I long to play...

Hi,

I've just remember of an old Amiga video game that I long to play. Most of the classics I've managed to emulate, like Commander and Hunter. (Sorry guys, this isn't an attempt at piracy, just that my old Amiga has long passed it's life expestency and if you know of where I could get on in Manchester, England. Please let me know.)

Anyway... The logo of the Amiga company, I remember had a picture of a Red Fox with some writing over it. The video game was a platform game, and I think it was also a fox. You could drop springs to jump on, to reach higher platforms. But for love nor money, I just can't remember the name of the video game. Please help if your an Amiga veteran. :D

Oh! And PS: I don't think the video game company is established anymore, I think they only had a few video games out before they vanished.

Is it one of these:

http://hol.abime.net/search.php?find=fox&x=0&y=0


EDIT:
Also, you can get Amiga emulators for PC - plus there are thousands of Amiga games for them. I bought a CD in HMV that had 3,000 Amiga games on it, plus emulators.

OMG it's the last one! F**king rocking!

Thank you puki for that link, yes it's Titus the Fox. I remembered it had a fox in it or the logo. Thanks again I owe you one.

It would appear it is available for Amiga emulators.

I have an Amiga 1200. Only just got it! It has no mouse or hard drive >.<;; so i dont know how to use it :p I've probrably got the game somewhere ni my 500+ disks that came with it....

Does anyone remember playing this game? My other classic is playing Chuck Rock 2 and Commander. Hunter was good for it's time, even though it was kinda hard.

Video game companies and marketing staff may come and go over the years. But a Classic Video Game will never die.

Cyg: notice you said "disks" and not "boxes" he he.

Jono: I think Chuck Rock 1 was better personally. Hunter was a fab game, I was playing that along to Metallica the Black Album when it first came out.

Good point, I only have 2 boxes. and half these games seem to need 3 disks :P

hey. Whats the newest WorkBench version- and is it different to Amiga OS.... um... and where'd i get Amiga OS? o.O I dont seem to have that.

I think: Amiga OS is just what you first see when a disk (or hard drive) boots up to its DOS equivalent. Workbench is an extra app you load that looks like windows. Latest version was probably 3.1 as that was the latest ROM version for 1200. But I haven't researched any of that (and it's like 10 years ago now man) so someone else may know more.

Last time I remembered using Workbench, was playing around with Deluxe Paint 5. I wish Workbench was here, and Windows was six feet under.

I'm damn sure the last time i used an Amiga it had a better OS than workbench! Maybe that was an Archimides. In which case, does anyone want this Amiga, so i can go find an Arc? :P

Ah those days of Amiga and AMOS :) Few weeks ago I booted my A1200.. whoa.. it was up in 7 seconds. Tried WinUAE on my current PC.. whoa part 2, workbench booted in about 1 second from virtual HD!! Imagine if current Windows could boot that fast :)

Actually, i think it was an Archimedes A3000 i was using back then- I always was an Acorn fan :)

Archimedes were good for serious stuff but forget them for games. Anyway Cyg, don't get hung up on Workbench for the A12000, after all it rocked as a GAMES machine and also to program in Blitz. Forget crappy workbench, just start loading up them disks!

Arch was good for games creation, with its SDRAM, (basically, backbuffers)- and music. also, "microsoft home" stuff like Office ran on them.

I didnt say my a1200 was naff :) lol. I can't do much with it since its got now parts- No HDD and No mouse.. :(

Might go buy a 1gb IDE drive and a 2.5" adapter, Theyre so cheap it doesnt matter if it isnt all recognised?

But if you get a 2.5" drive it'll fit in the case. I had an 80Mb one and DOS botted in a second, so if I crashed the Amiga doing assembly, I could be coding again in no time at all, it was lush, sigh.

I've never played Titus the Fox, but I just wanted to brag that I managed to identify it just from the above description.

I must admit though, I don't know this 'Commander' game of which you speak. Someone wanna enlighten me a tad?

Grey, yeah... and i'll also have to pay a ton extra :P lol. I can probrably mod my case a bit to get a larger drive in there.

Now, if only my wireless PCMCIA card would fit into the damn socket >.<;;

"mod my case" omg, you SIN! Leave that Amiga alone for its body is holy!

This poor thing's been abused already- Looks like someone attacked it with a blowtorch in places.

A mod would probrably be a good thing :) It's the Amigas version of having a boob-job.

And we had no 3D, or world wide web or BB Forums? GG fanboys! ;)

+BlackD

Oh yeh, the www was completely innaccessible to an Amiga. Sheesh.

Besides, didn't need BB forums back in the BlitzList days. Thems were sweet. I miss YAM.

Not inaccessible. A mate of mines got ethernet working with one. I might try to get the specs to a standard nw card, and write a driver for it :P A mate of mine claims to have connected it to the net.
It would be cool if in a month or so I posted off my Miggy :)

Pssh.. there was more on BBSs and they were faster anyway. :D

+BlackD

Cygnus, you really need to get aquainted with a program called Miami ;]

problem is BBSs were a bit crap in terms of searching and no such thing as thumbnails or any pictures at all in fact unless you downloaded them.

a buddy of mine got surfing on the amiga.. so it's doable!! :p

anyways.. I got two 1200's on the floor in my "office".. one with a 1GB HD and Viper 1230 accel card (+FPU)... :p

LineOf7's: Sorry it's wasn't Commander it was Carrier Command, one of the best video games ever made. Won't see quality like that ever again. I miss the days of Arcades and Snes.

Aaaah. Carrier Command - yes, much-loved.

I never had the patience to play it properly though. I always ended up ramming my carrier with the walrusses and doing strafing runs with the mantas... before putting them on auto-pilot and picking them off with the carrier's deck gun.

Oh those sweet sweet days. :o)

Pffff, one of my A1200's has a 5.25" drive fitted. OK when I say fitted I meen hanging out the back in a jiffy bag, but I had 2.5gb of storage... woohoo. The drive became my first PC hard disk, but I still have most of the contents on my PC to this day although I rarely load the emulator anymore.


The last I can remember using on an A1200 was Workbench 3.1. One of the post-Commodore Amiga owners was supposedly making a new version but I do not know if it ever saw the light of day.

Workbench is aesthetically dated now but I believe that in terms of power it can still rival Windows to this day in some aspects, it's only in the last few years that Windows has even caught up.

I wonder what ever happened to the guys who made it? I worked with Dave Haynie and Jeff Porter at a multimedia firm briefly after they left Commodore, but i've not heard of anything they've done since.

Did you know Jeff had 3D accelerated Amiga hardware running on the Amiga 10 years or so before the PowerVR and 3DFX cards appeared on the PC, but Medi Alli (sp) said nobody would ever pay for 3D accelerated hardware... lol.

wasn't that the video toaster thing they used for Babylon 5?

Also the third-party-firms which did video-cards for the Amiga were not interested in such things. I remember walking with a friend of mine over the amiga exhibition in cologne and asking them after 3d acceleration. They were looking at us like we were aliens...at least that's what i would imagine how aliens would be looked at like. ;O)

And as for workbenches: http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/


Greetings,

taumel

the amiga 1200 can also fit a 3.5" drive internally, although you will need a 2.5" to 3.5" HD converter, may need to remove one of the plastic divider brackets on the inside of the case... Plus if you also have an expansion card in the bottom slot, the 3.5" drive may end up taking too much power from the standard external powersupply.

Mine died after some time, and I had to buy a different powerbrick that provided a little more juice.

Not really, when I spoke to Jeff about it he said it wasn't as powerful as a 3DFX card (the design was from a decade before) but it was capable of running solid filled full screen graphics with shading (dont know which type) at extremely fast framerates. I'm not sure now what if any support for texturing there was, I dont think I even fully understood texturing as a concept back then to have it explained to me.

It wouldn't have been a card but instead a different motherboard. I wonder how a 3D accelerated Amiga would have impacted on the history of gaming and the stuff that we play today? Was Medi Alli or however you spell his name right? The chipset would have been quite expensive to produce as it had quite a lot of transistors per chip for the day.

I suppose to some extent these things come down to cost but then again the Amiga grew up from a machine that launched for £1000 and didn't even have a ROM chip on the motherboard (you loaded the A1000 kickstart ROM from floppy disk before you loaded the OS). I think that Innovation does pay, and I think if games had gone 3D during the "arcade" era then the world of gaming would be very different indeed.

Workbench 3.5 is quite good. Adds a lot of needed developer features.

I know Amiga OS 4.0 is in existance. But I'm not sure if that runs on actual Amigas or not.

OS and Workbench 3.1 were pretty much the pinnacle of where the Amiga was at.

OS4 (which does run on real hardware) is a goddamn afwul mess in comparison. Sure, there are some nice things there, but I'll stick to 3.1, thanks anyway!

Just think, a computer where you really could code in ASM and know exactly how fast it was going to run, to the nearest clock-cycle.

Coding on the Amiga was pure, unadulterated fun.

[quote]Just think, a computer where you really could code in ASM and know exactly how fast it was going to run, to the nearest clock-cycle.[quote] This was great, knowing your game was gonna be 50fps (or 25) in PAL and never change!

I thought an NTSC telly put out 30fps with an Amiga, unless you used a half decent monitor where I think you could run the machine itself at 50Hz in a PAL mode and 60Hz in NTSC. I'm probably wrong though, I never programmed well enough to worry the maximum refresh rate at the time and my memory is blocked by years of drug and alchohol abuse in the interim !

I still used to use delta timing back in the Amiga days though and even my early stuff had a speed limiter. The hardware was not as standard as I think a lot of people here seem to think it was. My own collection of machines is(was) evidence of that, 8 machines over the years and not one of them the same speed as another.

Sure a UK telly plays at 25fps BUT UK Amiga's frame rate was 50 and a game at 50fps looked a lot smoother than a 25fps one, trust me (something to do with interlacing). You are right about different speeds, but only really when you talk about enhanced Amigas. If your game ran at 50fps on an A500, you knew it wouldn't run any slower on ANY Amiga and as you locked the game speed to Vertical Sync (which was perfect on an Amiga, sigh), you didn't really need Delta time AND it ran the same speed on really fast Amigas too, it was lush, sigh V2.

I was frazlling my brain at the time too. I also gave up Alcohol from 18 to about 27 until I met this Scottish guy at work. I got LOADS more done not drinking, and thus have recently given up again.

If I had tried to make a game run at 50fps at the time it wouldn't have had much in it :( !

interlacing is a method where you update alternate scanlines with a half scanline offset in order to double the vertical resolution, you certainly couldnt use it to double the refresh rate. I think you'll find that a television plugged into an Amiga isn't going to go any faster than 25Hz, even if you replace the frontbuffer twice per frame.

I had both the Phillips and the Commodore monitors and both where also locked at 25hz, but I used a Compaq 420 VGA monitor and I seem to recall being able to run that at 50Hz without interlacing in hi-res, which was awesome at the time.

Yeah I hear you but I found this for example: "The Amiga 500 only had two possible FPS rates – 50Hz (50 FPS) for PAL monitors (outside North America) and 60Hz (60 FPS) for NTSC monitors (US)." here http://www.tweakguides.com/Amiga_4.html

That's what I was timed to and if your logic took over 1 frame to do, your fps dropped to 25fps and it looked worse on a TV so I tried to make all mine fast. Although TV is recorded at 25fps it's played back on a TV which does 50fps by using interlaced mode normally.

Found this "A regular PAL tv set can be thought of as a low resolution fixed-frequency monitor. A new 312.5 scanline field is drawn in every 1/50 second. Since drawing each scanline takes 64 µs (that is, 0.000064 seconds), drawing two fields (a full video frame) takes 2 × 312.5 × 64 µs, which equals to 0.04 seconds (=1/25 seconds). On the other hand, there are 625 × 25 scanlines per second, which equals to 15625 (the line frequency)." here http://www.uwasa.fi/~f76998/video/modes/.

Becky: I think you misunderstand slightly how the TV updates the frames.

You're right in saying that an interlaced display will only update a full frame 25 frames a second. However, if you output a non-interlaced display (320x256 was common) then your frame rate was 50Hz (60Hz for NTSC).

You can update an interlaced display at 50Hz, but you get a 'combing' effect on fast moving objects. This is caused by each alternate scanline being slightly behind the scanline above and below. You do not generally see this when playing back DVD's or watching TV, this is because the interlaced display is known about in advance and the original recording is adjusted to compensate. This is why a progressive display (such as your monitor) will display a combed image, unless the video stream is processed to remove the interlacing (which pretty much all DVD playback software does).

That Compaq 420 sounds cool, as non-interlace at hi-res woulda been fantasic.

I find it a real bummer that deinterlaced video never looks as good as played on a proper interlaced screen.

Oooops, the way I worded my post "I think you'll find" may have come across in a way I didn't intend, sorry if it did.

That's interesting, and complicated, i've learned something new. I actually understood most of it already but stupidly I interpreted it wrong, which is what you get for letting a ditzy cow like me post on internet forums ! ...

glad to be of service.

While Amigas did update at 50 (or 60) FPS I think you'll find game logic was limited in most (if not all) AAA titles to 25 (or 30) fps, or possibly even 12.5 (or 15). Only the drawing was done at 50 fps. Except in the Brutal Sports series, which gave me dizzy spells as a result.

Yeah, I don't think any games used the Amiga's interlaced modes. DPaint and programs like that certainly did though, and it made your eyes hurt like hell on a standard tv.

Oh boy, interlace battle begin :)
In normal PAL TV you can update image (half resolution-> field) 50 times/s, choose interlaced or non-interlaced. In interlaced case you get double Y resolution (512...6xx) in still or slow moving scenes and 50hz temporal resolution. ( depends how broadcast is recorded.. 25 or 50 images/s) In non-interlaced case you turn interlace "bit" off and get low Y res (256...3xx) but without interlace, 50 times per second.
Amiga game logic was not fixed, and certainty run 50hz in most 50hz graphic updated games.

Any old amiga demoscene programmers here? Ooh those c2p routines ;)

Only fleetingly, like that loading screen from Shadow Of The Beast with the bio-mechanical creatures. You really couldn't look at an interlaced screen for long - did anyone actually invest in a "flicker fixer"?

So, back to what I originally said, I made all my games and demos run at 50fps (gamespeed AND video update) because it looked the Smoothest. I'd never heard of Delta timing because you didn't need it! The copper rocker.

I needed it, my games started at 50fps no problem, but ended up nearer 12-15. I would start off hoping this one would run at 25fps, then i'd say ok - but 15 is the minimum...

And because in 2D delta timing is scurrilous and morally indefensible. :D

My keyword was optimise! So that everything could happen at 50fps. One night I had a "Vision" of the fastest way to do multi-directional scrolling at any speed and it was so damn fast that I had plenty of time left for the game logic.

Who wants to hold him and who wants to explain? lol.

An entity is an entity no matter how many visual dimensions it has. If it moves over time then time is a dimension of it's speed, and that's the only dimension that counts when your moving an entity about the screen in a project that might not run at the maximum framerate, or in my case, definately wouldn't.


Moving the screen pointer was fast for 2D, but what do you meen by multi-dimensional?

He doesnt mean anything- since thats not what he said :P

Oh yeah.

What I meant was you are a player in a multi-"directional" 2D map that extends REALLY far in all directions (think Turrican). You obviously can't draw all this in the memory and just move a screen pointer, and you obviously can't draw the entire screen each frame as it would be WAY too slow on an Amiga (you can on a PC) so you have to be ... clever!

Grey, you mean screen pointer scroll and when over limits -> big screen copy blit + new tiles blitting? Sure, there are many ways to do it but with Amos I used that system..

no, not that method as it leads to a jerk in FPS when you do the big screen copy.

Personally, i use the screen pointer offset to decide where to draw the new blocks, enabling a neat screen-scrolling effect.

and on the BBC, you could just VDU7,23,7¦ and VDU7,23,7,1¦ to scroll :)

OK, OK. Here's how I did it. I made a bitmap that was 4 times the area of the screen. Obviously the screen pointer could be set to anywhere in the topleft portion, but it couldn't go too far right or down otherwise you'd only view a portion of the screen. With me so far. The current screen was drawn before the gameplay starts. Then, say you are scrolling right, the verical strip of new blocks are drawn just off the screen to the right AND duplicated to just the left of the area currently being viewed. This is repeated until you hit the right hand side of the large bitmapt (the screen pointer is in the middle by now) and then all you do is reset the screen pointer to the far left and of course by then you've drawn a fully duplicate screen of the one on the right. Still with me. Then you can carry on scrolling right as far as you want. You oviously repeat the code for left and up/down and you have unlimited 4 way scrolling with a minimal overhead and no FPS jerk due to massive redraw! Tada. I was soooo pleased when I came up with that one.

heh, thats what i was imagining when i said the above. i think. Quite cool :)

I tried it first on a vertical scroller which only needed 2 screens and this worked so well I made it multi-directional.

"And because in 2D delta timing is scurrilous and morally indefensible. :D"



It breaks a golden rule of game design - that if you are going to be unfair then be so in the player's favour - and does so pretty catastrophically. You're essentially punishing the player for your inability as a designer to keep control of the game world by depriving him/her of information that they should ideally have... information that may mean the difference between their success or failure. Where their ship, say, had been moving 2 pixels per frame, suddenly there's a five frame pause and the next thing they know it's ten pixels from its previous location and the game's been thrown into jerk-o-vision.

It won't do. Look at the spec you're aiming for, work out the limitation on what you can show, move and calculate per frame and %*&!ing stick to it! If you get carried away with over ambition then do the honourable thing and have the game slow down - because the alternative is to drop the player right in the crap at the worst possible moment (ie when things get busy and they need the most detailed data-stream possible to survive), and all to maintain the cheap sham that your code is coping. Anyone who would rather show off fancy delta timing routines than make sure that their players have a fair ride is both a spod and a bounder and would be better off coding scene demo's to illustrate how very clever they are than games.

That's for 2D.

In the wacky world of 3D there are actually some pragmatic reasons to entertain the device: Namely that your audience's specs will vary wildly, the graphical load will alter a great deal from one portion of the game to the next and, hell, it's simply less off-putting when affecting motion in three dimensions. But for 2D it's a heinous sin that should be punishable by GX4000 for hours on end.

riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight

Using delta timing is nothing at all to do with smoothness and frame rate consistency.

Although the delta timing methods I use thesedays do feature compensatary suspension in order to compensate for background tasks, the Amiga didn't have that problem.

As for whether 2D games need delta timing or not, well, if using delta timing allows a user with a 200Mhz computer to play my game designed for a 1Ghz computer then great, compensating for pauses and badly written background software is a completely seperate issue, and it's one that is PC specific, not 2D specific.

One I wrote the engine I would test it with more and more sprites until I hit the limit where a frame dropped and then I would make sure the game kept under this the whole time and bingo, no slowdown.

Which is exactly what I said ("and the game's been thrown into jerk-o-vision"), which is exactly why it's bad-as-in-bad-not-bad-as-in-good.


Except it's not great when you can't play it because the framerate is too low/unwieldy and some green blob has killed you half a second before the computer gets around to displaying your already-rotting corpse. (ie If your game needs a 1Ghz computer to run at full frame rate then it needs a 1Ghz computer... employing delta-timing in order to palm 200Mhz owners off with a substandard experience rather than simply being straight with them ("You need a 1Ghz computer to play this") is not only disingenuous but sells one's own creations short.)

None of this is meant to imply, incidentally, that you're rubbish because your Amiga game ran at 12-15 frames per second instead of 25 or whatever. As long as the frame rate is consistent and the game is designed to be playable with such an update speed then that's just dandy; I'm saying that dropping frames when things get too busy rather than accepting slowdown is the greater of two evils: Anyone with eyes can see that a frame-skipping game is struggling - it fools nobody and, unlike slowdown, robs the player of likely-vital visual information. Particularly so in 2D, because you're much more likely to be in a context where pixel-perfet accuracy matters.


I haven't got the faintest idea why you've started talking about background tasks. I haven't mentioned them.

Sometimes of course frame rate dropout can be a stinker in FPS games, "dead! what hit me! I never even saw it!"

It annoys me that Unreal Championship 2 frame-skips your winning blow on Xbox each and every time... talk about anticlimactic!

Because Amiga games, and certainly the ones I wrote, tended to be arcade games which on the whole have a fairly constant level of action on each level, so what exactly was going to cause frame skipping?

I said I used it, but I didn't say that I used delta timing on the Amiga and it caused all sorts of problems for me.

Well some action games sometimes put too many sprites on screen or had to calcualte too many collisions and the result was frame loss. This would often happen when an end of level boss exploded or something, or you powered up to have massive weapons with loads of bullets and each one needed to be tracked.

I wouldn't know, not having seen any of your Amiga games. I was criticising the use of delta timing in 2D games in general, because I was asked to elaborate on my opinion. That doesn't mean I think it was common (it's not going to be common on fixed hardware platforms for obvious reasons) and it certainly doesn't mean I was criticising certain forumites' games on certain Commodore machines without ever having looked at them (which would be silly). Just so we're cool, like.

But just in case anyone's ever tempted, I have a GX4000 and a copy of Burning (sorry, "Burnin'") Rubber ready and waiting. Don't risk it.

This is what I dont get.

I had 8 or so Amiga's over the years and not one ran at the same speed or had the same amount of ram, hard disk space, or graphics "card" chipset. I never considered the Amiga a fixed platform.

Woo Becky's back! So those Amigas, what was the lowest common denominator? An A500 un-upgraded? Make your game work on that and it'll run fine on the rest, it just won't make use of the extra hardware. Sure use delta time if you image your game being run better and smoother on bigger Amigas but the majority of people just had A500s or later A600s which were the same speed. In the end tho' I just made games run at A1200 speed for myself really. I would have said to people this is an A1200 game only, if I ever sold it (but I didn't).

So what I am saying is I DID consider the Amiga a fixed platform because in 90% of cases it was and you knew what the absolote min specs were, and you could work to these.

actually, backtracking a bit, if you used basic on Spec, C64, BBC etc there was really no concept of timing at all! You just made you game and it did it as fast as its little BASIC legs could carry it (although strangely it always used to be fairly consistant on those platforms). In reality this would have sucked, at least with assembly people could time to Vsync.

I know, lets all write our current games to run on a P200 with a 3dfx-I card and 16mb Ram.

In any practical sense, pre-Dungeon Master you would write for an unexpanded A500; post-DM you would write for an A500 with a 1/2 Meg expansion. Most of the market bought one, not eight Amigas and tended to go for that model... taking your point (which I do - "fixed hardware platform" mostly brings consoles to mind), it's still a long way from the mix 'n' match PC situation. Commodore's meddling with the A500 spec then release of the A600 was completely bonkers anyway... what was all that about? :S


Don't be facetious :P

If you specifically made a game on the PC have to have certain min specs and never run faster, then you knew that everyone who was eligible to play was getting the same experience but many wouldn't buy now due to their lust for modern 3D graphics.

I understand it a bit like this:

The A500 had become horrendously out-of-date. You need to put it into an international context as the Amiga was the platform of choice for business throughout German speaking Europe and Workbench 1 was just too out-dated.

That's why the A3000 came out and the spin off was the A500+. These platforms both supported Workbench 2 which was a huge step forward for the commercial viability of the OS, for the first time the appearance of Workbench began to look a little more professional (although hideously dated if we look at it now).

The A600 was a necessary step, not because of the machine, but because of the AGA chipset in the sister machines of the same era and the retooling of the factory to surface mount technology.

With the top machine (A4000) and home flagship machine (A1200) the A600 catered the budget entry level market and could still be manufactured at the same facility using the same tools.


I didnt just buy over half a dozen Amiga's over the years, I updgraded them too ! In a professional context I bought several thousand more and few of those went out with the same spec too...

I think the Amiga market was more hardware varied than a lot of programmers realised.

I'm not sure that matters as much for indies - it's Half Life 2 / Doom 3 that people immediately fire up when they buy a new rig, not some piece of shareware that got bought mainly on account of being a nice lil' game. That said, capping speed doesn't necessarily have to mean capping features... you could still offer bump mapping on hardware that supports it without cutting out support for older cards, fer example. "Speed locked" (for want of a better term) games could still look loads better on more powerful kit - the question is one of whether we can be bothered to make those features scalable or not.

I tend to think of it the other way around - that varying the hardware was more treacherous than Commodore realised. There were simply too many outfits hitting the metal with the relatively early A500 model and thus the A500+ and A600 just fragmented the market. You could have a real miserable experience with those two machines (especially if you wanted to use DPaint and had an A600... erm, where’s my keypad?!) You just can’t say to developers “Please stop doing fantastic things with our hardware that we never envisaged” and expect them to comply - those fantastic things are what differentiate you from the competition and you therefore have to use every trick you can find in order to compete effectively.

Basically, although smaller, the A600 was a let down, loads of A500 stuff didn't work unless you stuck in a ROM disk first and no numeric keypad etc.

I tend to view the replacement for the A500 as the A1200, the A600 was an entry-level budget device which is something the Amiga had never really been.

You can argue quite sucessfully the A600 was a mistake, but I think it's wrong to consider it the replacement for the A500. It was a different beast entirely, I think the A600 was trying to muscle in on console sales - but probably only served to impair the CD32.

I replaced my A500 with a A1200 as it was a true upgrade, the A600 was not.

I'll say one thing for the A600, it had a DOA rate of 0.2%. The A500's was 8%. It might have been useless, but the darn things are still working.

really!
You know the amiga had that kind of lower "shelf" behind the keyboard, it was a plastic grill thing. Lots of people used to rest their disks on this and I sued to say don't in case of an electromagnetic effects (esp. from disk drives) corrupting the disks. It's like people leaving videos on the TV or speakers!

I know the grill you meen, i'm not sure it was really a problem though because the electronics where all encased in a faraday cage, the EMF and magnatism emmission from an Amiga was actually very tiny, but it probably still had an effect although I would imagine most 3.5" disks have lost their integrity by now anyway.

I tried my disks a few years ago after about 8 of inactivity and they seemed OK. It's a shame they breakdown in the end.

I never had an Amiga die on me. Only ever the PSU's. Dodgy pieces of crap they are. The 1200 ones were worse. I recall about 5 A1200's eventually running off of A500 PSUs...

I was lucky enough to get my first A1200 several days before it launched (thanks go to Claire at C=), but I only got the power supply 2 weeks later! I never had a powersupply fail but I did start using an A500 power supply on my big A1200 because it had higher wattage, and my main A1200 was a somewhat modified beast with lots plugged into it.

Same here. That's probably what pushed the PSUs over the edge.

I had lots of PSUs go and also a couple of A500 disk drives started reading bad.

The floppy drives where the most common failure which happened every 3-5 years of regular use. The problem wasn't the drives themselves though but the non-DOS protected floppies with their special seek tracks as part of the copy protection routines, this threw the head alignment out easily and could damage the (pauses to think) attenuator?

I'm sorry to say your floppy drives expired in the name of corporate profits. I hated the NDOS disks myself because I was a hard disk user and they where impossible to install.

At least we can be glad we dont have this sort of floppy protection system today ... but what's this, my little CD writter appears to have died - it was the one I used to play games in ... :/

So you think they really do that with CDs now? I don't know that's why I'm asking?

Thing was I uh, didn't have many official Non-DOS games, just ... you know Xcopied games and demos. Guess it's possible the demos used extra sectors and so on, actually maybe a lot of the cracked games did too to squeeze everything on. In fact xcopy was what showed up drive errors, you'd copy a normal disk and it would show failures.

Hmmm i remember it also in early A1000 times that some of the floppy drives just @#!*ed up after a short time or right from the very beginning even without any non-system-disks (in the beginning there were simply none). But i also knew one person who never had any problems and he inserted the same stuff as we all. The amiga drives were one of the worst things i ever witnessed for storing data in my life. It was so important to have the right disks for your drive!

The 1541 and the disks were a reliable medium! I remembering walking to a friend of mine with some stuff on some disks. When i arrived i noticed that i somewhere had lost some disks. I went back, searched for them and found them lying in the snow (in winter and it was snowing). Then i brought them back to him then we blow-dried them and woopsa all the disks were working. Not a single RipRip-RipRip :O)


Greetings,

taumel

Do you remember the old, how to make your C64 single sided disks double sided trick. i.e. cut a hole out on the opposite side to the existing hole and voila it's now double sided! Selling double sided disks for more money was such a marketing scam!

Yep! Do you also remember the fear when cutting the first one on your own?
Did i cut into the magnetic slice, did i ,did i ruin the disk?! ;O)

Yeah, and "was the person who told me this just completely lying so I ruin a disk!"

That was my path also so no arguments here!

Lol@Grey and taumel...


The only floppy drive I ever ruined was an A1200 one - and that was after forcing it to play Saint Dragon - SD was a side scrolling shoot em up, made by the guys who did SWIV (except many years earlier) and used the same level load principles - streaming off of disc as you play. As I said, it was many years previous and the code I guess was not nearly as friendly as SWIVs loading routines - it took a few tricks to get the A1200 to play it at all and once it did, it played fine ... except for some REALLY loud crunching/grinding noises coming from the drive... after a reset, it never worked again. <grin>

EDIT : Actually, I do remember one A500 drive going kaput on me as well, but that was due to the little bit around the spinner supporting the ballbearings giving way... if I kept the thing well greased I could keep using it =] That lasted for about a year or so after that I think... =]

My first computer, 48K spec stopped working one day in the middle of Starquake. The screen just went black. You could turn it on, so it wasn't the PUS, it just had a black screen and nothing worked. I was bummer out but took the opportunity to buy a c64. Can't remember if I ever had a new PSU for that, may have. It never broke and the tape deck was fine too. Someone lent me a C64 disk drive which was brilliant and as I had a freeze frame, it was amazing!! I then proceeded to convert all my games (and uh a few others) to disk. You could even freeze disk games and make them load in about 1/10th the time due to the compression. At the time I was totally gobsmacked by the thing.