If you could design the best Amiga from existing Amiga models and third party hardware what specification would it be? Including Amiga model, expansion cards, OS, and any other hardware.
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If you could design the best Amiga from existing Amiga models and third party hardware what specification would it be? Including Amiga model, expansion cards, OS, and any other hardware.
I always wanted an A1200 with a decent sized HDD, an external drive (maybe a couple) a CD-ROM drive and a decent, sizable monitor to play on. I wasn't really too fussed about accelerator cards, I knew very little about them.
Easily pleased :lol:
You guys need to see what Zetro, Smiley and Dambuster have done for the Amiga, such as fitting DVD-ROM drives to them and booting from Compact Flash cards, take a look on the English Amiga Board and Oldskool UK for what I am talking about, I nearly have all the parts to build my own A1200 Plus machine.
Merlin
We had a discussion a while back regarding using flash cards instead of an HD, and I think it was Teho who is using such a method on the A600. From what I have read though there are a few downsides to using a flash card compared to a real HD on the Amiga. Things such as compatibility with some software and games and the transfer speed.
I've always wanted to do a major A1200 to tower conversion project myself, upgrading the system with PPC and PCI/Zorro breakout board, but as time has gone on I now find myself mainly using Amiga software via emulation and leaving the actual hardware behind. Don't get me wrong, I do still love the actual Amiga hardware, but compared to emulation it is now more fiddly to get the variety of software running on the Amiga compared to just changing the settings in emulation.
Maybe if the new PPC Amiga actually reaches production I may once again take a direct interest in building a really good PPC Amiga.
Heresy!Quote:
Originally Posted by Harrison
I cannot believe that you would rather muck about with WinUAE than get your hands on the real deal....admittedly, it is easier to run setups you could never afford under WinUAE (I could never afford an A1200 at the time, let alone the upgrades), however, the scene is still alive with Amiga people, otherwise this board would not exist and we would all be slaves to boards created by Cloanto and the like.
I returned to the scene because of Amiga Forever by Cloanto and it made me want to get involved again, not because of rose-tinted glasses, but because I am a bit sick of Windows wanting to do everything for me, I missed the old days of writing startup-sequences and getting my hands dirty in the CLI.
Besides, there are some cracking games on the Miggy that just don't run too well in WinUAE, even on my 3.2 Ghz, 1 Gig memory PC.
There, that's my tuppence worth.
Merlin
True, but also there's a significant proportion who remember the games and just want to give them a go again.Quote:
Originally Posted by Merlin
There's a few ones that are hard to configure, and a few with only bad cracks but nearly everything I wanted to play again, and everything I wanted to try has worked. WinUAE can shorten the loading time, makes disk swapping easier etc. Sure it's great to fire up the miggy every now and again, have a go at a few games on it with the real disk drive noises, proper anticipation while it loads etc. for nostalgia but I find that really WinUAE does the job better for actually playing the games.Quote:
Besides, there are some cracking games on the Miggy that just don't run too well in WinUAE, even on my 3.2 Ghz, 1 Gig memory PC.
Pretty much got mine.
Just need PPC really.
Was hoping to get the Shark, or PowerVixen, but can't see it happening now.
You can even activate the floppy sound in WinUAE, hilarious :lol:Quote:
have a go at a few games on it with the real disk drive noises
It's not perfect though, it just clicks when the number goes up or down.Quote:
Originally Posted by Demon Cleaner
Points taken, I just think there's something "wrong" in using a 64-bit, Gigahertz PC to run software from a 7Mhz, 16 bit machine (14 Mhz and 32-bit if you count the A1200).
I'm not a total nostalgia freak, I am not going to lovingly polish the plastic of my Amiga and keep it in a vacuum so as not to ruin it, I intend to mod my A1200 with a 4Mb trapdoor expansion, a 2Mb SRAM card, a buffered IDE interface and a laptop DVD-ROM, and load games to a 1.4Gb hard drive that didn't exist back then...I don't want to think about what some of these expansions cost back then.
My old 2Mb A600 had a 40 Mb laptop hard drive in it that was near the cutting edge back when I had it in the early 90s. Yes, I want to play games on it once it's finished, but that doesn't mean I have to wait ages and swap loads of floppies, now that WHDload is around.
The Amiga had a huge following and just because some of us are older now, that doesn't mean we gave up on it....
Virtual floppy clicks? Nah, give me the real thing any day......
Merlin
Don't get me wrong, I own a lot of real Amigas (2x A500, A500+, A600, 2x A1200, A4000, CD32) and do run them often. I used to have them all setup in the spare room and used them a lot, but they do take up a lot of room so are now packed away when not in use.Quote:
Originally Posted by MerlinHeresy!Quote:
Originally Posted by Harrison
I cannot believe that you would rather muck about with WinUAE than get your hands on the real deal....admittedly, it is easier to run setups you could never afford under WinUAE (I could never afford an A1200 at the time, let alone the upgrades), however, the scene is still alive with Amiga people, otherwise this board would not exist and we would all be slaves to boards created by Cloanto and the like.
I returned to the scene because of Amiga Forever by Cloanto and it made me want to get involved again, not because of rose-tinted glasses, but because I am a bit sick of Windows wanting to do everything for me, I missed the old days of writing startup-sequences and getting my hands dirty in the CLI.
Besides, there are some cracking games on the Miggy that just don't run too well in WinUAE, even on my 3.2 Ghz, 1 Gig memory PC.
There, that's my tuppence worth.
Merlin
So if I just want to play one game, run something to take screenshots, or access a file for the site then I will use emulation. Also there were some Amiga games that I couldn't get to run on any of my real Amigas, but that I did get to run via emulation.
But, there will always be that sense when running anything via emulation that something you cannot quite place is missing compared to a real Amiga.
I would much prefer to play games on the real deal, but most of my games are now corrupted, so its impossible to play them so I just stick with the emulation.
That's sad that most of the games are corrupt. I've discovered that recently with a few of my original Amiga game disks. They either cannot be read at all when trying to load them or they return an error part way through the boot process.
There is one way you can often get them working again. Using Amiga Explorer and writing an adf of the game over the corrupt disk. I've found this works often and so you end up with a working copy of the game again on the original disk, all be it a cracked copy. :)
If you get hold of the SPS sets which are ipf files instead of adf's, these are prefect reproductions of the original disks including any copy protection, so there are no piracy issues, I just thought I would mention it..:thumbs:..mind you, they are so anally retentive (still pooing rusks, I reckon:blink:) about which machines make the images, they don't have a fantastic selection....check the site...
Merlin
Don't worry, I already have the SPS(CAPS) collection and update with every new release, as I do for all Amiga collections. ;)
I actually prefer to use the cracked versions as I don't then need to worry about any copy protection schemes or passwords. Also most have the trainers built in which can be useful.
No probs, I wasn't sure what the board policy was on cracked disks, some get funny about stuff like that and SPS doesn't seem to get mentioned much, probably for obvious reasons, at least there are the LSD / Loons etc. docs disks if you get stuck...
Merlin
Don't worry, we are very relaxed about such things on here. You are welcome to chat about anything including cracked disks, pirated software etc... The only thing we don't allow is direct linking to such downloads on the open boards, but links to sites is OK.
GAR! Pirates arrr!!! :pirate2:
YARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR MATEYS
CAPS really are overly-fussy, cracked ADFs is where it's at. We play the games, relive the fun, not care about the accuracy of the copy protection system and that guff.
In conclusion
:JRflag: :JRflag: :pirate4: :pirate3: :pirate2: :whitpirate: :piarate5: :pirate: :bluebandana: :pirate4: :pirate3: :JRflag: :JRflag: :JRflag: :ridingbanana:
(you can tell we are OK with piracy by the fact there is a whole smiley section for them :ninja: )
Amiga floppy drives are the best!
Having the sounds coming from speakers, is OK, but no where near as good as actually having motors producing the sound.
Although I don;t tend to have speakers connected to my PC anyway so it doesn't make much difference.
What is wrong with you people.
There are all kinds of hacks and commodities to stop the clicking because it drives people mad.
And you lot actually like the clicking.
I was on about the noises the drive makes when it is working.
The clicking when there is no disk present can be annoying, but it is not as annoying as the constant whirring of fans and HDs in the PC. Or the GVP HD+ for that matter.
I used to hate the clicking sound the drives made when not in use. The first thing I always did was install a patch in the startup-sequence to stop it. But I do still like the noise the drives make when loading a game. Nothing like it on any other platform.
The old Catweasel also made the clicking sounds when no disk was inserted, which was very annoying. It used to boot the driver at the start of the PC. Now the latest Mk4 only starts the driver when you start the program, thus no clicking when using your PC.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Harrison
Now that you're talking of disk drive loading noises, my favourite was the loading system they used on the Hybris disk. I believe it was a custom-made loader, and it was a pretty relaxing kind of whirring - almost like motorcycle engine noise, but more laid back.
There were some games that were awfully loud and annoying. Didn't much care for the crunching sounds of standard DOS disks, either.
My cousin had an Amiga 500 with an EXCEPTIONALLY quiet internal floppy drive. Was a joy to listen to - smooth as baby buttocks!
A mate of mine had the exact opposite on his 500.
Sounded like industrial ginders or something.
Worked perfectly for years though.
The noisiest Amiga drive I've had is in my A600. That is really bad, especially with certain games where it really grinds and creates some very loud and sometimes annoying sounds.
Funny how we can even make a discussion out of disk drive loading noises :D
It takes a special kind of people, for sure.
The drive in my A500 was pretty bad also. 'Chainsaw' comes to mind.
To stay on topic: my dream Amiga, back when I owned an A1200, was always the A4000, with a ridiculous amount of fast RAM and a CD-ROM. The main reason for wanting such was Frontier - it ran a bit choppy on the A1200 (though, much better than when I played it on the A500), so I wanted to see what it was like to play it on a fast comp.
Maybe the strange sounds where to keep you occupied while waiting for the game to load up? It would be a bit boring if you were listening to a silence for ages while the game was loading up.
I can confirm that Frontier does indeed play much smoother on my A4000 ;) :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Sharingan
Interesting idea, but surely the loading screens and especially the cracktros would keep you interested! ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Stephen Coates
True, but what about on games when you are just given a blank screen while the game is loading?
Remember though that most of us came from the 8-bit era and were used to waiting for games to load from cassette! Those could take 8 minutes! And what did we have to watch while that was happening? A loading screen if we were lucky. Compared to that the Amiga floppy disks loaded games in next to no time so relatively speaking waiting for a game to load on the Amiga wasn't a hardship compared to before.
When I first got my C64, it came with cassette, as the floppy drive was still too expensive, at that time about 375€. But on cassette you had only very few games that were actually good, the rest was crappy. Of course I mean the copied cassettes, you couldn't copy games which came in several parts, as the cassette reader did only read one track, then you could run it, but it did not load the next part, if you didn't have the right loaders, so it was hard to get a "better", let's say bigger game on cassette.
I already mentioned that I never bought games, that wasn't not only because of my limited budget, but we had no shops here in Luxembourg, and I mean NO. We had to drive to Trier, which was the nearest bigger village from my hometown, but we only went once a year.
So one day I got hold of the original Summer Games from a friend. And then you can say "the waiting is the hardest part". When you practiced an event, you had to re/wind your cassette to a certain count (the 1530 dataset had a counter, as most cassette players at that time), then press play and wait for the event to practice. But if you wanted to play the whole events in competition mode, you pressed play, waited 5 minutes, played one event for 30 seconds, then again wait 5 minutes for the next one to load. And you can image that certain events are quite fiddly to play, and if you don't know exactly how they work, you play max 30 seconds and it's over.
It was pure satisfaction when a game was loaded. Of course later on we had some Turbo Tape loaders, which speeded the whole thing up a bit.
And I still remember my cassettes:
000-034 - Soccer 64
035-078 - Jumpman Jr
079-104 - Jungle Hunt
and so on. We had to write the counter position down for later loading the game, we were really crazy at the time, that was pure dedication to gaming :lol:
That is really mad :lol:
I never had to do anything like that on the CPC, but then it did load much faster from cassette than the "superior" C64! ;)
I have a few games on cassette for the BBC. I have played Tetris alot recently on it and that usually takes a good few minutes to load. To keep you occupied while loading cassette games though you do have to keep hoping that the volume control is set correctly, and that the tape is still working properly (My copy of tetris is fine though because despite it being 20 years old, was only remove from it's original packaging a couple of months ago).
Have you considered getting a 5 1/4" disk drive for your BBC Steve? Much easier to use than tapes. Thinking about it I never did use or even see a tape drive for any of the BBC Micros I used over the years, and there were quite a few. Was there much software released on tape for the system compared to on disk?
hats off to you DC. That is pure dedication!Quote:
Originally Posted by Demon Cleaner
I will get a disk drive eventually, but I don't really need one at the moment.Quote:
Originally Posted by Harrison
I really could do with a proper tape recorder so that I can record my own stuff as well. I am just using my Walkman at the moment.
I only remember ever having one game on the BBC, as we had one on the training course I was taking that we were allowed to use. But it was THE best game to have on the BBC... Elite!!!
I think nearly every game ever released on the BBC was available in our school. Other kids would bring in a copy and within days it was copied and in every classroom (unofficially). Pole Position, chuckie egg and loads of others. Our computer and maths classes were quite good fun. ;)