Quote Originally Posted by Noelozzy View Post
Would this be because the bootblock is a universal one, or will it be more extensive changes to the game???
Hi and welcome to the forum.

As the others have said, older games written specifically for the A500 might not always work in the A1200 as standard. This isn't to do with the bootblock on the floppy disks. Those should be able to be read by any Amiga model. The issue is due to the difference in the hardware between the A500 and the A1200.

Many A500 games developers were a bit naughty. To squeeze as much as they could out of the hardware they bypassed the standard programming rules and coded directly to the hardware. This is fine on a real A500 but if you try to run such games on other Amiga models they can fail. This is due to each model having different amounts of chip ram, a different processor or a different custom chipset to the A500.

As an example of what might cause a game to not work in the A1200. If for example the developer coded some of a game's routines so they accessed specific memory addresses on the A500, then this would cause the game to crash on the A1200 because the memory addresses for the 2MB of chip ram and the wider CPU address space of the A1200 would mean the memory addresses the game was looking for are in a different place and it wouldn't be able to find them.

The good news is that most games can be made to work on the A1200. And as PG has already mentioned you can often do this using a disk called ReLoKick 1.3. This loads the Kickstart 1.3 rom from an A500 into the A1200's memory and then reboots the A1200 so it loads up thinking it is a 1.3 A500 (until the next reset). This disk can often get many older games to work properly with the A1200. If you need a copy of this disk PM me for further details.

Also as already mentioned you can hold down both mouse buttons as you switch on the A1200 to access a boot menu. In here by simply disabling the memory cache you can often get many games to work. I would say this simple method got around 80% of all the games working that I had problems running on the A1200.

Finally there are many other degraders that will get games to work. TUDE, KillAGA, Degrader etc...

Except again as already mentioned, you would be better off if you have a harddrive in the A1200 and some fast ram installed in the trapdoor. Then you can install WHDLoad. This is a harddrive games installer and it allows you to install pretty much any Amiga game onto the harddrive, not just ones that are HD installable, but all games. This is possible because the WHDLoad supporters write install scripts for each game.

The advantage of using WHDLoad is that it includes downgrader support for older games, so most games that won't normally run on an A1200 will run when installed using WHDLoad.

I hope some of that info helps.

Please ask if you need more help and advice for WHDLoad and the ReLoKick 1.3 disk.