Amiga & Atari ST
-
@russ asked in another thread if there was a way to run downloaded games on an Amiga. Here we go then...
With a few pointers from @ely (thanks mate!) I looked into this around April of last year and had a lot of fun getting my A600 (thanks xeron!) working very nicely using internal and external CF cards. I'd never used an Amiga before, I chose ST the first time but "discovering" and learning to use the Amiga was great fun.
There are a couple of ways, depending on the model of your Amiga, here's the long and short of it:
A500/other
- Not tried this but there's a hardware floppy emulator that will allow loading of disk images from USB PC (€60) or SD card (€75)
http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/
This devices will work with pretty much any retro computer, which is a big bonus.
A600/A1200
- CF adapter and CF card as internal hard drive (less than £5)
- PCMCIA adapter with CF card as swappable hard drive (less than £5)
- WHDLoad software (free trial or £12 for nag-free version, extra RAM costs more!)
(this can be used to install pretty much any game to hard drive, including redirecting all saving to hard drive, at the expense of needing more RAM to run them as they are run after the OS has booted so you need room for both. Compatibility is high but not perfect.)
aside: SWOS with WHDLoad will not work for me even though I have the 4MB of RAM it should need - WHDLoad support ignored my requests for a fix. So, I use a strange cracked version of SWOS which runs from hard drive but does not support saving to hard drive. My floppy drive is fucked so that means no saving for me, but there you go.
As with all old hardware YMMV - you'll may still have hassles with kickstart versions, RAM freezes, software compatibility, and so on.
Which I guess is why emulation was invented and remains popular. Good luck!
Atari ST and AmigaPost edited by matt at 2011-10-02 04:26:18 -
The best machine for classic Amiga gaming is an A1200 with 030 and some fast RAM, an HD or compact flash card, and a copy of WHDLoad.
Second best would be A1200 + FastRAM + HD + WHDLoad. -
There are quite a few classics which aren't compatible with Kickstart 3 though.
-
True, but sometimes WHDLoad even goes so far as to patch in compatibility.
-
Do you find you feel pretty gutted when you fire up an Amiga emulator in a way, matt? ST owners (me included) used to defend their machine to the death back in the day but it's pretty difficult to see them on an even keel now we can have a better experience of what life was like on the other side. Maybe the passage of time has left out the need to defend our decision or maybe it's because I've learned a bit more about how both systems came to life and now realise how much more the ST could have been had the game been played a little differently.
Still love the ST dearly though - it's a gorgeous looking machine, but do you understand what I mean?
Do you? -
I still will defend the ST for the same reason I defend the Spectrum over the C64; the more expensive machines were two to three years ahead of their time of affordability, and in each case only really started to hit the mass-market price point at the time something newer had launched and the most talented developers moved on.
It was a far bigger change to have 512M of RAM and a floppy drive than to have the Amiga's custom chips over the ST's entirely CPU-based approach, so for the first few years (until the two former items became taken for granted) there really wasn't much difference to justify paying twice as much money for it. By the time there was, the Megadrive was on the horizon, and that ended the home computer era until the PC became a real games machine post Doom, X-Wing and X-Com. -
I will add, though, that with a couple of changes that would have cost very little the original ST would have been a shitload better (writable screen address register and basic hardware display list support).
-
I would have loved an Amiga back in the day but at the time an ST was the very outer limit of my budget. Plus it came with at least 10 games IIRC. Loved that machine, the GEM interface was excellent and I had no real regrets... But by god the Amiga had a stonking soundchip. -
@TwistedScrote Absolutely - I remember going around a friend of a friends house who had one and was running an early version of SoundTracker (House music was 'in' at the time and he'd bunged in 'Housenation' and 'Can you dance') and my gob hit the floor.
-
Most WHDLoad slaves patch compatibility problems with the A1200 + KS3. Thats why I list WHDLoad as a necessity ;-)
-
Thank @matt. This is great info.
I had an A500 with an external HD+8MB Ram. I loved it to bits when I was briefly unemployed. I spent all day fiddling about with Octamed and coding in Amos. -
I thought the 1200 could emulate the 500 in some sort of fallback mode? Or was that the 600? maybe it depends on the amount of fast, slow, or chip ram WHY DID IT GET SO COMPLICATED??
-
@junosix I know exactly what you mean, but I don't feel gutted. Actually I feel lucky to be able to experience all this technology at next to no cost. Just a few years late, mind!
Growing up I had no real buying power, I just had to be good at convincing my parents to pony up for these expensive things. When I saw an ST boot to GEM Desktop in error, my friend Rakesh moved the mouse and my tiny little mind was blown wide open forever. I didn't have to see anything else - Amiga, IBM, Mac were not even words in my vocabulary at this point. Regardless, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life - push a mouse around a desktop!
I can't remember ever seeing an Amiga growing up, all my mates had STs or consoles. So I never really had an opinion about it, though I'm sure the vs stuff in the magazines undoubtedly put me in the "STs are better" camp. I'd definitely never used Workbench before last year, and I really enjoyed it when I got into it. It's more powerful than GEM, or at least has fewer quirks.
I'll always love my ST, I love the chip music, demo scene culture, the way it looks, and of course the games it let me experience. The bounds of 8MHz and 1MB RAM seemed so limitless at the time.
If I had to do it all over again I'd do it exactly the same, except if make sure one if my mates had an Amiga. ;)Post edited by matt at 2011-02-24 18:40:55 -
I had friends at uni who had albums released of music written on the Amiga. Not sure if they still use it for production these days.
http://open.spotify.com/track/1prErrCv1mF5y72FWOL25vPost edited by KidCasio at 2011-02-24 19:30:54 -
It was one if my favourite pastimes watching out for STs on Top of the Pops. I'll leave it to Juno to reel off a bunch of top albums recorded on the ST and Amiga.
I know up until he helped Blur out on their Think Tank album Fatboy Slim was still making all his music on an ST. -
The ST had a built-in MIDI port, the Amiga didn't. I'm pretty sure that convinced a lot of musicians to go with the ST, despite the amiga having a better sound chip.
-
Oh, cool. Such witchcraft didn't exist back in 1992.xeron said:Most WHDLoad slaves patch compatibility problems with the A1200 + KS3. Thats why I list WHDLoad as a necessity ;-)
-
Yeah there is, you turn it on with both mouse buttons held down and then there's a screen of setting you can adjust. It was the only way to get Kick Off 2 running. I think there was a disk you could boot first as well.mugsy said:I thought the 1200 could emulate the 500 in some sort of fallback mode?
Oh and yeah I agree about all the memory config. options. A real minefield that is for us ST owners from back in the day!!
-
Yeah, ST spotting was a real thrill. I think the last time I caught one on TOTP was in 95/96 - either Robert Miles' Children or Spaceman by Babylon Zoo. But still used in a recording studio scenario for a good few years (Gorillaz and as matt says, Fat Boy Slim famously using them up until pretty recently). Actually, just checked the Gorrilaz site and found that this page is still there: http://gorillaz.com/item.php?N=comprussel&URL=comprussel
According to the man who was the chief designer of the ST, they chucked in MIDI ports because they realised not everyone needed good sound, if any sound at all. (Actually, the story's a bit more complex than that - there's several reasons which lead them to use the YM chip). But MIDI was there as an upgrade path rather than a singled-minded decision to get their kit into recording studios. Masterstroke of an idea though, coupled with the fact that TOS/GEM was very lightweight and gave the MIDI ports on the Atari incredibly solid timing made it the thing to use.
The STE that was used to record all the Altern-8 stuff went for £50 on eBay about a year ago! That's nuts, it was a very tidy example of one too.
It's only the games that make me feel a bit miserable when I compare them to the Amiga, although mine came with the Power Pack bundle which had 23 fucking brilliant games, a lot of them being arcade ports which is probably why I love playing on MAME even though I didn't really go to arcades very often at all. You can't beat a bit of YM, either - the Amiga soundchip was "just" a sample player (excellent bit of forward-thinking hardware design nonetheless) so didn't really quite have the same sort of identity.
Er - maybe we could have an ST thread so people can use that to talk about Amigas? -
matt said:
@junosix I know exactly what you mean, but I don't feel gutted. Actually I feel lucky to be able to experience all this technology at next to no cost. Just a few years late, mind!
Growing up I had no real buying power, I just had to be good at convincing my parents to pony up for these expensive things. When I saw an ST boot to GEM Desktop in error, my friend Rakesh moved the mouse and my tiny little mind was blown wide open forever. I didn't have to see anything else - Amiga, IBM, Mac were not even words in my vocabulary at this point. Regardless, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life - push a mouse around a desktop!
I can't remember ever seeing an Amiga growing up, all my mates had STs or consoles. So I never really had an opinion about it, though I'm sure the vs stuff in the magazines undoubtedly put me in the "STs are better" camp. I'd definitely never used Workbench before last year, and I really enjoyed it when I got into it. It's more powerful than GEM, or at least has fewer quirks.
I'll always love my ST, I love the chip music, demo scene culture, the way it looks, and of course the games it let me experience. The bounds of 8MHz and 1MB RAM seemed so limitless at the time.
If I had to do it all over again I'd do it exactly the same, except if make sure one if my mates had an Amiga. ;)
What a brilliant post... could easily be expanded into an article Matt. -
Cheers Mick. :)
ps: harmony now brought to this thread as it's now Amiga & ST -
What, you can't cross the streams! ;)
-
I never played an ST in my youth. Did I miss out? I jumped from Speccy to Snes, with a minor flirtation with an Amiga 1200 owned by my bro.
I've missed out, haven't I. Gone on, be honest. -
I'd say so but it's never too late to make amends!
-
Yeah you have, it was a lovely machine... Some really good games on it and it felt like the FUTURE was in your hands. Massive jump from the 8 bits and games like Starglider and even Buggy Boy were light years better than anything we'd seen before. -
@Mr_Kentish: You missed out by not embracing the Amiga. Though, for me, the magic had mostly gone by the time the 1200 was released.
-
Yeah. 1990-94 with my Amiga 500 were the best years of gaming I've had. It will always be my fave machine.
-
A couple of mates had A500s, and I spent a number of years playing Kick Off, Sensi and Chaos Engine - so it was very much a machine I coveted from afar. I think I bought half a dozen games for it - Alien Breed SE, Superfrog, Wing Commander, Body Blows, some racing game that was a lot like Hot Pursuit - before the lustre of Mode 7, Street Fighter 2 and, yes, WWF Royal Rumble, lured me to console-land.Post edited by Mr_Kentish at 2011-02-25 05:54:28
-
My A500+4mb+20mbHDD+68030+1080s was probably my favourite set up.
-
Flash sod. I'd have loved a proper monitor... I thought they were the 1084s? -
Something like that. There's too many mumbers.
-
I had a 40M HD, a second floppy and a monitor, couldn't tell you the make of it tho.
I think my mate still has it all in his loft, I'll need to dig it all out and donate it to a good home maybe. Anyone interested? Assuming it all still works of course. -
That must have been a brilliant set up mugsy, always wanted a proper monitor but the Atari one was really small and way out of my price range. -
Yeah it was awesome, I did have a second floppy too, and the 68030 had 512k of some sort of ram on it. It was like having a 'proper computer', and a lot of games ran off the HDD which was fab.
-
My A500 had the 1/2 meg upgrade!
£50 for half a meg!! -
At one point I had a PC-Emulator in the trapdoor slot. It was terrible.
-
Dastardly said:
My A500 had the 1/2 meg upgrade!
£50 for half a meg!!
MIne had that too. Can't remember how much it cost tho.
I also had the chipram mod done on mine (think it was chipran, it basically made the trapdoor upgrade RAM run faster).
-
You were all just a bunch of posh kids I reckon!
There were 12 of us in one room!! (dramatisation) -
I have an A600 and and a Philips CM8833 II but bnoth were aquired due to the internet :-) My original 1MB ST is in the garage.
-
Post edited by Dastardly at 2011-02-25 06:54:04
-
@Dastardly Nah, I have a Spectrum for that :-D
-
ha! :)
-
Moving from the C64 to the Atari ST I knew I'd entered a new phase of computer technology. It brought with it incredible graphics, a futuristic control system, floppy disks and could play real sounds. My mate Ian and myself had massive amounts of fun using his sound digitiser playing our voices backwards and increasing the pitch. None of this stuff was possible on the 64.
Months later when Fred Harris revealed the new Commodore powerhouse the 'Amiga' I simply knew I'd have to get one. It took a long wait for the price to drop before I took my 520 to a shop in Portobello in Edinburgh to trade in. I'm sure I still had to pay about £200-£300 to get it.
The sound tho of the Amiga just blew my mind.
With every subsequent technological upgrade (SNES, PC, Playstation etc) the excitement rush has been less and less to the point there's virtually none now.
The 8 bit and 16 bit are were my heart lies for sure. -
I think the problem is that the perceivable improvements have been less and less as time goes on. My pc is still a pc, like the one I had in '98, but the improvements have been so gradual that you don't appreciate them as much.
-
Heh, the dealbreaker for me getting my A500 was getting a free desk with it :D
-
Must admit the jump to HD gaming on the 360 brought a bit of a rush tho never on par with the leap from 8 to 16 bit.
-
Mamemeister said:
With every subsequent technological upgrade (SNES, PC, Playstation etc) the excitement rush has been less and less to the point there's virtually none now.
It's a case of diminishing returns hardware-wise nowadays - they all do largely the same thin but faster and with more triangles, and sometimes with the modern-day equivalents of the plastic surfboard controller that came with that Speccy game back in the day. It'll take a console that you plug into your cock to give that same sense of excitement again. All about the software these days. -
I've got my mate's A1200, and stacks of games... but a lot of them don't work any more.
Unless they're just not compatible. I tried the A500 mode thing once, but I don't think it worked.
Always loved the Amiga from playing on it at his house, though. -
I had a A1200 Paul and most of the games did work.
-
Nah he's saying that the one he was given a couple of years ago doesn't read games!
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!