With a little more time on my hands, I finally decided to plan and progress with some of my old and retro hardware and put them to meaningful and fun use. I have had two Amiga 500s for a while now, both in fair condition, and decided to keep one was pristine as possible, with the original configuration – that would be the one that still has its working floppy. The second Amiga 500, I would upgrade and update, add extra horse powers and make it a “gaming machine”, that I could use to play even newer games (e.g. Aquabyss (agedcode.com)) conveniently. And also – get around the massive floppy changing madness that some games demand (looking at you Monkey Island 2, Indy Fate of Atlantis and Ambermoon).
That “beefy” Amiga already had its floppy replaced with a Gotek, so switching ADFs I created from my games was slighly faster than floppy jockeying. However, the plan for this 500 goes further: I want to upgrade the Kickstart ROM, add a turbo card with a faster processor and also additional RAM, and install a hard drive to install Workbench on, so I could not only load games from floppy or ADF, but also from disk, also leveraging the WHDLoad project and run my games from disk, without switching floppies altogether.
So the bill of material looks like this:
- Terrible Fire 536 turbo card with a 68030 processor with 50MHz and 64MByte of RAM
- IDE DF card adapter for the TF 536 – and use a CF card as the hard disk
- Amiga OS 3.2 (ROM and Workbench media to install
- A 4Gbyte CF card to install the OS
- I also bought a SDBox v2, so I could use an SD card as temp hard disk, to copy/transport data to and from the Amiga to and from my Windows machine. Easier than to unplug the CF card all the time (which requires
- Lots of software packages from Aminet (Installer, LHA, WHDload, Sysinfo, MMULib)
My plan was to put all parts into the Amiga and properly assemble it hardware-wise. And that was easy enough:
For the Workbench installation, I thought I could follow Johan Driessen’s guide of installing Workbench on the CF card using WinUAE in Windows, and then putting the CF card into the Amiga: Setting up a Compact Flash card with Classic Workbench and WHDLoad for Amiga 600/1200 | Johan Driessen. That would save some time, and the whole operation would be carried out much faster – and I could transport the required archives directly to the CF card, before I plug it into the Amiga.
I followed the guide and well – while I succeeded in installing Workbench and it booted in WinUAE, it never booted in my Amiga 500. I suspect it has to do with the fact that I did not correctly specify/configure my machine in WinUAE – the Amiga 500 originally does not have an HD drive, and I may have messed up the config, rendering the install unbootable in the physical machine. The first time, I chose an Amiga 600 w/ HD as the base machine in WinUAE, the other time an Amiga 500 with a SCSI controller and an HD – both failed when I transported the correctly installed HD into the physical Amiga.
Bugger – so I resorted to installing Workbench on the hardware, using the ADF images that came with the Amiga OS 3.2 package. The guide that Johan provided was still useful, I was able to train the installation and also pick the right settings with the hardware config – or so I thought. My idea was that I’d partition the hard drive such that there’s a 750MByte partition for Workbench and its stuff, a GB partition for applications and the rest in a partition for games and WHDload. I’d partition it following the guide, format and install Workbench.
Installing OS 3.2 worked alright and it booted without issues – almost. The boot process stopped, asking for a proper library for the 68030 processes that I had installed: “A 68030 processor was found in the system, but a corresponding CPU library is missing(…)”
After installing LHA, I unpacked the MMULib and copied the MMU.library and the 68030.library to LIBS:, rebooted, and the message went away, never to be seen.
Alrighty, after installing all the pre-requisites, it was about time to install WHDLoad – this is where my problems began. It’s not WHDload itself, as it turned out, but my config. As I unpacked WHDload from my SDBox sd-card to the hard drive using LHA, I would have checksum error ever so often. I was surprised, downloaded the archive again, and tried again – the errors would continue. I changed the way I unpackt WHDload, and instead of unpacking it to the hard drive, I’d unpack it on the SD card and later copy it over to the hard drive. That seemed to work. Moving on, I’d follow through with the WHD games and I’d have similar issues – right on, I’ll unpack to the sd card and copy them over after. Again, it worked.
Until I tried to launch the games. The Amiga would present me with:
WHDLoad
Program Failed (error #8000000B)
Wait for disk activity to finish
Cool. Not. #8000000B seems to be a well-known AmigaOS error code, and according to research, can have a few reasons. This thread was very useful, listing four potential reasons:
“(…)
– Max transfer too high
– Library or program that requires FPU (and using setup without FPU)
– Missing/wrong 68040/060 library if you have 68040+. (Not You)
– Old version of SetPatch(…)”
I checked the MMU/68030 libraries I had installed and they seemed fine – they even came with a new version of SetPatch that fixed and error that lead it to assuming that a new CPU also had an FPU when really, it didn’t, causing the error – similar to #2 error above. Which lead me to “Max transfer” – the configuration you’d set down, to tell AmigaOS/Workbench how much data the system can ask the device driver (and the device) to deliver in any given request. It isn’t controlling the speed, but rather package size, if you will – more over at the SFS and in this thread. If the driver is asked for too much, it might corrupt data while reading/write from the cf card. The guide I followed listed 0x1FE00 as the mask that would work with CF cards, but there’s also a lot of advice on using 0xFE00 for other cards. So I switched to 0xFE00 for the “Games” partition in HDToolBox and formatted the partition, copying the data over again. This time, the checksum errors while copying didn’t show up again (yay!) – but WHDload still wouldn’t start.
I tinkered further, looking into the installer for the MMU libraries, ultimately messing up my Workbench installation, leading to a re-install of Workbench on the hard drive. This time, I chose the right mask for my CF controller (0xFE00) and used it for all partitions on the drive, and re-installed dependencies – including WHDload – and it magically worked!
Puzzled, but happy, I called it a night. In bed, I think I understood what I had done wrong: the re-installation for Workbench fixed the issue. That’s because I already had a corrupted WHDload installation that was NOT on the Games: partition I had re-masked, but on the Workbench partition in C:. So while the new data I copied on the “fixed” partition, I still had a messed up WHDload install on a partition that had a faulty mask still. Re-formatting it all and copying WHDload again must have fixed it.
AAAh!
So a few learnings here:
- Research is everything!
- When dealing with a new CF card (controller), read up/test out which mask works reliably. 0x1FE00 is larger, but if that doesn’t work, 0xFE00 is the next option that works reliably on my Amiga. Try with maxtranstest.LHA from Tom’s Homepage – Download (t-online.de).
- If you had a faulty MaxTransfer setting initially and there’s already data on the partition/drive, all *new* data copied to the partition may be good, but what’s there may still be messed up. Starting over by formatting the drive and re-copying is the only way to be sure.
FRICKELSOFT 