Amiga Tricks and Tips From Amiga Deals
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Amiga crashes after installing accelerator.

First simply unplug the card, clean the contacts and plug it back in. Make sure the card is plugged in correctly and not slightly crooked.

If this does not help unplug all hardware apart from the accelerator and boot the machine. If the machine works properly without crashing the problem may be a conflict with other hardware. Re-attach each peripheral in turn to find the cause of the problem.

Are you using the standard Power Supply that came with your Amiga ? The standard 25 watt A1200 supply is fine for Powering a stand alone Amiga but starts to struggle as soon as you add more than one or two extras that don't have their own separate supply. You will need to either get a more powerful supply or decide which peripherals are most important to you.

The processor on the accelerator may be getting to hot and shutting itself down. This is especially common on the 68040. Try leaving the trapdoor cover off or fitting a small fan to keep it ventilated. It is also recommended to place the machine in a tower case or raising the machine off the desk by putting it on stilts.

If the machine is crashing on particular programs you may be trying to use software which breaks under a new processor. There is very little you can do in such cases apart from finding a similar application or game that will run. It may be useful to try degrader patches to get the stubborn software to work.

Hard drive not booting

Some hard drives require a warm reboot. This is because the A1200 looks for a hard drive as soon as it is switched on but some drives take a few seconds to get up to speed. The A1200 does not check for the hard drive again so consequently it thinks is doesn’t have one. All that is required if this is the case is to hold the Ctrl and 2 Amiga keys for a few seconds after switching on. This will reboot the machine and recognise the hard drive. Sometimes cutting pin1 on the IDE ribbon cable will solve this problem.

HDToolBox cannot recognise your hard drive.

Try using RDPrep to recognise the drive.

Floppy Disk read errors

This may simply be that the drive heads need cleaning. You can clean this with a floppy drive cleaning disk set.

What software can you use to format and partition your Amiga hard drive ?

The program that you need is called HDToolBox, which comes with on the Workbench install disk. The installer disk was only usually supplied with any Amiga that came with a hard drive. You can also use a third party utility such as RDPrep or Fastprep. These will all allow you to prep, Partition and format your drive.

When I turn my Amiga the hard drive light will sometimes stay on for ages and will not boot properly.

The Amiga has probably crashed whilst it is writing to and the drive has become invalidated . Unlike the PC, the Amiga will usually repair the damage automatically, it just takes time. The only way that you can actually shorten the time it takes to repair itself is by holding down both mouse buttons when it has reset and go into the Early Startup Menu, from here you can select to boot with no startup-sequence. This will allow the Amiga to sort itself out without having to attempt to boot Workbench at the same time. If you still have problems you may need to use a hard drive repair program such as - Quarterback tools or Disksalve.

How to write protect your hard drive?

Yes, it is possible to protect your hard drive using the lock command. E.g.

Lock sys: on - this will lock your partition
Lock sys: off - this will unlock it.

If you wish to lock a drive other than your main partition simply substitute Sys: for the drive name.

Running DiskSalv 2 validates the disk and then becomes invalidated when the program quits.

This is a known bug in DiskSalv. When it finishes validating the disk and asks if you want to do another, it has not really finished. So when you quit, AmigaDOS tries to revalidate the disk and fails for the reasons it did in the first place.

It is possible to solve this by replying YES when it asks if you want to do another device. DiskSalv will then open another requester that you can then cancel and it will finish fixing the drive.

I have a new A1200. Some games will not run even though they should be compatible with the A1200.

The latest A1200s made had a HD floppy drive set by jumpers as a DD drive. This has caused problems with custom disk loading routines. There is a hardware fix available called A1200FDfix.lha on the Aminet.

What causes the conflicts between PCMCIA cards and A1200 RAM boards?

The 68ec020 used in the A1200 can only address 8 Megs of FAST RAM. The PCMCIA slot uses 4 Megs of this address range whether you're using a PCMCIA RAM card or not. This means that only 4 Megs of addressing space is available for a trapdoor RAM boards. Newer accelerators will solve this problem as 68030 has its own larger address range. Some older accelerators use 4 Meg of the 68ec020's addressing range so the same problems will occur.

How to tell what Amiga boot errors mean.

The failure colours are:

YELLOW 680x0 Exception is taken before the real Exec exception

   handler is installed.

GREEN Chip memory fails. This can be a real chip memory

   failure, or a problem writing to the CIA chip that

   controls the ROM overlay.

RED ROM checksum failure.

BLUE Chip failure -- something's wrong with Agnus, Denise,

   or Paula.

The keyboard self test results are:

One blink The keyboard ROM check failed

Two blinks The keyboard RAM check failed

Three blinks The watchdog timer test failed

Four blinks A short exists between two row lines or one of the

seven special control keys

How to add more memory to an A1200.

The Amiga can be expanded in a number of ways.

The first is the RAM board, this adds more memory to the system providing a speed increase. The 68020 as used in the A1200 can only have a maximum of 16Mb fast ram.

The second option is too buy an accelerator card. This will add a faster processor to your machine making it go even faster. The memory can also be added actually on to the accelerator. The amount of memory that can be added varies according to the make and the type of processor that is fitted on the card. Those developed over the last year allow a maximum of 256Mb to be added.

Both of the above option fit into the Trap Door slot underneath the Amiga. A third option is a PCMCIA credit card type simm card that plugs straight into PCMCIA slot on the left hand side of the A1200.

Can PCs or Macs read and write Amiga floppy disks?

While the Amiga does use PC-type floppy drives, it uses the custom Amiga chips to control them, and writes entire tracks at a time with no sector gaps. This is beyond the capability of the standard PC floppy controller. There is a special floppy controller called the Catweasel that makes this possible.

Can Amigas read and write MS-DOS floppy disks?

Yes, later versions of the Amiga operating system came with CrossDOS, which does just that but only low density disks formatted to 720K.

Will high-density diskettes work when formatted to double-density?

They can work ok but are said to be unreliable.

Will low-level formatting ruin my hard drive?

Maybe, but probably not. On a few old IDE drives, it might. Most recent IDE drives simply ignore the low-level format command and pretend they did it.

Using Crossdoss

"CrossDos is a software product that allows the user to read and write MS-Dos formatted disks, directly from the Amiga. CrossDos integrates into the Amiga operating system, allowing access from virtually any Amiga utility or application, including file requesters."

You can perform most AmigaDOS functions, for example:

Read and Write files
Create directories
Set file or directory dates and protection bits
Relable the disk name
Rename files and directories

Supported drives are as follows:

3.5" 720k floppy disks
3.5" 1.44M floppy disks
5.1/4 360k floppy disks
5.1/4 720k floppy disks
Hard drives
Zip drives
Jaz drives
SyJet
EZ135
SyQuest and
Bernoulli

Other features include an ASCII text filter option, translation tables that handle international text character sets, automatically senses disk changes, floppy disks parameters are sensed automatically, various disk utilities, MS-DOS hard disk configuration software and many other improvements over the original CrossDOS.

Q: What is Crossdos?

A: Crossdos is a program that allows you to mount drives which can read and write to MS-Dos formatted disks. After you have mounted a drive, you can use this just like any other drive on your Amiga. For instance, you can mount a drive called PC0. Then every time you insert a MS-Dos formatted disk into DF0 (the internal disk drive of your Amiga), it will be shown as a disk in PC0. Crossdos is available for Amigas with Kickstart 2.x and 3.x.

Q: I've got WB 3.x. What do I do?

A: Crossdos is an integral part of WB 3.x, here's how to use it: Boot Workbench. Insert the Storage disk. Click on the Storage icon, then on the Dosdrivers Icon. You'll see several dos drivers. The necessary ones are PC0 and PC1. PC0 is the driver you want if want to use DF0, PC1 is for DF1. You can use both if you require. If you want to use DF2 or something, you can easily modify the files to match your needs. See the manual.

Q: I've got an Amiga equipped with a Hard Drive, and I want the PC drive to be automatically mounted every time I boot. How do I do that?

A: Make sure the file PC0 or PC1 (or whatever) can be found in the Devs/Dosdrivers directory on your SYS: partition (the partition you boot from). Just copy it from your Storage: disk or the Storage/Dosdrivers directory on your Hard Drive (if this dir exists).

Q: I've got an earlier Amiga. What do I do?

A: You can use WB 3.x on your Kickstart 2.x computer. If you just want Crossdos, then the newest version, Crossdos 7, can be used on any Kickstart 2.x+ Amiga. For Kickstart 1.x computers, see the next question.

Q: Are there any shareware/freeware alternatives to Crossdos? Preferably something that runs on Kickstart 1.x as well?

A: Try Messydos. This is shareware, and it works on all Kickstarts from 1.2 and up. You can get it from the Aminet. You can probably find it in most good pd-libraries as well.

Q: OK, I've got Crossdos. What next?

A: You'll need a 720 kb MS-Dos disk. You can use a standard 1.44 Mb disk, but you'll have to format it as a 720 kb disk. I've never had any problems with this, but apparently you should put a piece of tape over the left hole on the disk (not the write- protect hole), in order to make the PC see it as a DD disk. If you have any problems, try using an original DD (like a standard Amiga uses) disk.

Q: How do I format a 720 kb disk?

A: Double-click on My Computer Right-click on A: Choose the Format command Under the word Capacity, you'll see a menu gadget. Click on the down-arrow, and select 720 kb 3,5 inches Select "Full". You cannot quick-format a disk if you want to change it's capacity. Press Start. In Dos, just type: format a: /f:720 You can format a PC disk with your Amiga as well, but apparently this option is a bit unreliable. This is done the regular way, but you must select the disk in the mounted PC drive.

Q: I can't create a 720 kb disk! What's wrong.

A: Unfortunately, some newer PC drives does not support 720 kb disks. I have only seen this once, on a Compaq portable computer. I don't think there's any way around it, except perhaps to install a new drive. Sorry.

Q: What if I own a High Density drive for my Amiga?

A: Then you can use 1.44 MB PC disks too. You're quite lucky.

Q: Ok, I've formatted a disk. What now?

A: Copy the desired files on to the disk, turn on the Amiga and mount a PC drive (like I explained earlier).

Q: Hmmm. I've inserted the PC disk into my drive. Now all I get is an empty window with no files displayed.

A: Make sure you've selected "show all files" from the disk menu. If you still can't see the files, try selecting "view by name" from the same menu. If the problem persists, then make sure you actually copied the files to the disk :-)

Do you think you could add to this list ? send your tricks, tips FAQs or absolutely anything that may be of use to other Amiga users to: sales@amigadeals.co.uk

See your name here - I will list all contributors that we use (unless you request otherwise).

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