Arcade & Retro Repairs & Mods, all new recipe, with no added MSG...

For my 'wonder what that looks like' with the TurboGrafx-16 I was given, i went the cheap and prob not great route of this adapter as I don't forsee myself using the console much;

Believe it uses a Sega MS/Genesis 2 RGB SCART Cable

New A1200 RGB cable came in the post yesterday, connected everything up to a monitor and it sprung to life! Greeted with the purple screen asking for a Workbench disk.

I honestly couldn't fully remember what was actually inside, so popped the back cover off to be greeted with a compact flash drive adapter with a 4Gb CF card in it. So everything seems to still be there to get it all up and running again.

Unfortunately all my CF card readers have long since been tossed, so that's where my progress ended last night.

Ordered a new CF card reader, downloaded WinUAE / a Workbench 3.1 rom and have it all ready to go. So next step once that reader arrives is to build a fresh Workbench image on that CF card and see if I can get it booting in the Amiga.

Actually quite excited to get this going as I've finally a bit of desk space to set it up.

Oddly, that did not work.

Workbench appeared to install correctly on the CF card, I went through all the configurations and set it up.

Restarted WinUAE expecting everything to finally be done but was instead greeted with a blank screen and a crash.

Rebooted the software completely and any time I use a configuration with this CF card it makes WinUAE freeze up and go incredibly slow. Tried to start it up but absolutely no joy.

Seems the workbench install part of the process somehow corrupted. I do not have it in me to go through that whole card cleaning/partition creating process again so it'll time to call it a day and just hit ebay for a preconfigured card. I see our friend Sordan in Ireland actually has them in and around 20 quid. (I'd have paid 20 quid not to have gone through all that this evening and fail 🤣)

Also, I remember reading last year or so that WinUAE doesn't play nicely with all cf readers either. But in saying that, there's usually an error thrown at the partitioning stage iirc. Make sure you're running WinUAE as an admin.

I'd start WinUAE, manually load the saved config of a 1200, increased ram, floppy drive set to max speed, CPU cycles set to fastest, etc. Then connect the cf drive, attach it as a hard disk, make sure it's set to df0 and bootable, and click start.

If the CF card doesn't have the RDB setup correctly then it will still boot using WinUAE but can fail with real hardware, make sure to hit Enter after making changes in the textboxes or the changes will be ignored.

Rather than endless swapping CF cards around while you get setup you like, better off setting up everything on a virtual disc in WinUAE first and then copying everything over to the mounted CF card using Dopus when you're happy with the setup.

Obviously the CF card will need to be partitioned and bootable before this though. This is a pretty good guide, you can ignore PFS3 stuff if you like. Its a better filesystem but not essential to have.

https://johan.driessen.se/posts/Setting-up-a-Compact-Flash-card-with-Classic-Workbench-and-WHDLoad-for-Amiga-600-1200/

The default installation is fairly bland and missing a lot of essential applications to I'd go with a BestWB install for a good minimal setup - using one of their prebuilt 4GB images is the easy way to get started.

Don't forget to check out the latest Mega AGS images for huge game bundles, or just pull the individual ones you want from WHDownload.

I himmed and hawed about buying that myself. In the end, given the cost of repair parts, a controller, and an mpeg card, I kinda felt it all added up to more or less the same as just buying a complete one. I've a massive queue of jobs so I was kinda relieved I talked myself out of it 😁

Glad you got it up and running, always nice to see repairs saving machines...even if it is a cdi 😄

Very good, sounds like a nice project

Will it boot to kickstart screen with no cf installed?

Nope, nothing at all unfortunately.

Yep!

I did a bit of googling however and it appears I made a bit of an error with my 3.1 roms which may have actually fecked them up.

On the rom socket, there's actually 1 pin hole too many for the 3.1 roms. You've to leave the holes to the left of the rom empty and align the chip with the right side of the socket. I inserted the chips aligned to the left with the empty pin holes on the right.

It's possible this whole issue has now been caused by my new 3.2.2 roms not being compatible with my A1200 and then maybe I fried my working 3.1 roms by not aligning the pins correctly.

If that's the case it's all good as it means the issue is just the rom chips and the rest of the A1200 is fine. Here's hoping! (Other concern is perhaps a broken trace around the rom sockets)

In the words of Victor Meldrew, 'I don't believe it!'

So to summarize for posterity, it was the bloody CF to IDE adapter. I got a new one with the kit I ordered on ebay, installed that intead and not only did the new copy of Workbench 3.2 work, the version I made in WinUAE myself actually worked too. I wonder has my problem all these years simply been because of a borked CF adapter?

Both sets of roms were working too, I just didn't have enough patience. If the Amiga doesn't boot a HDD, after a good 30 seconds to 1 minute of black screen the Kickstarter rom screen appears. I did not know this and after looking at darkness for 10-15 seconds I assumed they weren't working. 😅

Good job o1s1n!

I really should get back to messing with my A600. I got an Ethernet adapter for it recently but have yet to install it properly.

Anybody know the best frontend to use for WHDLoad?

3.2.2.1 is available as well, hotfixes some issues in 3.2.2. But tbh the changes since 3.1 are good to have but nothing life changing, particularly for a machine running WHDload on lower resolution CRT.

To get on the 'net you can get plipboxes, plug into the parallel port and have either an ethernet port or some have Wifi. Seen a nice project demo at Amiga Ireland this year, Infinity Mod that plays streams mods.

https://youtu.be/bH7Pd4TJCc8

iGame is a decent standalone launcher if you've got a library of WHD's already. Otherwise take a look at the AmigaVision packs

This will have to wait. It's still ongoing. Honestly, never seen anything like it. It's a CleanScreen Sega Game Gear kit. Replacement parts arrived this week, and I've still no image on screen. Two kits now. An absolute saga if I've ever seen one. It'll make a hilarious thread, if I ever get it working. It's supposed to be a simple, drop in replacement screen, screen driver board, with a handful of quite simple wires to solder.....so you'd think...

Not so much a single thing no, missing product instructions, vague YouTube video instructions partly related to the product, resorting to youtube comments for info, broken parts due to gaps in my knowledge/missing instructions, replacement parts that dont work....an absolute saga that's still ongoing.

Re your 1200 and cf card issues, I don't know about the 1200 as I haven't messed around much with mine yet, but certain accelerators on the 600 will disable the pcmcia slot in order to give access to the full ram of the accelerator. Doesn't really explain the non booting issue though. Can the 1200 be set to boot from the pcmcia slot maybe, and it's trying to boot from that?

That's one of the kits yeah, the previous one I bought was a V2 version with really poor info on it. The current v3 isn't working, and am finding troubleshooting time consuming and difficult.

That Amiga thing must relate to the 68E020 cpu in the 1200, because the Furia upgrade for the 600 gives that same 68E020 CPU and thats where I learned about the pcmcia trade off.