User avatar
bnilsson

Posted Wed Oct 16, 2019 12:42 am

Hi I just joined and I would like to tell you some about my Amiga setup.

History and the OSSC

About a year ago I decided to get my Amiga 500 out of storage. Its mostly been in diffrent storage over the decades, as I have been keeping it all these years since the early nineties. At that time my parents bought it for me second hand.

What really triggered it for me, was I stumbled upon the OSSC (The Open Source Scan Converter) when reading about retro console stuff on the net.

So I got one and the goal was to play some games using the family OLED TV we got in the living room. After lots of thinkering with the OSSC I got a very nice picture. The true blacks really bring out something special from the old games and demos.
pic1.jpg
Im the guy posting here:
https://www.videogameperfection.com/for ... ga/page/3/


Creative stuff

Back in the day I was always drawing in Deluxe Paint and programming in AMOS, generally being creative with my Amiga. As I have gotten older, family, work, and the many distractions that exists today on the net for example, I feel I have kind of lost that.

So more recently I have felt the itch to learn more about 68K Assembly and the Amiga hardware, so Ive been doing some tutorials (The awesome youtube ones by Photon of Scoopex).

I have connected the OSSC and my Amiga to monitor in my office / man cave now instead.
pic2.jpg
I dont have a harddisk or any accellerator (yet). I got a Gotek though, that I put inside an external drive. Still use the real floppy as internal drive. This enable me to copy .adf contents onto real floppies using X-Copy. And also to save files on the USB drive and transferback to my Macbook.

I was expermenting at first with having the Gotek as internal drive, but after a while I felt I was missing the floppy sound, and the physical handling of the floppies.

So My Amiga is a Rev 5 with 1.2 Kickstart, for now I will not get an accellerator board (maybe later), and keep using it like this with floppies.

Development environment

So how to use ASM-One and Deluxe Paint with these restrictions, while also listening to some MODS with ProTracker?

I made a bash script on my Mac that builds an .adf with the minimal Workbench files and utilities to do some pixel art and ASM programming. The result is what you see in the picture above.

Its amazing how much stuff you can fit on a single floppy if putting some effort into it. I also used an old program called Imploder 4.0 to compress some of the larger executables, that made a huge difference.

Sadly there is not Enough RAM (512KB+512KB) to run all 3 programs at the same time, but anyway not strictly needed.

Thanks for reading. Will be happy to answer any questions you might have, or if you have hints about to improve this minimal setup. Any experiences doing something similar perhaps?

User avatar
3D-vice
Germany

Posted Wed Oct 16, 2019 1:34 am

That's a nice setup. Did you have any obstacles to take when putting the GoTec into an external floppy case? And can you boot from the GoTec?

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Wed Oct 16, 2019 1:41 am

Great story, thanks for sharing.

Your desktop looks great. Nicely captured, I guess you have fun in photography?

Personally, I would love to see some of your older artwork. Do you still have those pictures and could share them??

Regarding the expansion there are a puzzling number of new developments available. If you have the skills to solder your own equipment or access to people helping you then it gets even more puzzling.

For a start, KS 1.2 is an issue. Effectively all accelerators, or rather HDD interfaces, require KS1.3 to have at least autoboot capabilities. HDDs make little sense without.

Personally, I'd start with a Flash-replacement for the Kickstart and an adapter to get 2MB ChipRAM. These will always be beneficial, regardless of further expansions. Also, I couldnt live without VGA-out, i.e. a flickerfixer/scandoubler.

For the ROM-Switcher, I can recommend this one:
https://retro.7-bit.pl/?lang=en&go=proj ... =a500flash

For the Chipmem expansion this is a good one:
https://icomp.de/shop-icomp/en/shop/product/ace2.html

For the Flickerfixer/scandoubler this is a nice one:
https://icomp.de/shop-icomp/en/shop/pro ... pe=OCS_ECS

Would you prefer internal or external accelerators and HDD/SD solutions?

User avatar
bnilsson

Posted Wed Oct 16, 2019 2:03 am

3D-vice wrote:
Wed Oct 16, 2019 1:34 am
That's a nice setup. Did you have any obstacles to take when putting the GoTec into an external floppy case? And can you boot from the GoTec?
Thanks!

Yes I had a false start with an modern adapter for using the Gotek externally, for some reason it didn't work at all, still don't know why.

Bought an external drive off Tradera (Sort of like the Swedish ebay), the floppy drive in it was broken and also smelled strange :-/ Binned that and put in my GoTek instead, worked on first try.

As for booting, no. But there are solutions to that with a simple switch to install underneath the CIA chip I have seen. Might be a good thing for a GoTek with display and rotary selector.

I think I will stick with booting from real floppy though.

User avatar
bnilsson

Posted Wed Oct 16, 2019 2:09 am

McTrinsic wrote:
Wed Oct 16, 2019 1:41 am
Great story, thanks for sharing.

Your desktop looks great. Nicely captured, I guess you have fun in photography?

Personally, I would love to see some of your older artwork. Do you still have those pictures and could share them??

Regarding the expansion there are a puzzling number of new developments available. If you have the skills to solder your own equipment or access to people helping you then it gets even more puzzling.
Thanks, it was just a quick photo with my Phone, but It was fun setting it up.

I have some of the .IFF files I managed to extract from my old floppies using this setup, not all though. I will post some. Do not expect to much though with regards to artistic qualities :-)

Yes Chipmem will one main problem with regards to expanding this one (rev 5). I don't think I will solder anything on this one since its special to me. Maybe I will look into separate Amiga for accelerator and stuff.

With regards to flicker fixer, I kind of prefer the OSSC for quality on modern displays.

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Wed Oct 16, 2019 2:17 am

The KickROM and Chip-Expansion I linked above are both fully reversible and dont require soldering.

User avatar
bnilsson

Posted Wed Oct 16, 2019 2:31 am

McTrinsic wrote:
Wed Oct 16, 2019 2:17 am
The KickROM and Chip-Expansion I linked above are both fully reversible and dont require soldering.
Oh that's great, then its a thing I will consider. This with an ACA500plus maybe.

User avatar
bnilsson

Posted Sun Oct 20, 2019 3:44 am

Monitor arm is the best investment I made in years :-)

Didn't originally buy it for my Amiga hobby, but it really is a thing that makes the A500 work.

Since the A500 is so deep, it really makes it possible to place it for comfortable typing on the desk.

Currently on tutorial 6 of Photons Amiga hardware programming youtube series. Its super exiting to finally get a deeper understanding how the machine works. But I must admit some of the concepts are a bit hard to follow.





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