Around 17-Dec-97, Carlos Villarroel Cortes typed: >Hello Tom. >Your hacking page is really great, with lots of useful information. >Maybe this question is already answered on some of your texts, if so, >i'm sorry really but i'm still haven't read all your texts. Thanx... glad you like them.. I'm adding yours to the list.. hehe >I have an A500 Kick1.3 (Fatter Agnus) 512kChip-512KSlowRAM (via A501) >and some troubles with game loading. The fact is that the internal drive >(DF0:) can't read some non-dos game disk's (the game appears to load >correctly but then after some protection-like drive noises the machine >hang-on or crashes). I have already proved these games with other >machines and it works fine. Also i have an original game (copy protected >disk file-system) that recognizes the external drive so i boot and >in the title page change the disk from DF0: to DF1: if i don't do it >(if i maintain the disk in DF0:) the game crashes when loading. Sounds like your df0: is out of alignment... Happens more often on machines that play a lot of copy protected games as those disk based games slew the heck out of the floppy heads... [...] >So my questions are: >How i can make the machine think that DF0: is DF1: and DF1: is DF0: via >hardware (using jumpers to configure it or something). No.. THAT hack requires that you physically change the control lines on the mother board, or lift the control line pins on the 8520 and rewire them to swap the two... but this is just a kludge.. not a good hack... I've done it b-4 for some student that had no money once.. but it's not the way to go... >If this is not possible, I can exchange the drives (from an A1011 external >drive to the A500 internal drive and viceversa) in some easy way? YES! You can Since you have an external Amiga drive (extra you can rip apart I assume)! You can just pull it out and make sure the jumpers are set right (drive "1" out of the 0-4 range if I am not mistaken). If I remember right you need to make sure the _MTR control line jumper on the drive is set also... Now mechanical mounting is the tricky part... you are only mounting on three points first off... second, you need to hack the case of the floppy drive (cut the metal case to match the stock A500 drive so that the A500 plastic case will fit nicely around the drive, and third hack the floppy eject button so that it extends out fully... The Metal case hack looks something like this: Before After _____________ ___ ___ | | | \_____/ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Drive Case | | Drive Case | | Top | | Top | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ------------- ------------- Of course you will want to REMOVE the metal drive case first... The easiest way to do this hack is with a dremel moto tool (http://www.dremel.com).. but in a pinch.. you would use radio shack metal Nibble Tool (Ouch! many a hand cramp using these.. but hey.. they work!)... Anyway... Extending the eject push button is more of a master hack work of art than anything else... Here's I what I have done (for myself and for other customers....) ------Step 1: Look & Examine------- ___ old drive button --> | | Now notice how the bottom of each drive button has | | a different plastic mounting scheme? Well...it's '-' usually just easier to stick with the scheme of the ___ new drive, use the new drive's button hooked to the new drive button --> | | new drive, and just use the stock button as an ``' "extender"... ------------Step 2:Cut------------- ___ old drive button --> | | See what were gonna do now? Ya cut off the un-needed |___| mounting part (plus some) of the old drive button and ___ make sure ya got the right approximate length, width, new drive button --> | | etc... (dremel tool makes this part easy...) ``' ---------Step 3: Melt-------------- ___ Some hacks prefer to do this step their own way... well old drive button --> | | here's MY way... Use a small blow torch or s.iron to |___| heat up the paper clips and melt/insert them into the , . upper half of the button (see next ASCII pic) two pieces of --> | | slightly bent ` ' paper clip ___ new drive button --> | | ``' ----- ___ old drive button --> | | Now with them melted into the upper button (further |___| then how it appears in the ASCII art), apply Loctite two pieces of --> | | Liquid Weld or Super glue (your call.. but I prefer slightly bent ` ' the epoxy weld) to the lower half, heat the other paper clip ___ end of the paper clip segments up (quickly!)(next) new drive button --> | | ``' ---------Step 4: Weld------ ___ old drive button --> | | ... and quickly and carefully (with the aid of |___| n.n.pliers, coax the tow parts together... Now new drive button --> | | just mate make sure they line up nice and neat and ``' that the edges flow smoothly.. and paint it if you wish... Some people skip the whole paper clip/melting method and just use Liquid Weld Epoxy... but I opt for the added strength and rigidity of this little hack... and if you do it right.. it looks nice... this is the method I used for putting an A2000 HD drive into my stock (at the time) A500's case... of course now it's in a tower in a drive bay and has a face plate and a REAL LONG drive button! hehehe... >I never have open my A500 but i will do it if i don't need to use solder. Oh.. didn't see that before I went into the hack details.. oh well.. I'll keep this one for tech suggestions I guess... >games. Also i have used an Action Replay III Cartridge to change the >trackdisk.device parameters but these are limited via the cartridge and >i don't know very much about configuring amiga devices. Tweaking with those parameters is probably what screwed up the stock drive alignment in the first place... Stepping a drive at the speeds that some utils/cart's let you is rough on the hardware.. >Also i'ts possible to make a switch (like your NTSC-PAL) for 512K/1Meg of >chip memory at boot time in the A500 KS1.3. Yes... check out my Tech Suggestion that covers the A500 Fat Agnus hack and I think I touch on that subject... you would need a DPDT switch (fully debounced of course). But I can not think of two may games that freak out over 1M of Chip.. just OLD A1000 era games like Arctic Fox (EA) and the like... Some may not like not having ANY fast RAM though... I though about building such a switch (just to appease the control freak in me), but there would really not be that much advantage the way I see it... You a hard-core gamer I guess then? >Or is there any software >solution for this purpose that works with ALL games? No software solution... unless you call turning off all RAM above 512K a "fix".... using 1M of chip vs 512k is purely a hardware issue... (unless the latter method is used). >Thanks for reading this and keep up the good work! Hope you got something out of these late night ramblings... Nite nite... Tom D Tek -- __________________________________________________________________________ / Thomas W. Weeks |Team AMIGA Commodore Amiga 500/030 40MHz \ | A&M EET/Telecom Grad '95 | /// Hacked Into Black Tower Case, | | Authorized Amiga Tech (7yrs) | __ /// 9M RAM, SyQuest 44M, 700M-o-SCSI | | Contact Me @ | \\\/// IBM 286 Hardware Emulator, | | o------------o | \XX/ Home Brew Audio A/D, HP48GX | | Email: tweeks@texas.net |"Amiga, The Computer for the Creative Mind"TM| |Web:lonestar.texas.net/~tweeks|"Mac, The Computer for the Rest of Us"TM | \_____________________________|____________________________________________/