Prevue Guide Forums

Hi All

Wondering if any of you may be able to help with running this on a real Amiga? I guess that might be only LocalH but I thought I'd post for the potential future benefit of others....

I have several A2000s, mainly purchased for the anticipated running of prevue guide - alas it appears I cannot run it! I have so far tried on two of them. One has a SCSI hard drive and 8MB fast RAM, and the other 4MB fast RAM so both within spec AFAIK.

I have written the original ADF and another ADF I made with UAE onto disks with Catweasel. I have verified they read back in OK, and also copied the entire disk onto the hard drive of the HD-equipped A2000. I am therefore pretty sure the disks are fine. I have also tried both images on several floppies (some of which were inevitably faulty)

Booting from floppy, I get the standard startup stuff that I'd expect, to see, and the screen turns black as just before the PLEASE STAND BY message. However, at that point the disk grinds back and forth twice - sounding like a classic Amiga disk read error, and the program appears to halt. I note that at this point it is possible to press esc twice, and the disk will appear to access again, but with no real clue of what it's doing, if anything.

I also installed PG onto the hard drive of the HD-equipped Amiga, and wrote a custom startup to deal with the assigns etc. This encounters exactly the same problem. If there's a disk in the drive it will grind in the same pattern.

I ran snoopdos on both the disk-based and HD-based Amigas. I note the snoopdos logs get to different points on each setup. the floppy one indicates that serial.device was the last thing attempted to be read with no result code. I can't remember where the HD based one gets to but it is further.

SO.....

I presumed I had made a mistake and this software will just not run properly on PAL hardware. Foolish of course - all my A2000s are PAL.

Closing the NTSC jumper on the mobo, and checking in workbench that the AmigaOS thinks it is NTSC, made no difference. Neither does setting UAE up so it's definitely PAL. Of course both things could be superficial - maybe there's something more fundamental in the hardware that is PAL that causes the incompatibility. All hope was lost for a while.

However, I remember I was given a A3000 quite some time ago, and this is American NTSC (someone had blown the PSU up by plugging it into a European 230V supply). So I flipped the jumpers back to NTSC and gave it a go on that machine - same result! Notably, the A3000 has a VGA ouput. The monitor attached says there is "no video input" the moment that the disk grinds and the program appears to crash. Also I noted that on the A3000, it was NOT possible to get it to do anything by pressing Esc.

SO...

That is my story and I wondered if anyone had any ideas

No idea whatsoever Let's hope LocalH can show up and tell us how he did it! Or maybe you should ask metalguy66.

I'll PM them in a couple of days, in case they don't frequent the board so often

OK experiments so far seem to indicate that it's because there's no genlock - of all things!!

tin wrote:OK experiments so far seem to indicate that it's because there's no genlock - of all things!!

Interesting! I just remembered that when the guy sent me the floppy disk, he did mention that he tried running it on a normal Amiga (without proprietary Prevue hardware), and it didn't work for him.

LocalH and Metalguy66 have both been able to run it on non-Prevue Amigas, but I believe both of them had generic genlocks at the time.

Interesting. I thought metalguy66 used an external genlock as well - wondered how the Amiga knew that it was connected at all!

Anyway the point being that I have fitted a commodore genlock, and it boots and runs

tin wrote:Interesting. I thought metalguy66 used an external genlock as well - wondered how the Amiga knew that it was connected at all!

Anyway the point being that I have fitted a commodore genlock, and it boots and runs

Fantastic
Forums feel a bit empty right now though, lol

tin wrote:Interesting. I thought metalguy66 used an external genlock as well - wondered how the Amiga knew that it was connected at all!

Anyway the point being that I have fitted a commodore genlock, and it boots and runs

Aha, bit of research suggests that the internal genlock slot is just the same as the RGB port on the back of an Amiga anyway. The software must activate something on that port that makes the absence of one throw a wobbler, but not within the emulator. Interesting

My poor Amiga is quite ill, it crashes if you try and run Prevue guide again without giving it a 10 minute rest

YAY