ACE2B PAL question

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Don't Panic. Please wash hands.
  • Is there anyway to get the ACE2B to prefer PAL at startup with an A2000 NTSC?


    I have cleared J102, and I have the newer Indivision ECS V2 that doesn't require Denise to be installed. When I try the two mouse button hold at startup and set the boot to start in PAL Enhanced the system manages to find its way back to NSTC. I have been using The Black Lotus EON demo to test, when is starts up in NSTC is gets all glitchy which its been doing.

    Thanks,

  • Is there anyway to get the ACE2B to prefer PAL at startup with an A2000 NTSC?

    Ony by exchanging the Aganus chip for a PAL version. We will most likely add this as a software setting to the ACA2000, but even the prototype of that is not due for another few months.


    I have cleared J102,

    That does not have an influence on ACE2b. The 2M Agnus chip does not have a PAL/NTSC pin at all.


    When I try the two mouse button hold at startup and set the boot to start in PAL Enhanced the system manages to find its way back to NSTC.

    I don't know for sure if the PAL setting remains if you click on "boot" in that menu. We do have a bootblock-routine that switches to PAL, but I don't even know what the status is on that one. Timm wrote that a while back, but I'm pretty sure it was never released, and I can't even say why. Anyway, maybe Timm can elaborate on what the routine does - maybe it helps getting this unfinished work out the door.

  • We have such a bootblock, but we somehow lost interest in it. I don't have NTSC hardware to test with. You find it attached. Please report back if it works for you. It's supposed to be installed on one disk. Boot with this disk to switch to PAL. Then remove the disk, then insert the disk that you actually wish to boot. It's supposed to continue booting with the second disk in PAL mode.

  • Timm, didn't you want to publish the "devicetool"?


    The easiest method would of course be to pad the file to be 901120 bytes - then write with an ADF-write utility.

  • There are numerous tools to install this, one would be bb20 from Aminet.


    Jens: We did not have a "case" yet for publishing devicetool. It has no GUI, but instead numerous options to destroy your media, various bugs, and incomplete documentation.

  • We have such a bootblock, but we somehow lost interest in it. I don't have NTSC hardware to test with. You find it attached. Please report back if it works for you. It's supposed to be installed on one disk. Boot with this disk to switch to PAL. Then remove the disk, then insert the disk that you actually wish to boot. It's supposed to continue booting with the second disk in PAL mode.

    Thanks. I can report the following:


    On my A500 with the stock 68000, Kickstart 1.3, ACE2 and Indivision ECS V2, using a Gotek, switchboot.adf works with some games (Pinball Fantasies, Lemmings), but not with others (Bubble Bobble, Another World) where it gurus before booting the game. It continues to boot, but in NTSC mode.


    With the Vampire V2+, nothing I tried could make it work - doing it after a power-cycle or Ctrl+A+A, booting from Gotek or CF card after switchboot, doing the two-finger salute and selecting PAL mode from the boot menu (of Coffin R58). Sometimes it gurus, sometimes it doesn't, but each time the machine reverts back to NTSC after switchboot sets it to PAL.


    Is it possible to package this as a program that can be run from startup-sequence?

  • Is it possible to package this as a program that can be run from startup-sequence?

    THis would mean to change the screen mode after it has already openes (at least on Kick 1.3), which is much more than just hacking a few registers. While the routine itself can easily converted into an executable, it will most likely just fail if run that late after system startup.


    The beauty of the bootblock is that it's executed so early in the system startup. It's the ideal place for such a hack - I don't think it makes sense to try and move it to a less suitable place, rather than finding out *why* it crashes.


    The Vampire stuff will be impossible to debug for us, as we don't have any Vampire card, and also we're not so keen on debugging other people's hardware. I've expressed criticism before about the (non-)testing procedures that Vampire uses, and I believe it's not required to go into more detail. The amount of complexity that Vampire adds to such a problem is in a truly bad relation to the problem itself. The easiest thing they could do is to just flip the PAL/NTSC bit on read/write to the respective register, as that's really easy to do if you have full control over the CPU.

  • The Vampire stuff will be impossible to debug for us, as we don't have any Vampire card, and also we're not so keen on debugging other people's hardware. I've expressed criticism before about the (non-)testing procedures that Vampire uses, and I believe it's not required to go into more detail. The amount of complexity that Vampire adds to such a problem is in a truly bad relation to the problem itself. The easiest thing they could do is to just flip the PAL/NTSC bit on read/write to the respective register, as that's really easy to do if you have full control over the CPU.

    Thanks for the reply, Jens.


    Of course I don't expect you to debug the Vampire, you have enough of your own hardware to take care of :)


    In the meantime I found plenty of mode switchers on aminet, I'll give them a try. Some of them seem to be more complex than a one-liner, but I'm not very hopeful.


    I could also try to file a feature request with the Apollo Team, since it does seem to be an easy thing to implement. In order to be as specific as possible, could you please tell me the name of the respective register?


    If all else fails I can always use my ACA500plus for the PAL games, for me it's an easy switch since I have the Vampire plugged to the Amiga externally through the Lazarus CPU relocator board. However, for people without the luxury of having a Lazarus and/or ACA500plus such a fix could be pretty useful.

  • We'll look into the bootblock approach again, as there seems to be more we can do. After all, the software approach works fine for all ACA500plus customers, and since a boot block can be put "in front of" a trackloading game/demo (by swapping disks), my vote goes towards debugging that instead of going to a commandline version that has much more limited use (no chance with track loaders).


    Since Vampire is a whole new platform, I don't consider it "Amiga" at all. Granted, it's really fast, but not 68k (even though it runs a good share of 68k software). So please spare me more Vampire reports here - I'd like to focus on Amiga, C64 and other fun stuff.

  • Here's a bootblock that I hope works better and fixes more titles.

    It shouldn't crash anymore, and it should also coerce the system a bit more into PAL.

  • Here's a bootblock that I hope works better and fixes more titles.

    It shouldn't crash anymore, and it should also coerce the system a bit more into PAL.

    So this is an *.img file. Is it possible to write this to a floppy using ADF blitzer? I use ADF blitzer for writing ADFs to floppy.

  • Oh yes, of course. Sorry. I'm always using .img and .adf synonymously. (It's just a raw device image, containing the disk's payload data, so it's even debatable if 'Amiga disk format' is really a 'format'.)

  • Here's a bootblock that I hope works better and fixes more titles.

    It shouldn't crash anymore, and it should also coerce the system a bit more into PAL.

    I tested the new bootblock with more games than before - A500 with the stock 68000, Kickstart 1.3, ACE2 and Indivision ECS V2, using a Gotek. All games I tried work in PAL mode: Pinball Fantasies, Another World, Batman, Bubble Bobble, IK+, Lemmings, Pang, Rainbow Islands, The Secret of Monkey Island, Sensible Soccer, Speedball 2, Eye of the Beholder 1, Flashback, Gods, Ishar 1, Ishar 2, Dune. Only Dyna Blaster switches back to NTSC, but it looks like that's because it really wants to, and it doesn't crash in the process.


    For "control" I used my ACA500plus in classic cloaking mode, 1MB chip, forcing PAL. All games work exactly the same.


    So I can conclude that at least for this small subset of games, the new bootblock works just as well as the ACA500plus for forcing PAL mode.


    Just for kicks I tried the bootblock with my ususal ACA500plus profile only without forcing PAL, KS3.1, Workbench 3.1 booting off the CF card, but the Amiga switches back to NTSC and crashes. Users of other similar cards could have better luck, though.

  • Users of other similar cards could have better luck, though.

    Doubtful for two reasons:

    1) there is no card that even comes close to being "similar" to the ACA500plus

    2) If there are two patches at the same time doing the opposite thing, all kinds of unpredictable things can happen.


    Thanks for your test - since the underlying idea of the boot block is identical to the menu item in the ACA500plus, only a hardware solution can improve things here. I have already written that on my idea-list for the ACA2000 :-)

  • Doubtful for two reasons:

    1) there is no card that even comes close to being "similar" to the ACA500plus

    2) If there are two patches at the same time doing the opposite thing, all kinds of unpredictable things can happen.


    Thanks for your test - since the underlying idea of the boot block is identical to the menu item in the ACA500plus, only a hardware solution can improve things here. I have already written that on my idea-list for the ACA2000 :-)

    1) Yeah, yeah, I know... I'm aware of and appreciate the unique features of the ACA500plus. I meant "other cards of that general type" with a 60000 or 020, a little RAM, IDE controller, maybe some card slots... And trying to exclude the one which you consider not to be an Amiga.


    2) Now that you mention it, I did experience some strange behavior from the ACA500plus after using the bootblock and booting into WB3.1 from SD card (I had PAL/NTSC forcing switched off): often it wouldn't boot but rather just show the menu screen with the profile page I selected, with the dismo displaying 99 after circulating through a few other numbers. I wasn't sure whether this was caused by the bootblock, my fiddling with Indivision settings I did in the meantime, or dirty contacts. A mix of cold restarts, ACA500plus profile saves, Indivision profile saves and contact cleaning seems to have made it go away. Could it have been caused by the bootblock?


    From my experience forcing PAL from the ACA500plus works perfectly, but I can imagine it wouldn't be enough for the ACA2000 since it potentially needs to compete for initialization privileges with other cards. However, why not implement a hardware solution on the ACE2(b) itself? (ACE2c? ACE2f? ACE2pn?) Have a jumper or switch to set it forcing PAL/NTSC/Off?

  • Could it have been caused by the bootblock?

    Hard to say from a distance - especially if it's not reproducable. In this case, I'd rate it "not worth investigating" if the problem is gone now.


    However, why not implement a hardware solution on the ACE2(b) itself? (ACE2c? ACE2f? ACE2pn?) Have a jumper or switch to set it forcing PAL/NTSC/Off?

    I prefer universal solutions - I don't want people to buy new hardware when the "old" (like the predecessor ACE2 and other companie's products) are still good. While it seems like the solution "belongs" on the chipram expander, I believe it's more useful if it's where the data actually comes from, and that's the CPU (and no, the ACA2000 would not "compete" for init privileges, it will always be first, even before Kickstart).


    The unfortunate part is that I can't add it to the ACA500plus any more, as that's already in the field, and even a CPLD update won't do the trick, as I don't have enough pins on the data-CPLD free (if I remember right...).


    My current understanding about the startup of these non-hardware-configurable Agnus chips is that they need a software "kick" to be set to PAL, and I won't be able to implement that easily on the chipram expander. A few lines of code in the startup ROM of the accelerator, combined with a flipped bit that I "fake" during a read access are way easier and - like I wrote above - universal, meaning, it'll also work with other chip ram expansions.

  • OK, I tried several other options. Let me summarize.


    It is evident that there is no universal solution for switching the ACE2(b) to PAL mode at startup. If you don't have an accelerator that supports this (like the ACA500plus), the following should cover all needs (at least it covers all of mine):


    1. For booting stuff off floppies, there is the bootblock from this thread,

    2. WHDLOAD supports setting screens to PAL mode (I finally RTFM) by adding "PAL" to the tooltypes of the individual game/demo, or to the global preferences file,

    3. For running programs from workbench that don't run in a window and/or can't set their own mode, there are mode promotion tools available from aminet, like ModePro and NewMode. NewMode works well for me.

  • I have an Agnus 8375 NTSC that I bought from icomp several years ago. I have it installed in one of my A500 ++ replica boards. Mostly used this with my ACA 500 and ACA 500 Plus. And yes, they can switch to PAL after the machine coldboots in NTSC.


    I encountered a problem. When I flashed a Kickstart 2.05 37.500 to my ACA 500 Plus I couldn't switch it to PAL. So it looks like the Kickstarts that comes built into the ACA 500/ACA 500 Plus has implemented PAL/NTSC switch. Then I found by googling a program that let's you modify your kickstart to force PAL. I did that and flashed the modified Kickstart 2.05 to my ACA 500 Plus. This enabled PAL.


    Then I thought, I want this forced PAL switch in my physical kickstart ROM. So it coldboots to PAL. But I didn't want to buy a eprom prgrammer just for this one system. This is the only system I have with an NTSC Agnus that can only be switched via software.


    So I contacted an Amiga reseller and asked them to sell me a Kickstart 3.1 ROM for A500 with forced PAL switch. I gave them the link to the program and explained. After a few days they answered me and said they would do it for no extra cost. They shipped the kickstart today.


    So this seems like the best solution. This way the machine should coldboot to PAL. A kickstart ROM is quite inexpensive. Simple and nice solution.