pavelr@sco.COM (Pavel Rozalski) (01/08/91)
I am having what appears to be a hardware problem with my Amiga 500. I have a 500 with 1 meg RAM (A501? from Commodore) and two floppy drives (internal and external), Commodore monitor and no other hardware (hard drives, CPU accelerators, etc.). Recently I purchased Populous form Electronic Arts. Unfortunately the game does not work on my Amiga. The demo screen runs fine but when it comes to playing the game, my Amiga locks up after the disk spins for a bit and makes some unusual sounds. This happens if I boot off the Populous disk or boot from a 1.3 disk and try running it from DF1:. The game works perfectly on another Amiga 500 so it is not the disk. I had a very similar problem with Dungeon Master which I borrowed from a friend. I believe that the problem lies with my floppy drive when the game is attempting to verify that the disk is copy protected. I do not have problems with any other disks, reading or writing, copy protected or not. I have cleaned my read/write head recently. I believe that my floppy drive is slightly misaligned and the copy protection test fails. I want to get my floppy drive to work. It doesn't seem as if I can get my drive realigned at reasonable rates (at least $55). I would consider getting another internal floppy if the price is reasonable. I am also open to the idea of re-aligning my drive myself, if I can get some good instruction on how to do this (I used to do this on my C64 all the time). Has anyone heard of these problems before? Is there a simple fix or workaround I could use? Where can I get a cheap replacement internal floppy? Or is the problem I have with some other piece of hardware? Pavel Rozalski pavelr@sco.com