thad@cup.portal.com (Thad P Floryan) (06/13/89)
SimCity & Elite UPDATE Interesting new developments .... ------- SimCity ------- Thanks to all the input from others in this newsgroup, the problem has been verified to be 100% attributable to the number of floppies mounted on one's Amiga system and NOT to the CPU. As I was returning the software to the dealer today, who should walk in but Jay Miner. We chatted for a few minutes, and he, too, was puzzled why SimCity bombs on a system with more than 1 floppy drive. He stated: "I wonder why they would check that" and "I wonder what they're doing." My thoughts, precisely. Especially since running GfxMem at the same time as SimCity clearly showed that CHIP memory was NOT being exhausted. Sheesh. Attempting to boot SimCity on the dealer's systems, it simply would NOT boot (NOTE the plural: systemS.) This included several A1000, an A500, and several A2500). All the systems had multiple floppies (among other things). Because of the feedback in this newsgroup, I decided to try it one more time at the office after removing all external floppies; it worked. Just tried it a few moments ago on my lab Amiga (a 68020 Ronin) after removing all the external floppies; it worked. Powering down to run this test, however, was "painful" since power cycling ANY system tends to reduce its lifetime (and the last time I powered down the lab Amiga was in March). So I decided to keep this one (esp. since the Pres. of Maxis will be at FAUG on Tuesday and this makes for interesting conversation :-) Because Maxis WILL fix the bug with SimCity, it can no longer be called a turkey; it IS a nice simulation. ----- ELITE ----- This abomination, however, is pure CRAP. Again, at the dealer, inserting the disk into an A2500, booting alternately with "68000" or "68020", it would work on the "68000", and fail (same rainbow screen as with my Ronin) with "68020". We cycled 6 times, same results every time. ELITE is brain-damaged. At least my C=64 version of Elite still works. And the dealer allowed me to swap the ELITE for the latest 10 Fish Disks (at least THESE work on Amigas! :-) What IS it with some of these games? Too much C=64 mentality? How 'bout "CRAZY CARS", which JSRs *DIRECTLY* into the $FCnnnn address space ... works only on 1.2 and not 1.3 "Kickstart". Cretins. ------------------------------ By the way, since Rick Unland was asking about Amiga dealers, my vote (for the Silicon Valley area) goes to HT Electronics (of Sunnyvale, CA). And I'd definitely recommend Winners' Circle (of Berkeley) for the "North Bay." Thad Floryan [ thad@cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]
mlelstv@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de (Michael van Elst ) (06/19/89)
thad@cup.portal.com (Thad P Floryan) writes: >----- >ELITE >----- >This abomination, however, is pure CRAP. Again, at the dealer, inserting the >disk into an A2500, booting alternately with "68000" or "68020", it would work >on the "68000", and fail (same rainbow screen as with my Ronin) with "68020". >We cycled 6 times, same results every time. ELITE is brain-damaged. My version of ELITE (I regret the 90,- DM I paid) shows something different. It crashes on A1000 and A2000 (the game continues to run but the screen is garbled) and runs on an A500 and my A1000 with 68020 (altough I had to disable the cache to get a clean picture), I didn't check this with 32bit mem. Maybe the A1000/A2000 machines are slower than the A500, thus missing the point to restore the bitmap pointers. Michael van Elst E-mail: UUCP: ...uunet!unido!fauern!immd4!mlelstv