178504488@excalibur.UUCP (03/03/87)
I just started using an Amiga at Villanova University. Although I was supposed to be doing some development on Mult-Forth I had the urge to use Flight Sim II. So I booted up only to come up with a picture of a run way intermittently covered by static, with static covering up even the engine sound. This was by no means analog static or interference, but "digital static" as in static literally being drawn unto Video and Audio Ram locations. It seemed that maybe the blitter was corrupting the data it was redrawing since pictures started going all over the place as the static eventually took over the entire screen and crashed the Amiga. I tried games such as Artic Fox, One-on-One, Marble Madness (the wave section) with similar results. However, non-animated games such as Chessmaster 2000 showed know problem. I tried the line drawing on Aegis Draw and the shaded circles and rectangles in Deluxe Paint with no problem. Also I took note that there was no problem whatsoever with window manipulation and all graphic demos (Boing, Ray Juggler, Lines, Dots, Rect, ect.). Another interesting fact to stirr things up was that Flight Sim II only uses the 68000 for animation. Maybe its the sound chips? No, Speech works and so does Instant Music-- at least until I start drawing the first line off notes. So whats going on! The CPU is dated October 85. Wilson Cheung
wtm@neoucom.UUCP (03/05/87)
Your Amiga going nuts with Flightsim II sounds very similar to what happened to me about a year ago just a couple of months after I got my Amiga. For the last year, it has purred along quite happily (knock on wood). What happend to me only (or at least primarily) showed up when running Amiga (microsoft) Basic. The music demo program was the killer. It would run for about 2 to 5 minutes and then all heck would break loose, with the most bizarre sounds you've heard coming out, and some really wild looking video that I can't really describe. It turned out that Basic uses some interrupt mode particularly heavily that brought Agnus to its knees. The bad part (that's a play on words, son) is that it took 3 new Agnuses (Agni ??) to get the machine working again. It wasn't completely terrible, as the whole mess was covered under warranty. I still wound up paying about $25 in gasoline and lots of lost time as the local dealer is about 45 min. away. With all the reported problems with Flightsim lately, it sounds like its a good program to have around to smoke out marginal hardware. --Bill
ee173way@sdcc3.ucsd.EDU (John Schultz) (03/05/87)
Sounds like another case of a bad 256k ram cartridge. Try replacing it first, as it is the easiest possible hardware fix. John 7OHN