Retro gaming update.

Hmm.. Maybe opening an account at eBay wasn’t such a good idea in the first place. It’s *FAR* too easy to spend lots of money on postage (but not a huge amount on the goods).

As far as the Amiga goes, I shouldn’t have listened to the advice I was given about getting an A1200 and should have stuck with picking up an A500 as I had first thought. Why do I say this? Well, although the A1200 is faster and more expandable than the A500, and is usually cheaper on eBay, it doesn’t run a lot of the old software. The newer software from the mid-90’s meant to run on the A1200 don’t actually work on the stock machine but require massive upgrades to the memory and/or processor. :-/

This has meant that the two items of software that I’ve so far bought from eBay, F-16 Combat Pilot and SimCity 2000, won’t run on my machine. The former ‘cos the machine’s too new and the second because the machine hasn’t been upgraded enough. At least if I’d have had an A500 I would have known not to buy the second one and the first one would have worked.

There is some light on the horizon, but it means spending more money.. £4 for Relokick software which often will help old games run on the later machines and an upgrade from eBay (which will probably cost more than the machine and the software to begin with). I’m going to see if I can use a last minute of the auction bidding technique to get a 40MHz 68030+memory upgrade card for less than £20 this afternoon.

On the Atari ST front, I’ve managed to get the memory upgrade working and have diagnosed the floppy problem to the machine not being able to read the second side of the floppy disk. The main problem now is that I can’t test whether the problem is at the ST end or the floppy disk end as to do that I’d either need a seconf floppy drive or a second ST. So, it was back to eBay… where I bought an upgrades 520STFM plus games for £6.50 (plus £15 postage… See, the postage is more than the item again!). That should arrive sometime next week. Still, I would have prefered a second floppy drive as a test item (for a start the postage would have been less) but they seem to be rarer than hen’s teeth.

On a positive front, I’ve got my olf Ferguson TV/Monitor out, made up a cable to go between it and the ST and that’s working fine. So I can play Bubble Bobble and PacMania (as they’re both single sided disk games) and Starglider 2 runs nicely on both the St and the Amiga. All is not lost.

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