_____            .__                             _____                    __   .__     
  /  _  \    _____  |__|  ____ _____               /     \    ____    ____ _/  |_ |  |__  
 /  /_\  \  /     \ |  | / ___\\__  \    ______   /  \ /  \  /  _ \  /    \\   __\|  |  \ 
/    |    \|  Y Y  \|  |/ /_/  >/ __ \_ /_____/  /    Y    \(  <_> )|   |  \|  |  |   Y  \
\____|__  /|__|_|  /|__|\___  /(____  /          \____|__  / \____/ |___|  /|__|  |___|  /
        \/       \/    /_____/      \/                   \/              \/            \/
June 9th, 2017


[Amiga Early Startup Control]


Eww, these pictures are absolutely horrible, I'm sorry about that. It all goes with the 90s theme though, we didn't have the greatest of pictures then either. These were taken with my phone, then converted to PAL (phase alternating line) to display on my amiga, and then on top of that, the colour reduced down to 256 from millions. It doesn't help at all that they are blurry though, that is a combination of a cheaper old cellphone, and my hands not being incredibly steady.

Anywho! Today I ran into some problems when starting up the Amiga. I would get to a black screen, and .. nothing! All of the power lights came on, but no OS was loading, there was not so much of an error message. It would enter into the Amiga Early Startup Control screen (sort of like BIOS on a PC) so I knew it was not likely a hardware issue.

So, I put my WorkBench floppy (20 year old floppy!) into the floppy drive, restarted the Amiga and everything seemed to be working great. Ah-Ha!! It must be software, so it was then a matter of hunting down what software was causing the issue.

[AmigaDOS]


I went back to the AESC screen, and selected to Bootup with no Startup-Sequence and was brought to AmigaDOS as you see in the above screen. From there I had to edit the startup-sequence file to locate exactly where the problem was. The startup-sequence is sort of like autoexec.bat or config.sys for DOS, for earlier versions of windows it would be like win.ini or system.ini. It is a text file that tells Workbench what to load. To isolate exactly what was causing the problem, I would just push in a rubish command in startup-sequence. Doing this, would issue an error message during bootup, and cease the bootup from progressing further. This, would allow me to narrow down which lines of text were fine, until I got to the point that I no longer saw the error message upon rebooting, just a black screen.

What I discovered, was that a few virtual drives had stayed in my DEVS: folder. I think I shut the computer down yesterday with a virtual floppy inside of it, and as the such those virtual drives were never erased. Workbench must have been getting caught up loading one of these drives. The solution was simple enough, just delete the offending virtual drives, and reboot one last time. Now everything is working just as well as it was previously.

Sure it sounds easy, but it had me goofing around with things for a couple of hours :) I had to reboot the computer about twenty times, until I finally figured it out.

[Zombie Apocalypse]


Since I have already burned your eyes out with the above pictures, I may as well include one more. This is my best score yet, in Zombie Apocalypse 2. This game is so cheesy, and yet so addictive. I almost hit the 1 billion mark.. Okay, not quite.. it will happen though! I will topple this "Paul" guy's score soon, then I will rule the world!!

[One Billion]


If any of you have an Amiga or an emulator you have to give it a shot.




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