pinball game on any computer system. I knew I had the HD version on a very old
HD (Kickstart 1.2 and 1.3), so I picked one of my old A500's and tried to connect
the very old MFM 30 Mb HD to it. At first it did not seem to work. But since it had
never worked very well, I tried plugging and unplugging the pheripals untill it
booted.
Unfortunaly, that A500 totally died on me. Probaly blew a fuse or something. Than I
though of connecting my old A2000. But remembered that I had stored it away quit deep.
And I didn't want to rebuild my rooms yet B-)
I therefore got interested in Amiga Emulation. The more since I found out that
Digital Illusions (the developer of the Pinball games) had donated the game as an
.ADF file to the very excelent Back to the Roots website.
After obtaining WinUAE, and coping a ROM from one of my old Amiga's
(with the suplied TransROM), I was ready to go.
On my Pentium III @ 800 Mhz it was just to slow. Specially the sound was effected by this.
But on my Pentium III @ 1 Ghz at work, it worked prefectly B-)
This brought me to another point: Why not try those old demo's to see if they work allright ?
Therefore I needed an application which translated my .DMS files to .ADF files. That application
is xDMS (it's best to place the included programs (xDMS and readdisk)
in your WINNT directory). You my also need a copy of gzip to use all the functionallity of xDMS.
xDMS works perfectly, so I converted the old 1991 Plasmutex demo to an .ADF file, set the right
settings (ROM file, disk file (plasmutex.adf) and sound (full)) and started WinUAE.
And low and behold.... It worked !!! I did the same with the other old TFA demo's, and besides
disk 2 of Vocal Attack III (this just maybe a bad disk in the first place, since I never
got the second disk running on any of my Amiga's anyway), they all worked like they did so
many years ago on our old A500's.
To top it all off, I remembered I once made .DMS files from my never released Music Mega demo
(Final Impulse). At home I converted them and tried it. IT WORKED !! It's been since 1995 that
I had seen this demo running any where at all. However, the .DMS files did not contain the latest
version of the demo. And I'm currently looking if it's possible to assemble the whole demo as
it was ment to be released at The Party '95. I'm also thinking of assembling all the other small
demo's we made and put that on a bootable disk (or something like that).
Excited by all this I called Price to give him the good news. Just minutes later I had mailed
him the needed stuff and he also was very pleased to see all that old stuff again B-)
Therefore I decided to add this extra page with the needed links to get started. Only the
needed ROMs are not included, since they are still copyright protected. But if you have
an old Amiga you can extract the ROMs (with TransROM, which is part of WinUAE). But you
can also search the internet. It's recommended for the TFA demo's that you use a
Kickstart 1.3 ROM (the Vocal Attack demo will not run on 2.x or higher ROMs). The
other settings can be set to their default. Allthough you may want to enable the sound
if your machine is heavy enough to handle it.
And a nice tip: To swap floppies in WinUAE press F12, click on Eject and then OK. Then
press F12 again, fill in the new .ADF file and click OK.
Another nice Amiga emulator is WinFellow. But it's not as advanced as WinUAE.
Have Fun B-)
Files available for downloading
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