Expert: Gregory Donner - 6/20/2007

Question
QUESTION: Hi Greg, hope you find the time to respond to this; I have an A500 recently purchased off ebay. I have been testing all my old games, and all was going well until I tried a game and the drive started making this squeeking sound as it tried to read the disc. I thought the disc just may have been stiff, so I left it in for a while, and although the squeeking quitened (a bit) the game never loaded. Well, I moved on to check more games and now can't load anything. The start up screen with the big tick and the disc going in the drive comes on, and when I put a disc in it tries to read (orange light comes on and drive sounds like its working) but then stops and remains on the start up screen. Have I knackered the drive, do you think? If so, is there any way to fix it? I read other threads trying to work it out, but thought I'd ask the expert instead? Thanks for your time, I look forward to your response.
Regards,
Roo

ANSWER: Hi Roo,

It's certainly possible that the drive has died, especially seeing as all Commodore-Amiga hardware is now about 15-20 years old. :( The 'litmus test' of your drive seems to be the fact that games worked fine until you tried that one game. If even proven Workbench disks no longer work, I would suggest buying a replacement drive.

Your use of the word "knackered" sounds like you're from the UK :) so two good places to look in your area are:

ebay.com or www.amigakit.com (the latter website is apparently a newer Amiga company that a user informed me about recently).

I hope this helps!

Greg

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Wow, you guys really are quick! Thanks very much for getting back to me. I should have asked before, but now that my A500 is out of action (which I kinda suspected the moment it happened- got that sinking heart feeling), will my games work on my A1200? I have all types of games; very early ones, and ones that state they work on 1200 series. Will the earliest games work? Thanks again for your time, and nice work on keeping us novices on the right track!

Answer
Hi Roo,

The odds are good that the earlier games (prior to 1992/1993) will *not* work well with your A1200, simply because of the hardware differences assumed when game developers wrote code specifically for the early hardware chipset (pre-AGA). There's certainly no harm in trying though; and the properly written games (esp. ones that claim to be 1200 compatible) should have little problem running correctly.

I hope this helps,

Greg