Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!waikato.ac.nz!canterbury!chem194
From: chem194@csc.canterbury.ac.nz (John Davis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc
Subject: Re: Fat Agnus gripes ...
Message-ID: <1991Jun11.104535.1057@csc.canterbury.ac.nz>
Date: 10 Jun 91 22:45:34 GMT
References: <17769@chaph.usc.edu>
Organization: Chem Dept, U of Cant, ChCh NZ
Lines: 36

In article <17769@chaph.usc.edu>, wdao@girtab.usc.edu (Walter Dao) writes:
> 
> My system is a 1.3 rom amiga 500 with 1 meg. When I had only the reg. agnus
> (0.5 meg) I was able to rip off tons of soundtrack modules after a reset. 
> 90% of the time the memory was not cleared leaving prg data such as GFX and 
> music to the harvesting . Now I have expanded to the fat agnus. I can run 
> the DEMOS in PAL mode , but now ripping the modules is nearly impossible
> after a reset. now 99% of the time the memory is cleared totally. 
> I have tried to re-rip a demo I ripped in the past, well, I failed on my face.
> Why is it that with the fat agnus, memory is cleared all the time at boot 
> time? that's a drag.

there's a bit of a bug in KickStart 1.2/1.3 which causes the machine to always
do a cold boot if you've got more than 512k of chip mem  ( kickstart treats
>512K as an error condition - true enough when the roms were burnt, but a bit
of a pain now). Hence, with 1Mb of chip, every time you reboot all memory gets
stomped by the cold boot mem test. Good news in that it stops most viruses dead
- bad news in that it stops you being able to 'rip' graphics or soundtracker
modules.
 
Of course CBM are aware of this, as on top of everything else it makes RAD:
unusable - hence if you run CBM's Setpatch with the 'r' option (or is it -r ?
can never remember) it installs a small patch (on coldcapture) to cure the
problem. However, the patch code _doesn't_ re-install itself on reboot, so you
_must_ make sure you run setpatch each time you boot (a nuisance).  
 
An alternative is to use BootMenu (on ab20.larc.nasa.gov, and came thru in
comp.sources.amiga a while back too), which installs a persistent patch for the
1Mb chip bug (will stay effective until BootMenu is killed), and also gives you
the PAL/NTSC switching option all in the same program (of course I'm totally
biased, being the author of it :-)
  
-----------------------------------------------------------
| o      John Davis - CHEM194@csc.canterbury.ac.nz       o |
| o    (Depart)mental Programmer,Chemistry Department    o |
| o  University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand o |