MiSTer FPGA Forum

Hello all.

I’ve had my MiSTer for a week now and have had a great time playing with it. And I’ve finally got round to playing some games seriously.

I’ve been playing Bloodwych in the Amiga core using the MegaAGS front end and it’s all working great.
I had the MegaAGS.hdf set to the primary master drive, and on boot up it recommended setting MegaAGS-saves.hdf to the primary slave drive to keep game saves intact after an upgrade.

Now the problem I have is this: On Bloodwych when you save your game you choose one of 10 different save slots (0-9), but once you have chosen one it is permanent, meaning there is no way to overwrite any of the 10 different save slots one you have used them.

This doesn’t happen if I disable the MegaAGS-saves.hdf as the slave drive, all 10 save slots work fine. But if I do this then I don’t have access to my existing saves. Is I’m around 10 hours into the game I’m a little reluctant to just disable the slave drive and just start again. Especially as an update to the MegaAGS front end would likely delete my save files anyway.

I’m hoping somebody here could help me figure out where I’m going wrong.

Many thanks.

Can you not load a blank floppy into one of the drives and use it as a save disk?

I am currently playing Frontier Elite II. I am using the floppy version though and not the one on the hard drive. I put the game disk if df0 and put a blank floppy in df1 and put all my saves on that.

That is actually a simple, yet very good idea. I’ll try it out and let you know how it goes.

Thanks for the advice.

Hey I finally found a solution to this issue.

I found it on this forum even: https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=650

Seems you have to save your game and exit back to the menu with the ‘delete’ key. This seems to make the saves stick and you can overwrite and do what you like as normal.

Which to be fair, it does tell me this each time I boot any Amiga game from MegaAGS.

It’ll teach me to read what I’m looking at as I’m doing something I guess.

Thanks for the suggestion Aspie, I had no joy doing it that way unfortunately.

ADF images seem to be write-protected by default (I see a lock icon next to them), how do you enable writing to them?

LamerDeluxe wrote: ↑Wed Mar 10, 2021 8:59 am ADF images seem to be write-protected by default (I see a lock icon next to them), how do you enable writing to them?

I am not sure, but I think it might have to do with whether the ADF file itself is set to readonly or not. It works for me since I have been formatting ADF disks and more. But I did have an issue with one file being very readonly and not being able to do much about it other than delete the file and replace it and then it worked.

Caldor wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 4:20 pm

LamerDeluxe wrote: ↑Wed Mar 10, 2021 8:59 am ADF images seem to be write-protected by default (I see a lock icon next to them), how do you enable writing to them?

I am not sure, but I think it might have to do with whether the ADF file itself is set to readonly or not. It works for me since I have been formatting ADF disks and more. But I did have an issue with one file being very readonly and not being able to do much about it other than delete the file and replace it and then it worked.

Ah, okay, thanks, so if you create one yourself it should be write enabled then. I hope you can somehow edit this on existing ones, because some games like to save to their own disk.

LamerDeluxe wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 9:32 pm

Caldor wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 4:20 pm

LamerDeluxe wrote: ↑Wed Mar 10, 2021 8:59 am ADF images seem to be write-protected by default (I see a lock icon next to them), how do you enable writing to them?

I am not sure, but I think it might have to do with whether the ADF file itself is set to readonly or not. It works for me since I have been formatting ADF disks and more. But I did have an issue with one file being very readonly and not being able to do much about it other than delete the file and replace it and then it worked.

Ah, okay, thanks, so if you create one yourself it should be write enabled then. I hope you can somehow edit this on existing ones, because some games like to save to their own disk.

You probably cannot do it directly on the MiSTer if the file is readonly, but on a computer you should be able to change it. My problem seems to have been with the specific file though. As I could delete the file competely, just not edit it, and then when I replaced it, it was just a script file, I could edit the new file.

Caldor wrote: ↑Fri Mar 12, 2021 8:56 am

LamerDeluxe wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 9:32 pm

Caldor wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 4:20 pm
I am not sure, but I think it might have to do with whether the ADF file itself is set to readonly or not. It works for me since I have been formatting ADF disks and more. But I did have an issue with one file being very readonly and not being able to do much about it other than delete the file and replace it and then it worked.

Ah, okay, thanks, so if you create one yourself it should be write enabled then. I hope you can somehow edit this on existing ones, because some games like to save to their own disk.

You probably cannot do it directly on the MiSTer if the file is readonly, but on a computer you should be able to change it. My problem seems to have been with the specific file though. As I could delete the file competely, just not edit it, and then when I replaced it, it was just a script file, I could edit the new file.

I have had some problems with files turning read-only, or even impossible to delete without changing permissions in Linux. And when using Samba it is often unable to copy files for no apparent reason.

Yeah, Linux can be a bit strange like that. I would like to see some support for Midnight Commander, so we could do some file management on the MiSTer itself. I guess maybe it could be done just with scripts. It does depend on Midnight Commander having been compiled for the version of Linux the MiSTer is based on, but otherwise its probably possible to compile it from source code for it.

That could be really nice for f.ex. making new floppy disks for save games, making backups of disks / media you might be using and making changes to. It would be more user friendly if the MiSTer interface itself had a create HDF or ADF feature built into the menu... but I am still not sure how that would work.

Might be something I could get to work if I looked into modifying the MiSTer main core myself. I might be able to help with doing stuff then to help. I have been able to build FPGA cores a bit, but modifying it in any useful way has not been a success so far. Not with the FPGA stuff itself.

Midnight Commander is already available. Boot MiSTer, press F9, user: root, pass: 1, type “mc” and press Enter.

AFAIK, .adf are write protected whenever you insert them from inside a .zip, so just extract them before inserting them.

rsn8887 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 01, 2021 2:40 am Midnight Commander is already available. Boot MiSTer, press F9, user: root, pass: 1, type “mc” and press Enter.

AFAIK, .adf are write protected whenever you insert them from inside a .zip, so just extract them before inserting them.

Yeah, makes sense. One thing is Minimig supporting to load zipped ADF files, another is being able to write to them as well.

I did find that Midnight Commander was part of MiSTer. I was accessing it remotely using Putty and found that MC opens when I run MC. I did not know it was possible to press F9 during boot. One thing to beware of though, is not trying to run something like SUDO UPDATE when in the Linux shell, the MiSTer does not support the newest versions of the packages its using and will stop it from booting if everything is updated.