MiSTer FPGA Forum

Posted: **Thu Jun 09, 2022 12:22 am**

We’re excited to let you know that MegaAGS 2022.06.06 is now available!

If you don’t know what MegaAGS is, it’s a carefully curated and tuned Amiga games and demo scene collection for the Amiga core on MiSTer. It takes advantage of many of MiSTer’s quality-of-life capabilities around shared drives, high-resolution RTG support, and integer zoom/scale options, in addition to also working on the original Amiga hardware.

It aims to be the de-facto Amiga setup for the MiSTer, and lets you explore the massive Amiga game and demo scene library with a user friendly launcher and lots of different categories to help you navigate the vast game library of the Amiga, as well as providing an introduction to the Amiga demo scene for people unfamiliar with it — which, interestingly, is nominated as a UNESCO cultural heritage.

What’s new in this version?

This is just a quick release to get some fixes out, so if you already have 2022.02.02 or 2022.03.03, it may not be worth the effort to replace your existing setup — but if you’re new to the Amiga, this is obviously the latest update as of this writing, and a great starting point.

Although if you don’t usually have a mouse connected to your MiSTer, this update is probably a must-have, see below. 😄

Experimental MiST & CD32 hardware compatibility

We have included some conditional checks that aim to support using the MegaAGS setup with both MiST and the CD32 original hardware. As we are not in possession of these devices, please help test if you do, and let us know if anything is broken.

Joystick/gamepad support for selecting game options

The system that allows hard disk installation of Amiga games, WHDLoad, has added joystick and gamepad support for selecting options on boot. These are usually options like cheats (infinite lives, invincibility, level skips, etc) or alternative versions of a given game.

These can now be navigated with whatever controller you are using. Up & down directions select options, left & right toggles the values. Fire button continues to the game.

You no longer need a mouse plugged in to select game options!

Eurochart #1-48 disk magazines added

Fans of the Amiga demo scene will know that an important part of the “scene” were diskmags (disk magazines), where 14-18 year old (mostly) boys would start drama with each other and compete (mostly in friendly ways) over who could top the charts of best demo, best music, best graphics, etc. This also evolved into electronic publications that would publish submitted articles.

Diskmags are an incredible time capsule of Europe and European computer culture in the 1990s, written by people that were teenagers at the time.

More (and fixed) 5×PAL settings, WHDLoad game updates

As people report improvements, we keep updating the settings for the 1200+ hand-tuned 5× scaling settings. And as usual, the setup contains the very latest fixes from the WHDLoad project.

Likely candidates for the next MegaAGS release

Native support for MiSTer Super Attract Mode (Amiga demos are the best attract modes!)
Chronological ordering of disk magazines, so you can watch the demo scene drama unfold in the correct order 😄
Things that you want fixed or improved!

And, as usual, we don’t distribute the finished image, we just maintain the script that produces it on a local setup. So asking us for a link to the image won’t be of any use. 😊

If you find any bugs or want to suggest improvements, file a ticket on GitHub.

Enjoy!

As always, remember — friends don’t let friends watch Amiga demos and games on modern displays without scanlines! 😄

Posted: **Thu Jun 09, 2022 5:27 am**

limi wrote: ↑Thu Jun 09, 2022 12:22 am As people report improvements, we keep updating the settings for the 1200+ hand-tuned 5× scaling settings.

Limi, since I know you have an iPad screen, what settings would you recommend for MegaAGS these days?

I was previously using the Atrac17 custom ini, but have since switched to just using video mode 13 along with the new vscale_mode=4 or 5 integer scaling options. I’m guessing all the custom 5x cropping is unnecessary (and probably detrimental) in this case?

Posted: **Thu Jun 09, 2022 6:43 am**

I like CD32 support. Will it support OS3.2?

Posted: **Thu Jun 09, 2022 11:15 am**

Is there a guide on how to setup the mister to use this image?

I have the image but it’s been many years since I had an Amiga and don’t know where to start.

Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere but I can’t find the method anywhere.

Posted: **Thu Jun 09, 2022 11:22 am**

Lloyd2084 wrote: ↑Thu Jun 09, 2022 11:15 am Is there a guide on how to setup the mister to use this image?

"MegaAGS-ReadMe.txt" should be included in the distribution and it hopefully covers your questions. If you don't have the file, it's also available in the github repo.

Posted: **Thu Jun 09, 2022 12:17 pm**

Always to the top!
Thanks.

Posted: **Thu Jun 09, 2022 3:58 pm**

Beeble wrote: ↑Thu Jun 09, 2022 6:43 am I like CD32 support. Will it support OS3.2?

It should work fine with both 3.1 and 3.2 — but I have only tested it with my dumped Amiga 1200 ROM. Let us know if you find any issues.

Posted: **Thu Jun 09, 2022 4:10 pm**

Lightwave wrote: ↑Thu Jun 09, 2022 5:27 am Limi, since I know you have an iPad screen, what settings would you recommend for MegaAGS these days?

I was previously using the Atrac17 custom ini, but have since switched to just using video mode 13 along with the new vscale_mode=4 or 5 integer scaling options.

I use video mode 13 for the Amiga core, and atrac17’s setups for arcade and console cores.

I’m guessing all the custom 5x cropping is unnecessary (and probably detrimental) in this case?

5× with crop only applies to 1080p output, since a lot of games fit in a 1080÷5=216 pixels tall image. Cropping does not apply to 4:3 screens or e.g. 1200px tall screens.

Posted: **Thu Jun 09, 2022 6:25 pm**

Thanks Limi (and all involved). Love MegaAGS.

Posted: **Sat Jun 11, 2022 7:08 am**

Thanks Limi & MegaAGS team, this is an awesome collection

I had to make a few config changes because my ROMs & HD images are on an SSD connected via USB. So I wanted to pass along the settings in case anybody else was in my situation and couldn't figure it out, it was a little weird, I'll explain.

(I am using the configs provided in the archive, and my config folder is on the SD card, I only have a /games/ folder on USB0 and I removed all the folders under games on the SD to avoid conflicts/confusion.)

First thing was, minimig seemed to be trying to use KICK.ROM for the kickstart ROM, so I got a kickstart error on boot. So I changed that in the System menu to MegaAGS-Kickstart.rom manually, saved the config and rebooted and then it worked. Or at least, it booted to the "insert disk" BIOS screen (whatever it's called, I never had a real Amiga.) Loading floppy images worked, so, it wasn't detecting the HD images. (I didn't have to do the "browsing trick" below to get it to recognize the kickstart ROM, for whatever reason.)

To fix the HD images, I had to browse for the HD images manually, but they would only work once I browsed up several directories (../../..) until I could choose between the SD card, USB0/USB1/USB2/etc. I picked USB0/games/Amiga/MegaAGS.hdf and likewise for MegaAGS-Saves.hdf, and when I saved & rebooted, it loaded the MegaAGS menu and everything seems to work. I tried a few games and they loaded, too (haven't tried saving, hope it's OK

)

There must be a bug or some conflict somewhere (I mean, maybe in the core? Probably not with the pack, technically) - when I first loaded the config it showed the HD images as "games/Amiga/MegaAGS.hdf" (including path) but when I re-selected them, it only showed MegaAGS.hdf (no path). So I could tell something changed, but IDK why. It was always putting me in the USB0 drive when browsing for the image, so it knew where to go, it just didn't see them on boot until I went all the way back to the root and browsed again. (I tried just selecting MegaAGS.hdf, without going to ../../.. first, but that didn't help...)

That's my story, now I'm going to go check out some more Amiga games

Posted: **Sat Jun 11, 2022 10:21 am**

Hmm. It sounds like the minimig core doesn’t transparently use the SMB share if available. Maybe the config stores full absolute paths? I’ve never used SMB with MiSTer so I couldn’t say, but it sounds like something worth looking into.

Posted: **Wed Jun 15, 2022 12:38 am**

I love these MegaAGS releases. I never grew up with an Amiga (I had an Atari 800XL), so I'm really lacking knowledge of how the Amiga works. These are perfect for me.

If I wanted to add my own WHDLoad/ADF games to MegaAGS (on my own MiSTer), is there any advice or a tutorial about doing that?

I've really wanted to play Franko and Street Hassle (yeah, I know, they're terrible games. I find them fun because they're stupid). I'd love to add them to my own MiSTer. That way I will do the work myself and no one else has to be subjected to those games.

Again, thank you *so much* for MegaAGS and how much fun I've had being a newbie to the Amiga.

Posted: **Wed Jun 15, 2022 11:37 am**

You can usually find WHDLoad images for Amiga games; you can put the .lha (usually) in the shared directory, and then uncompress it somewhere in the local filesystem. (which is usually easiest from the command line; cd to where you want the files, and then lha x mr0:mydumbgame.lha.) I don't remember the device name for the mister share... I think I may have changed mine to mr0:. If it's something else on yours, substitute that. Or you can use the name: all volumes have names, so you can use either "device:" or "name:". They substitute for one another.

You normally only need to double-click an image file to run it, but files won't show from Workbench unless they have an .info file. If your .lha extracts to a directory without also including an info for it, that dir will be invisible from Workbench. What I always did back in the day was to copy another directory's .info file.... e.g. "copy temp.info mydirname.info". When you next open the containing folder from Workbench, the two icons will be overlaid on each other. Move one where you want it, and then snapshot it from the dropdown menu, and it should stick where you put it. Then you'd open the dir by double-clicking, and then double-click the application icon to launch it.

Actually merging it into the AGS menu is something I don't presently know anything about. It's a custom program written in the E language, and I have no idea how it works internally. It's *probably* parsing a text file that you could add to, but that is a 100%-from-thin-air guess on my part.

edit: and default recipes almost certainly aren't going to save onto the game-save HDF. They'll probably save within their own image, meaning that you'll want to preserve that image if you want to keep the saves.

Posted: **Sun Jun 19, 2022 5:15 pm**

Thanks for your work!

Posted: **Mon Jun 20, 2022 9:43 pm**

Some feedback on running the image on a real CD32 + TF330.

The image gets to the shell and the startup sequence seems to fall over. I can "loadwb" but if I try to run anything, It asks me to point the Assigns out for WHD, MegaAGS etc. I figured these out from looking at the existing startup-sequence and got things running but I have to do that each boot. It's been a good 25 years since I really messed with this stuff so I'm a bit lost. I will try rewriting the image as I expect its something I did as the image ran on WinUAE ok.

Thanks for your hardwork !

Posted: **Mon Jun 20, 2022 10:57 pm**

Muddyfunster wrote: ↑Mon Jun 20, 2022 9:43 pm Some feedback on running the image on a real CD32 + TF330.

The image gets to the shell and the startup sequence seems to fall over. I can "loadwb" but if I try to run anything, It asks me to point the Assigns out for WHD, MegaAGS etc. I figured these out from looking at the existing startup-sequence and got things running but I have to do that each boot. It's been a good 25 years since I really messed with this stuff so I'm a bit lost. I will try rewriting the image as I expect its something I did as the image ran on WinUAE ok.

I might have missed something, but I believe these should be the only assumptions:
- The boot partition should contain most system files (c, s, devs, libs etc) from the distribution and be named “Amiga”
- The second partition (the largest one with the WHD directory) should be named “Games”.
- Ideally there should be a partition named “Saves” with a “WHDSaves” directory in it.

Posted: **Tue Jun 21, 2022 12:07 am**

There's something weird going on with the MegaAGS kickstart. I was trying to use default ROMs with WinUAE to boot it, and it was unbootable, throwing a weird error about workbench.library not existing. My presumption is that the provided Kickstart has been patched to have a library that's normally loaded from disk, because using that ROM means the system boots perfectly.

Since I found a solution, I stopped investigating there, but something is definitely strange.

Another point is that the Mister default shared filesystem is unavailable, and it's possible that device driver might throw errors. It seemed to work okay in WinUAE, the shared dir just wasn't there, but I have no idea about real hardware.

Another thought I had while messing around was that WinUAE does its shared directory support by providing a device-driver ROM that's loaded using Autoconfig, so that the shared drive just shows up on any ROM that's new enough to support it. (1.3 or later, I think? It's been a great long time.) No utility programs need to be loaded, it just works. If it's possible to support that API under Mister, it might be possible to incorporate the WinUAE ROM and get that rather nice feature.

Posted: **Tue Jun 21, 2022 8:06 am**

Malor wrote: ↑Tue Jun 21, 2022 12:07 am Another point is that the Mister default shared filesystem is unavailable, and it's possible that device driver might throw errors. It seemed to work okay in WinUAE, the shared dir just wasn't there, but I have no idea about real hardware.

Another thought I had while messing around was that WinUAE does its shared directory support by providing a device-driver ROM that's loaded using Autoconfig, so that the shared drive just shows up on any ROM that's new enough to support it. (1.3 or later, I think? It's been a great long time.) No utility programs need to be loaded, it just works. If it's possible to support that API under Mister, it might be possible to incorporate the WinUAE ROM and get that rather nice feature.

MegaAGS checks if it runs on Minimig before trying to mount the shared filesystem, which is then mounted as "MR0:" and named "MiSTer:". If not, it creates a directory in "RAM:" called MiSTer and assigns it as "MiSTer:" so any further MegaAGS functionality will have a path to work with. I'm hoping this should be enough to fall back to for compatibility with real Amigas and UAE.

Posted: **Tue Jun 21, 2022 10:58 am**

Optiroc wrote: ↑Mon Jun 20, 2022 10:57 pm
Muddyfunster wrote: ↑Mon Jun 20, 2022 9:43 pm Some feedback on running the image on a real CD32 + TF330.

The image gets to the shell and the startup sequence seems to fall over. I can "loadwb" but if I try to run anything, It asks me to point the Assigns out for WHD, MegaAGS etc. I figured these out from looking at the existing startup-sequence and got things running but I have to do that each boot. It's been a good 25 years since I really messed with this stuff so I'm a bit lost. I will try rewriting the image as I expect its something I did as the image ran on WinUAE ok.
I might have missed something, but I believe these should be the only assumptions:
- The boot partition should contain most system files (c, s, devs, libs etc) from the distribution and be named “Amiga”
- The second partition (the largest one with the WHD directory) should be named “Games”.
- Ideally there should be a partition named “Saves” with a “WHDSaves” directory in it.

Thanks Optiroc. To clarify, I didn't change the startup-sequence, I just wrote the HDF file straight to the CF card. The partitions all look to be in place per your comment (Amiga, Games, etc). The only partition I don't have is the Saves, but the startup-sequence I think makes provision for that by pointing to a WHDsaves folder on SYS:

I don't see any reason why the HDF shouldn't work as it worked fine on winUAE. I'll have another crack this evening.

Cheers.

Posted: **Tue Jul 19, 2022 11:07 am**

Couple small issues that caused me confusion.

I seem to have to disable Dynamic cropping or a minimig_vadjust.dat will get left behind in shared and it messes up my Workbench overscan. Is there a way I can have this enabled without it leaving that when it's not in a game/demo?

The readme assumes you have a 1080p screen and makes it sound like these settings are 100% correct for everyone: "Again, make sure to add the Minimig core overrides in MiSTer.ini as specified in the previous section to enjoy the best HDMI output possible, and make sure you have set MiSTer to output in 1080p resolution."

Posted: **Tue Jul 19, 2022 8:25 pm**

thisisamigaspeaking wrote: ↑Tue Jul 19, 2022 11:07 am The readme assumes you have a 1080p screen and makes it sound like these settings are 100% correct for everyone: "Again, make sure to add the Minimig core overrides in MiSTer.ini as specified in the previous section to enjoy the best HDMI output possible, and make sure you have set MiSTer to output in 1080p resolution."

I guess we should rephrase that somewhat. The custom vadjust cropping will yield resolutions that can be vertically integer scaled to 1080. This is not very likely to change in the near future, but it’s been discussed recently.. However, with the recent scaler improvements it’s not as big a deal as before to do non-integer scaling, especially if using “hybrid” style scanlines and shadow mask filters.

So it’s correc of course that the core output resolution is 180/216/270 lines at the moment, but those can scale quite well to higher than 1080p scaler resolutions.

Posted: **Fri Sep 16, 2022 1:25 am**

For some reason Dynamic Crop (5x) for PAL games isn't working at all for me now, even though it has in the past. When I hop over to the info screen it's showing 270 as the original vertical resolution. This includes games like Turrican II and Hero Quest. I've tried selecting the enable dynamic cut option in the options menu several times (or even disabling) and no effect. NTSC content like the menu and NTSC games is 216p as expected.

I'm running MegaAGS 2022.06.06 and Minimig official from Update_All 22.07.12.

Edit: also my megaags-saves are working if that's relevant, I've got saves in canon fodder and dungeon master II that I can write and read fine.

Posted: **Fri Sep 16, 2022 7:45 am**

Did a quick test with the latest cores, and it still works fine here. (Just as a data point, I know that doesn’t help you much more than confirming that it should and does still work)

Posted: **Fri Sep 16, 2022 9:09 am**

The “dynamic crop” feature relies on the MiSTer shared folder to be activated. By default this happens automatically if you have a directory called “shared” in games/Amiga. There is an ini option to set this to something else, and if so just make sure that the directory you set exists on the filesystem.

Also, using USB or network share may throw in additional wrenches in the machinery.

Posted: **Fri Sep 16, 2022 2:47 pm**

Optiroc wrote: ↑Fri Sep 16, 2022 9:09 am The “dynamic crop” feature relies on the MiSTer shared folder to be activated. By default this happens automatically if you have a directory called “shared” in games/Amiga. There is an ini option to set this to something else, and if so just make sure that the directory you set exists on the filesystem.

Also, using USB or network share may throw in additional wrenches in the machinery.

But this is a given. if you use the MegaAGS pack you get a shared folder also which you place in games/Amiga/

Posted: **Fri Sep 16, 2022 4:19 pm**

neogeo81 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 16, 2022 2:47 pmBut this is a given. if you use the MegaAGS pack you get a shared folder also which you place in games/Amiga/

I know (

), but I wouldn’t count on every “MegaAGS installation” to have followed the readme.

Posted: **Sat Sep 24, 2022 8:16 am**

Maybe you can add Incaman and Kings Valley to the next version

Posted: **Fri Oct 14, 2022 7:12 pm**

I'm getting a "couldn't open screen" message at startup, and when I try to launch MegaAGS from the desktop. I can get to the games via the directories, but would love the launcher. Best I can tell, I've followed all config settings in the readme including the additions to the .ini. If anyone had this and solved it, I'd love to hear how.

Posted: **Sat Oct 15, 2022 6:09 am**

We’ll try to figure it out

Can you post a photo of the error message, so I can identify whether it’s a system message or something else?

Posted: **Sat Oct 15, 2022 9:29 pm**

: IMG_8322.png (8.67 MiB) Viewed 8196 times

Sorry, don’t have my image hosting as slick as I’d like either. The core boots to this screen. The error didn’t appear at boot this time. Clicking the MegaAGS icon brings:

: IMG_8323.png (8.4 MiB) Viewed 8196 times

Which persists for a second or two, then returns to the desktop.

This was a core I hadn’t used yet, so all settings were/are brand new.

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