Introduction to the CD32-Emulator If you have at least Kickstart 3.0 and if you have installed the CD32-Emulator with the Installation utility, you will find a drawer named "CD32" on your harddrive. The CD32-Emulator tries to emulate all of the special system resources that can be found in an Amiga-CD32 game console. This includes the emulation of the battery backed up RAM for storing Highscores and the setting of the preferred user language. Embedded in the CD32-Emulator is a system degrader which will disable features of your Amiga - like processor caches or fast memory - to make your machine more "CD32" like, as some badly programmed games need this. You can control this "degration" easily from the CD32-Emulator's preference window and save your preferred settings. Great effort has been taken to make the CD32-Emulator as compatible as possible, but the usual restrictions that can be found with any kind of emulation apply: We cannot guarantee that all games that work on an Amiga CD32 game console will work with the CD32-Emulator! The Amiga CD32 has an in-built CDTV emulation. The CD32- Emulator has NOT! CDTV titles WILL NOT WORK with the CD32-Emulator, even if they work with the Amiga CD32 console! Emulating a PAL/NTSC console On a PAL Amiga, the CD32-Emulator will emulate a PAL CD32, on an NTSC Amiga the CD32-Emulator will emulate an NTSC CD32. You may change the PAL/NTSC state of your Amiga from the Kickstart Boot Menu. This will change the type of the CD32 emulated (PAL/NTSC), too. Installing the CD32-Emulator The CD32-Emulator may be used immediately from your harddrive. But it is very unlikely that many games will run correctly if you try this. The preferred method is to create a dedicated "CD32-Emulator Boot Disk" and start the emulation from this disk. The "Make CD32 Floppy" utility will create such a disk for you. Another utility is the "Make HD Startup" utility. It will create a new Startup-Sequence on your harddisk, that allows you to boot directly into CD32-Emulation, if you press a function key during startup. Your originial startup-sequence will be renamed to "Startup-Sequence.std" and will be executed if you boot without pressing the dedicated function key. This method is faster than booting from floppy, but it is advised that only experienced users try this option. Your original startup-sequence will be changed and there is the slight possibility that this may lead to problems! Double-click the "Make CD32 Floppy" icon and insert an empty disk into your internal drive (DF0:). The disk doesn't need to be already formatted as the program allows you to format the disk if you wish. All data on this disk will be erased! After the installation is completed you should wait a few seconds for all disk activity to finish. Now you may reboot your Amiga and your machine will boot from the created CD32-Emulation disk and the CD32-Emulator preferences window will appear. Using the CD32-Emulator The CD32-Emulator window offers you some detailed control possibilites of the emulation's behavior. Two gadgets exist to activate CD32 emulation: Boot and Initialize. Boot will set up the emulation and will immedialtely start any Games CD that is inserted in your CD-Rom drive CD0: Important Note: Clicking Boot is a one-way-ticket! Once the boot process from a Games CD has been started, there is no way to resume normal Amiga operations. The only way to back out is to reset your machine! This is important to know if you have started the CD32-Emulator from your harddrive! Initialize will NOT start the Games CD, but will initialize all of the emulation modules embedded in the CD32-Emulator. Its purpose is for games that can be started from Workbench. Important Note: To get the most fun out of CD32 games, a CD32 game controller is recommended. Please note that the originial Commodore controller may not work correctly with an A1200! The Competition PRO CD32 controller works with the A1200. Both controllers work with the A4000. Setting the CD32-Emulator preferences Gadgets NoFastmem Enabling NoFastMem will disable all Fast Memory in your Amiga. You should only enable this switch, if the game you want to play requires this. If the graphic and/or sound of a game is corrupted, try this option. NoInstCache This will disable the instruction cache of the processor. This option should seldom be neccessary. If you encounter that a game is running too fast, you should try this option. NoDataCache This will disable the data cache of the processor. If you encounter that a game is running too fast, you should try this option. VectorBase0 This option is only neccessary if you started the game from Workbench. Some games don't work at all if this option isn't enabled. NoVolumeControl This will disable the attenuation control of the CD32-Emulator. If the digital audio produced by a game CD cannot be heard or the game "hangs", try enabling this flag. Emulate Controller If this is enabled, the CD32 Game Controller will be emulated with the Keyboard. You shouldn't select this, if you have a CD32 Game Controller connected to your Amiga. You may connect a one or two button joystick and use the keyboard to access the additional keys. Emulation keys are: Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9 on numeric Keypad and cursor keys: Joypad direction. [ and / on numeric keypad: Reverse. ] and * on numeric keypad: Forward. F1 and F6: Green button. F2 and F7: Yellow button. F3, F8 ,SPACE , ENTER and 0 on numeric keypad: Red button. F4, F9 and DEL on numeric keypad: Blue button. F5 and F10: Play/Pause button. Note: It is well possible that some games do not work if controller emulation is enabled! Blocks The CD32-Emulator has a built in prefetch cache. Here you can set the size of this cache (1 Block equals 2048 Bytes). The optimum value differs depending on your configuration (Amiga model, hostadapter, CD-Rom drive). You have to experiment to find a good value. The rule is: Keep the value as small as possible, but big enough, that off-the-disk-animations run smoothly. For TandemCD/CD1200 the optimum value is 4. Max Volume Here you can specify the maximum level the CD sound should have during gameplay. Language Here you can select your preferred language for multi-language games. Menus Save Settings This allows you to save your CD32-Emulator prefences. The settings are stored as ToolTypes in the program's icon file. About Tells you about the version and copyright of the CD32-Emulator. Quit Will leave the program. Game Store - Select Path Some CD32 games allow you to save highscores or other data in the battery backed up RAM of the Amiga CD32 game console for later retrieval. The CD32-Emulator allows you to save this data to a dedicated place either on floppy disk or your harddisk. If you select this menu item, a standard ASL requester will appear. Choose the directory where you want the CD32-Emulator to save the data. Every Game saving data will get its own drawer. You may easily manipulate (copy, delete, etc) files in these drawers from the Workbench. Remember: After adjusting your preferred settings, you should select Save Settings. You should ONLY degarde your system, if the game you want to play otherwise refuses to run. Most of the games run fine without degration. Some Example settings: Microcosm: Pirates Gold: D-Generation: Sleepwalker: Clou: Frontier - Elite II: All off. Pinball Fantasies: James Pond II - Robocod: All off, but NoVolumeControl might be required on some hostadapters. Diggers: All off, but the intro sequence will probably run too fast. For the correct speed of the intro sequence you should select NoFastmem. Oscar: NoFastMem NoDataCache VBR0 (only if started from Workbench on 68040 machines) Running the CD32-Emulator in the Background You may specify the ToolTypes NoWinInst or NoWinBoot in the CD32-Emulator's icon file. NoWinInst will immediately install the CD32-Emulator's modules without openening its preferences window. If you wish to have the CD32 Emulation present all the time, you may specify NoWinInst and place the CD32-Emulator in your SYS:WBStartUp drawer. NoWinBoot is very similar, but it will immediately try to boot from any disc present in CD0:. Questions & Answers - Troubleshooting Q: The AmigaCD32 only has 2 MegaByte chip memory. Why do some games only work on my Amiga 1200 if I add 32-bit-wide fast memory? A: CD32-Emulator are loaded from disk.. This will use the memory a game probably needs. If an Amiga1200 doesn't have fast memory, the CD32-Emulator will be loaded in chip memory. As chip memory is slower than fast memory the speed of the emulation will probably be to slow for some games. Q: A game doesn't run on a plain A1200, but it works if I add fast memory. But I have to select NoFastMem in the emulator's preference window! Isn't that weird? A: No, it isn't. The trick behind NoFastMem of the CD32-Emulator is, that CD32-Emulator are loaded and initialized BEFORE the fast memory will be disabled. This leaves all the chip memory for the game to run. Q: I have a NEC-SCSI-CD-Rom drive. But the CD32-Emulator doesn't work correctly. Why? A.: The CD32-Emulator needs to access Audio playback functions and other more sophisticated stuff. The SCSI-2 standard defines the methods how this should be done and the CD32-Emulator uses SCSI-2 commands to talk to the drive. Only drives conforming to SCSI-2 will work correctly with the CD32-Emulator. Unfortunately most of the NEC drives do not comply to SCSI-2 and therefore won't work, sorry.