Action Replay Cartridge for Amiga 500 (Oddware)
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- Опубликовано: 14 апр 2020
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The Action Replay was a 'freezer' cartridge, available for many retro systems. I take a look at the Action Replay MK3 for the Amiga 500 and explore some of its useful features.
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Sources used in this video:
Games Master - Series 2 - Episode 2: • Games Master - Series ...
HRTMon: aminet.net/package/dev/debug/H...
HTTMon for WHDLoad: whdload.de/docs/en/freezer.html
Thrill Kill 1.05: janeway.exotica.org.uk/release...
Level 7 Interrupt: eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t...
#retrogaming #retrogames #oddware 
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I remember the action replay 3 very well. My friends had a amiga with the action replay card. I just had a plain 286 pc. But i had build a covox kabel so i could listen to amiga mod files on my pc. I spend a lot of hours behind the amiga, freezing games, ripping music, putting it onto disk and then playing it on my pc. Had a really great time, when i went to the computerclub, taking my pc inside, bringing in a receiver and speakers. Getting weird looks from the amiga guys. Pc doesn’t have sound. And then playing mod files on my pc. If i recall correctly you could not rip all music. Only music that was written in tracker.
And how 286 owners often with CGA or Herclues and PC Speaker looked bleak to Amiga. Like they had a big Spectrum!
You can rip all by dumping the RAM with the MKIII then load the dump into exotic ripper or other tools who will find exotic music formats not found by the MKIII.
Hi Dan, I'd like to register my intrest in the 4 hour feature long video. Please prepare a video showing us all the commands on the action replay. Thanks.
I'll second that. I bought the original A500 AR MKIII, which I used to increase lives, but never much more. I'd love to discover more with it!
Love the amiga videos u do. Takes me back 30 years
Oh Dan that had me smiling throughout! What a great look at a truly awesome piece of Amiga history. Really took me back to when I had mine for my A500+. Used to love ripping mods from games and using the memory monitor to scour for the current lives address - great memories. There was something really magical about being able to stop a game at any point and start delving into it's inner workings. Made you feel like an elite hacker ;)
Thanks for the info on the software versions and the level 7 interrupt mod. I am so going to look into that as it'd be great get something working on my A1200.
Every Dan wood video I see I think "I wish Dan wood made more videos !" . Awosme vid dude
DamnDanandhisDayjob! ;)
but he does :) , so he's standing up true.
I had an Action replay for my Amiga in 1990.
Awesome.. I've still got my Action Replay II and III - great memories watching it in use again :)
Great video, thanks. I too was fascinated by the adverts in magazines for these devices. Shoulda got a one for my c64 back in the day!
About 20 years ago when the Amigas were a little less loved and had faded into the background a bit, I brought a huge job lot from a computer store for £750. In the huge hall, I got about 15 Amiga 500, 2 Amiga 500+, 8 Amiga 1200, 4 Amiga 600 and a ton of other junk that I’m still sorting through.
In amongst the Accelerators were 5 Action Replay MK II and 2 MK III - I love these things...
WOW. I was never a fan of cheats but the other features make this awesome! I always never even gave these a second glance back in the day. If I'd have known about being able to grab mods and images, I'd have grabbed one for sure. That's fantastic! Thanks for sharing as always Dan. Stay safe.
This bought back so many good memories! We used to use it to bypass copy-protection (tut-tut!) and make boot discs for games we didn't own. I'd forgotten all about hacking lives etc, but its all coming flooding back now. Ripping sounds was also a treat but it reminds me how I really, REALLY should've spent more time getting to grips with Octomed. Sadly my Amiga and AR mk3 was lost in a house fire (we lost everything but got out alive!) but this video has accessed some well-forgotten memories - cheers mate!
AR6 on C64 was gift from god! PRG files loaded in instant and its boosted the system to totally new level :)
I got that to. I have the same in my ultimate cart today.
Yep that ar mk6 totally transformed my C64 experience, especially after I got a 1541 drive as well.
I had a Freeze Machine first and then I sold it and bought an AR 6 as it was faster and had more features. I think most games loaded in around 8 to 12 seconds which was a massive improvement.
Exactly my thoughts. Having started using the AR6 on C64 (actually the AC+6, but that's quite the same) I could never imagine going back. I sometimes had load errors and had wished they'd just used a 5x instead of a 10x loading speed acceleration, but all in all it was just so much better than the vanilla machine.
@@jaredderaj1331 Also pressing F7 > F3 then got top of game u wanted >F1 voila!
Great video! I used to use the Action Replay back then, first on a C64. If you have an ACA500plus there is a MK II and III + HRTMon built-in although I have not tried it out on mine. But now I think I will!
COOOL! Didn't know about that Action Replay for an AMIGA! Nice!
Greetings, Doc64!
I had one of these back in the day. I used to play a fairly obscure magazine cover disk game that was an extension to Ocean's F-29 Retaliator where they had placed aliens at the north end of the island and they were really aggressive and just flying near the area mean't you were likely to get taken down by an air to air missile. I used Action Replay to fly in, take down a couple of alien fighters and then get out of there at maximum speed and then freeze the game, knowing on my next run into the alien zone they'd likely shoot me down. Kept doing this repeatedly and where necessary restoring my frozen games and eventually took all the aliens out :) Great memories. Strangely the alien fighters were modelled directly off the "Viper" fighters from the original Battle Star Galactica, very cool though.
I nearly spat my tea out when you pulled out the Rise of the robots disk :D
top quality title there, put that wallet away
Wow thats a blast from the past.....I forgot I even had one of these....great vid Dan......Jim.
I have a similar story like your friend that say Lotus and then bought an Amiga.
Back then, I had a ZX Spectrum and I went to my friends house to see is new computer.
When I got there, he was playing Golden Axe. It was love at first sight. I couldn't believe a computer could have such amazing graphics and cool sound. I then tried to convince my father go buy me one and he bought me the Duck Tales bundle.
Great stuff, Dan! I'd not ever seen the AR for the Amiga...very interesting! Man, I coulda used one of these back in the day....
Loved my Action Reply, I had back in the day for my Amiga 2000.
I had forgotten i had one of those LOL! still got the a512, i used for ripping mods, but didnt know it could do all that... brilliant vid thanks again!!
i bought one of these recently but pretty keen to give it a go. I also remember the ads in all the mags!
Loved the Action Replay Cartridge. I can remember getting one for my birthday. Loved been able to grab screenshots from off of games and from what I can remember, grabbing music as well. I can remember grabbing some music from off of the Bitmap Brother's games (as these always had brilliant music as well as amazing graphics). I can remember using it as well to help me out on games I was stuck with.
Great for ripping the samples too. For retro fun I store them on a Pentium server to then pass on to my Atari ST sampler for keyboard use.
Wow this little device is actually pretty impressive :) More videos like this Dan ! :D
Love the video Dan, I always had an AR for whatever machine I had bar my old ATari which I used another less glitzy machine code monitor called OmnimonXL. I loved the AR on the PSX, you could flash it with dev software called Caetla and I spent many nights going through code, one night while playing Pandemonium on the PSX I noticed the level codes sitting in ram and not even encrypted so in an instant they were posted to the PSX newsgroup on Usenet. And a little bit of trivia that is actually known re your interview with the Psygnosis peeps, DMA Designs initial game was called Menace but its actual original name was Draconius, I know this as I had a trade review disk and was reviewing it for a mag but I had to inform Psygnosis that there was a game out on the C64 with the same name and so that is why it was renamed Menace....Good Old Davie Jones of DMA , gave us GTA from its humble beginnings :)
Used it mainly for ripping samples, mods, sprites and graphics. (Still do😁) Pretty much a must have, for me. Used it to snoop around for cheats to, mostly just for the fun of it. Fantastic video👍🏻
The best thing about Retro Computing is finally getting hold of all the stuff you couldnt afford at the time! Sounds like this box is Poke-ing the memory so you can, erm, cheat at your favourite games! Love how clever that little box is with scanning the memory for changes so you can work out where the number of lives are stored and then increase that value when/if you lose a life! :)
Great video, always wondered how the Amiga Action Replay worked. Had the SNES version but it was completely different to this.
I remember these...absolutely awesome. Memories ❤️😀👍👍 Great vid Dan 😀
Love the channel and the podcast thanks for all your hard work
Great video Dan! Really interesting!
Still have my Action Replay MK3 boxed and used it almost solely with those exact features you mentioned :) Playing through Cannon Fodder was almost impossible without save states. However, ripping mods where my fav thing to do. I actually looked through the code of a game once (can't remember which one) and found some kind of keystrokes hidden among that unreadable mess and when i tried them ingame i actually activated a cheat! I was so impressed by myself :D
Remember buying mine with my first wage mine was a green case version of action replay. I have one again on the aca500+ the SA command was very useful back in the day.
i had one.. amazing device, i'm sure mine was about £60.. i remember being really excited the day it arrived.. at the time it was a bit of a risk ordering from a magazine, sending off a cheque and trusting someone to send something.. i mainly used it for ripping samples, as a friend of mine used to write mods and i loved messing around with demos so used it to rip out font sets, and character graphics. thanks for covering this Dan, it's one of those devices i thought everyone had forgotten about.
i didn't pay anything for mine... well, i guess i did, my mate at school he was my "go to guy" for buying Amiga stuff he was selling. That's where bought Action Replay III and A570 CD-Rom from
Never had Action Replay but I remember finding some game music samples by ctrl+Amiga+Amiga during the gameplay, then loading Aegis Audiomaster & doing Ram scan with it.
I have the Lotus Trilogy for Amiga and love it :) Great music in these games and fun to play.
and all this hard work Amiga users did, today they are NOW all remixed in the internet..
We did used to try allot harder back then :)
enjoying the content as always, Dan!
I had an action replay 3 as well back in the day I remember when I finally had enough money for it after saving for ages.
Also the hidden message in lotus you could hear if you unplugged either the left or right channel (can’t remember which) whilst the music was playing in the game
Cool video Dan
As always, your teaching is excellent
I remember having one of these years ago. I wasn't able to get hold of pirate games at the time but this allowed me to backup any games that were just a single load. For some reason, I thought you needed an Action Replay Cartridge to load them back in but you could actually use a program called (I think) aload! Remember my friend thinking it was lame you needed a cartridge to play the backups; kicked myself when I found aload :)
Ahhhhh, I'm using one of these at the moment for memory editing.
Wow that bought me back! My best use of a Action Reply was to change the text in demos to say what I wanted. Search for the string then replace. Cue Dorset 1990 Holiday VHS starting with bouncing text of my name. Great times.
I had one of these. A seriously great piece of hardware. A tip for you. Dan - Load Mega-Lo-Mania and find the gruff speech sample that says 'No Way!' and play it back. You'll get a very funny surprise! I saved it out and use it to this day as my Workbench error sound effect to this day!
I still have mine, which is either an MkI or MkII. It still had its own FDOS (iirc) instead of AmigaDOS commands. It helped me get very far in Deuteros, upping all my resources, weapons, etc. :)
great vid, didn‘t know AR existed for amiga
These things were great. One thing I liked to do was freeze and edit game text when a mate was at the toilet, then we he came back he got a personalised insult at a certain stage in the game or at game over!
Ive got the A1200 one and the A500 models. It really depends how you use them as to how good you think they are. The trapdoor version suffered from being released at the time when most people had accelerator cards, and was a pain to swap them over. I did like both versions tho, the monitors are good on them and having a built in compactor on them (that's what the color flashes are when you do save-all of the computer's state) was handy for programming. I wrote a decompacting routing in order to use it. There are ways to disable users being able to use the freeze buttons on both of them in your game if you wanted to (and of course a means to bypass it if you wanted to) - oh and I still have one of your old floppy magazines on disk, with letter etc. Good stuff.
Could you post links to everything you mention in your comment please?
Thanks
A very cool piece of history!
I used an Action Replay to "Crack" Monkey island 1 and 2, I never had the cracked scene releases but my friend owned original copies of both games. I loaded the game up and entered the correct Dial A Pirate code, froze the game, and saved the state to floppy. Whenever I wanted to play either game I would load the state back up and swap the disc for my backup disk 1 (neither game used bad sector protection, they relied purely on the dial a pirate wheel) and it worked perfect :)
A friend and I did exaclt the same for his copy of another world, we made a savestate that we saved to a disk after the protection had been entered, so you just booted off the save state then swapped disks to the backup copy.
The times i used to dial up Lucas Arts... lol... "for help" on Dinkey Island
I had one of these, i think mine was a version 2 and i sent it back to datel and they upgraded the rom to version 3 (or it might have been v3-v4 ,was a long time ago). Was great for copying borrowed or rented games. I seem to recall mine could create stand alone backups that booted without going into the cartridge and typing commands. You just booted it like any other game. That was one of the features in the upgrade i got.
An important thing to mention may be that there were 2 versions of Action Replay III. The v3.09 only works with Kickstart 1.x, so if you have an Amiga 500+ (with kickstart 2.0x) you need a v3.17 of Action Replay III... important to know, if you are on the hunt to get yourself one.
- One of the best and most unique features of the Action Replay III is the mempeeker. Which is sort of a graphical version of the hexacode monitor (yea, it's hexa-code, not hexcode - hex only means 6 where as hexa means 16, so we've all been saying it wrong for decades). It takes a bit of fiddling and getting good at, but with the mempeeker you can find any of the graphics, sprites and animations in the memory. It really is quite brilliant.
- Writing "TS 3" works good and fine unless you're searching for a value greater than 9. Because unless you put an exclamation mark in front, the AR3 will assume that the value you entered was written in hexacode. Say for instance that you are searching for 500 gold pieces, then you really need to type "TS !500" in order to find what you are looking for.
- There is no need to load the game first from the game-disk(s), before reloading the save-state. Just load the save-state directly and swap to the game-disk(s) afterwards.
- Yeah, not all of us has 2 Amigas on standby, ready for action... some of us has 3 😜
Not being a critic, just sharing knowledge - before it vanishes into oblivion... loved the video 🙂
As a kid in the 90s I had the exact same MK3 and while I did use it to find cheat codes occasionally, I mostly used it to rip modules from demos and games.
I had Action Reply on my C64 , but this one was much more advanced
I would still like the Fast loaders on C64.. I'm one nostalgic buff..
I had one back in the day... it helped me learn 68000 assembly language. :) It was a real treasure.
Wow how neat. I grew up on a 386 pc. Wish i had a Amiga too!
I had an Amiga and it made me very wealthy in games like Civilization and Sim City. It was excellent.
I had one of those carts :) I was only a young lad and that was my Christmas present, I saw it in alot of magazines and sounded super cool.
But it was very difficult to get to grips with, I only scratched the surface!
YOU WILL NOT COPY THIS GAME ... the most amazing thing i have seen on youtube in a long time
always wanted one but couldn't justify the cost, I was able to rip mods though by doing a soft reset and using some software that I can't remember now to scan the memory. Worked pretty well!
Awesome memories of making slide shows, ripping music and feeling like a hacker, hacking games back in the day with one of these.. 😊 Stand out memories: upgrading the engines in Supercars II to the point the car engine audio goes silent while the car zooms in the barrier and instantly explodes lol. I also did the same with Super Skidmarks and the truck somehow glitched through the barrier and I couldn't get back on the track.. 😂
Fantastic as ever!
i really loved this cartridge :D
Datel also had a splitter they sold that would allow you to plug your exist expansion device (such as an A590) in as normal. Then a 90 degree upwards sticking edge connector for your Action Replay. You just had to be careful not to breath on it too heavily, it was quite sketchy :-D
Another modern alternative (with a ton of other features) is Individual Computer's ACA500+ accelerator card, which has Action Replay functionality built into it.
Oh yes very fond memories of the Lotus 2 intro track!
I had the Game Genie for the Sega Mega Drive (bought from Rumbelows if anyone remembers that store). Anyway I had a copy of Eternal Champions that would only work if it was plugged into the Game Genie.
Hi Dan I used to have this cartridge never used any of those cool features but used for cheating a bit in games lol I loved the Amiga and it still is in my eyes a very cool computer used to love listening to music demo discs with animations if u have any of those be good to see a vid .
All the best mate
I wish I would have known about the Amiga when I was a pre-teen or teenager but I only saw expensive oddball portables in catalogs or apple/ Microsoft units that were already outdated yet still expensive. I could have gotten into computing allot sooner than I did.
Yeah, great tradition of 8 bit ROM modules with nice enhancements continues!
Woohoo... will download this then watch it with no ads to get in the way. Total legend Dan. 😁😁
I seem to have plenty of spare time at the moment for some reason so if you feel like making that 4 hour , thorough explanation of every feature video do feel free ;)
I had exactly this freezer and also the same monitor :D
Absolutely never heard of this before
Save state would have come in handy when I was playing Settlers demo (save game feature disabled) through night and I had to go to school next morning
I used my A500 Action Replay to rip the intro music from Lotus Turbo, and to change all the intro text in Gods. Happy times.
I used to be a wizard on the action replay back in the day, used to compress many 2-disk games to one disk
I used to as well, but the mind fails me now. ..:( Thank goodness for manuals.
I still have my Action Replay III. Never really worked out how to use it back in the day though, but I think it'd be good for stuff like sprite ripping to do homebrew games now. Sold my Amigas though, so bummer.
Save feature would definitely have been useful back in the day.
Brilliant I never knew these could do s much, thanks
For anyone that still owns an original Amiga 1200 or or better,
paradox
a cracking company dumped the rom of the original action replay Mark III and made it soft bootable so that you can run it from RAM without the actual hardware
I used to love my software action replay.
And found it worked quite well on original hardware including trainer features.
Dan, did you had any problems with that Philips monitor while testing AR3? I have c1084S-P1 (same electronics as yours) and sometimes flyback goes wining when i press freeze on AR3 (switching resolutiin issue, i think).
It never happens without AR3 freeze.
Used to use this to rip sprites and fonts to use in my crappy demos learning to code
One of my favourite game was Wings and I see it's on steam and can be played on a modern PC
That monitor looks ace
I was shocked when you held up Rise of the Robots
Whew
Beatiful Computer... Beatiful.
There were a load of undocumented commands as well, like:
atari
msdos
And type in sequence these:
may
the
force
be
with
you
new
- and you unlock the Action Replay for some serious hacking.
Have fun.
Never used an action replay on the Amiga as I had the a1200 & the version they brought out I couldn't use anyway as I had a blizzard 1260 connected but I sure made use of one on the C64, transferring all my games to floppy disc. I had the mk6 version but datel dropped support for ripping novaload titles which microprose used but as luck would have it a friend of mine had a version of the cartridge which ripped novaload & playing titles such as gunship & airborne ranger was much more fun, especially gunship which on tape you spent more time loading than playing lol
Hi Dan! Fantastic video, as always!
I have a question, though... I don't have the real hardware, but I emulate it through WinUAE, and though I was able to enter the console and look for some cheats in ram, save states and so, i don't know how to activate the slow down button (it it's emulated in WinUAE, of course)... Do you know how I can control the speed?
Thanks!
slow-mo, i always thought that was physical only on ARIII cartridge.. not on emulation, but perhaps adjusting FPS (frames per second) would do the trick.
@@Tech-geeky Yeah ;-) I found that only a couple of days later :-D it works fine ;-)
Thanks!
Love the vids. Can I ask a quick (unrelated) question? If I wanted to get an Amiga for gaming, which Amiga should I go for? (cost is kind of a factor).
Always wanted an Amiga but my folks couldn't afford it. Loved my C64 (still have it, box and all) but after that I went down the console route for the next (nearly) 30 years.
Wayne The best of low budget ones was the 1200, which was the last model release before Commodore went bust if you discount the CD32, which I’ve still got, it had the aga chipset which enhanced the graphics but is fully compatible with all the previous models, the big box Amigas were and still are expensive.
@@gower1973 It was hardly the "low budget one", the A1200 was the flagship home computer replacing the seminal A500! The big box Amigas were never popular outside of the niche desktop publishing and Video industry and usually had compatibility issues with games.
I used to own a few Amigas many years ago and recently I had this urge to purchase an A1200. I will be looking to get it recapped, I was wondering what upgrades should i look to do first as it will be a stock Amiga cheers.
Gosh nostalgia happiness 😁
ohhhhhhhhhhhhh .. great great memories
Personally, I've wanted one of those since I've first seen in on Channel 4's Gamesmaster show in Xmas Eve 1992 presented by Dominic Diamond who is from 17 miles away from my home city of Dundee. But my parents didn't find or get it and told me that I'm best off using those Cracktro Trainer's Cheats boot menus. Honestly I've wished I had that when the Amiga's were in its prime until Commodore died no thanks to Irving and how the founder left Commodore in 1984. Also I had known that the Lotus II game got a hidden PD game, Dux which is a clone of Sega's Arcade game Carnival in the early 1980s.
Omg that monitor...that Amiga...those disk drives... pure tech porn.
Back then I always wondered how the magazines got perfect screen shots, and then I saw this video where you use the AR to capture a screen, and that's probably how the magazines did it (I'm assuming their DTP software could import IFF files?)
Does your Phillips monitor have scart input? i noticed your scart adaptor in the video and have always wondered why you use the Phillips over an original commodore monitor, if so that's probably why.
I have a Scart to RGB adapter for it. Just because this is the same monitor I got when I was a kid from my parents, had it since the mid 90s. The Commodore 1084 monitor is identical though, it was made by Philips, Commodore just re-cased it.
Ahhhhh the Action Replay cartridge was sooooo much better on the good old
C64
i used the ActionReplay MK IV on my c128 :)
I have not tried to copy a screenshot before, that's pretty cool. When I get my A2000 up and running, I need to copy it from A500 to the A2000 and then, I don't know. Do something productive just because I am supposed to on an Amiga 2000.
that is amazing. do you know if it works mounted on top of the ACA500+ card?
The ACA500+ has a built in Action Replay MK II and MK III and HRTMon.