The Picasso96 drivers allow the Amiga operating system to use screen modes other than those allowed by the Amiga graphics chips, giving access to all the resolutions of the PC display card. Normally, on all Amiga systems, whether emulated or not, a unique ID is associated to each screen mode. This ID is used, for example, to open the initial screen, when the system boots. If a screen mode is not available any more, the system should in theory fall back gracefully to another, available screen mode. This occurs when changing display card or drivers on a "real" Amiga, but in the case of the emulation it is also affected by updates in the PC display hardware and drivers, and can also happen when the emulation software is upgraded. In practice, some programs do not behave properly when the requested screen mode is not available, and this may cause the Amiga operating system to crash. If this happens at boot time, the Amiga will never boot properly, crashing each time.
Since in Amiga Forever the Amiga system files are accessible from the PC file system, this problem can be solved by deleting the "screenmode.prefs" file containing the system default screen settings, which are stored inside the "Prefs/Env-Archive/Sys" directory of the Amiga system drive.
The exact location of this file under Windows may vary depending on the installation options, but in general it is inside the "Amiga Files" folder. For example, the full path (starting with an environment variable) on a current Amiga Forever installation on a Windows system is "%AMIGAFOREVERDATA%\System\dir\System\Prefs\Env-Archive\Sys\screenmode.prefs". Expanded to an absolute path, on a Windows Vista system this would be something like "C:\Users\Public\Documents\Amiga Files\System\dir\System\Prefs\Env-Archive\Sys\screenmode.prefs".
Additional Information
The following article explains how to programmatically find the "Amiga Files" directory on Windows, independently of an Amiga Forever installation:
- 5-112 - Use of "Amiga Files" in Amiga Forever for Windows
The following article explains how to programmatically find the Amiga Forever installation directories on Windows:
- 5-102 - Locating the Installation under Windows
This article contains additional information about the ROM and operating system versions included in Amiga Forever:
- 3-114 - ROM and Operating System Files in Amiga Forever
