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Text Appears "Garbled"

 

TOPIC

Q: Shortly after the beginning of the Startup-Sequence, all text appears garbled. What's happening?

 

DISCUSSION

A: On early Amiga systems, a utility known as FastFonts was invoked during the Startup-Sequence to patch the system text rendering functions to make them faster. FastFonts was very popular, and was also included in official Commodore/Amiga Workbench 1.x disks.

Unfortunately FastFonts was not designed with "faster than real" Amiga systems in mind, and lacked proper blitter wait mechanisms. As a result of this, on systems which are faster than the original Amiga 1000, 500 and 2000 hardware, the use of FastFonts can result in "garbled" text. Usually this manifests itself as all characters appearing to be offset by one position in the ASCII table. For example, "Workbench" becomes "Vnqjadmbg", "RAM DISK" becomes "Q@L_CHRJ", etc.

This can be solved in one of three ways:

  • Remove the "FF" (FastFonts) command from the Startup-Sequence
  • Edit the title in Amiga Forever (right-click and select Edit) and switch the CPU speed from Fastest to Original
  • Edit the title in Amiga Forever and set the "Immediate blits" advanced compatibility option

 

Article Information
Article ID:16-119
Platform:All
Products:Amiga Forever
Additional Keywords:Caesar cipher, ROT25
Last Update:2014-02-06
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