Totally new to Amigas. Picked up a A1200HD/40 with a CSA twelve guage accelerator

Hello people, I picked up a Amiga 1200HD/40 at auction the other day, it was disasembled so I put it back to gether again. It has a 200meg laptop drive in it. The unit also has an accelerator card in it 'CSA Twelve Guage 1250'.

Link to the CSA 1250

http://planetcryo.com/amiga/csa12.html

Anyway I really don't know much about Amigas at all. My mate used to have an A500, whilst I had an AtariST. We forever argued about which was better. Obviously his was; with all the wicked games etc.
I'm really into PC and overclocking etc now.
 
I also picked up a cd disk with the unit, opening it up in windows 98, it shows over 600 megs worth of games. What I'd really love to do is to be able to play them.
The CSA card comes witha 25pin connector which is like the one a printer would use. I think this is a SCSI setup.
Can any one give me any advice on how to hook up a CD-rom, and would a SCSI-2 (50 pin)be ok. I've got an external cable which is a typical 'chunky' scsi at one end and a 25pin plug at the other. So I figure I'd get an external scsi drive and plug it in to the amiga. HMM, maybe a bit too much wishfull thinking , Would the Amiga pick the drive up? Or would I need a specific brand of drive.
Or is there another option?, inside the Amiga unit, it looks like someone has soldered a 'molex' power connector from the power socket. Could I use this in turn with the internal mini ide cable (looks to have a second channel on it, and might need a laptop adaptor ) to run a typical ide cdrom. Again would it be recognised.  

     

Sorry for all the questions but I still have more

There are a couple of problems as far as I know with the unit. The internal floppy comes up with DF0:? when a disk is inserted. It also makes a constant tick.....tick.....tick.... noise. Is it stuffed? I've tried an external setup and it reads the disks ok. Could I replace the internal unit with a A500 internal unit? Or is maybe my onboard floppy controller dead?

Well that's about it from me for now, I hope some one can help me out.

One last thing, How do I reset the unit without turning the power off, is there a combination of keys I need to press etc?

Thanks,

Pete

[Phoenix]

I think I can answer a few of these, as I have tried already to fit a A500 internal drive to a A1200 it doesnt work. That being said the A500's ive opened have a different height drives (I have 5 A500's) and its the height that was wrong for my A1200. Ctrl+A+A is your soft reset.

[Lando]

pete_pumpkin wrote:
Hello people, I picked up a Amiga 1200HD/40 at auction the other day, it was disasembled so I put it back to gether again. It has a 200meg laptop drive in it. The unit also has an accelerator card in it 'CSA Twelve Guage 1250'.

Welcome to the Amiga community I'm sure you will enjoy it.  We're all very friendly here.

Link to the CSA 1250

http://planetcryo.com/amiga/csa12.html

Anyway I really don't know much about Amigas at all. My mate used to have an A500, whilst I had an AtariST. We forever argued about which was better. Obviously his was; with all the wicked games etc.
I'm really into PC and overclocking etc now.
 
I also picked up a cd disk with the unit, opening it up in windows 98, it shows over 600 megs worth of games. What I'd really love to do is to be able to play them.
The CSA card comes witha 25pin connector which is like the one a printer would use. I think this is a SCSI setup.
Can any one give me any advice on how to hook up a CD-rom, and would a SCSI-2 (50 pin)be ok. I've got an external cable which is a typical 'chunky' scsi at one end and a 25pin plug at the other. So I figure I'd get an external scsi drive and plug it in to the amiga. HMM, maybe a bit too much wishfull thinking , Would the Amiga pick the drive up? Or would I need a specific brand of drive.

The Amiga will work with any SCSI drive.  Just needs a filesystem and a mountlist.  Have a look in your DEVS folder in your boot partition.  Maybe there is a mountlist in there already?

Get the filesystem from aminet -
http://ftp.plig.org/pub/aminet/disk/cdrom/AmiCDROM-1.15.lha

You'll have to find out what the scsi device on your turbocard is called (maybe csascsi.device or so) and change the device = setting in the cd0 mountlist (or in the icon tooltype)

BTW If those games on the CD you talked about are ADF format you will have to write them back to floppy disk to actually play them on the Amiga.

Or is there another option?, inside the Amiga unit, it looks like someone has soldered a 'molex' power connector from the power socket. Could I use this in turn with the internal mini ide cable (looks to have a second channel on it, and might need a laptop adaptor ) to run a typical ide cdrom. Again would it be recognised.  

The A1200 has only 1 IDE channel (PIO mode 0) and you can connect two devices to it (Hard drive as master, CDROM as slave) but you'll need to get IDEFIX from Aminet and use that to use an ATAPI CD drive.

     

Sorry for all the questions but I still have more

There are a couple of problems as far as I know with the unit. The internal floppy comes up with DF0:? when a disk is inserted. It also makes a constant tick.....tick.....tick.... noise. Is it stuffed? I've tried an external setup and it reads the disks ok. Could I replace the internal unit with a A500 internal unit? Or is maybe my onboard floppy controller dead?

Sounds like a duff drive.  An A500 one will work but is the wrong size to fit in the case so you'd have to cut away some of the plastic.  

Well that's about it from me for now, I hope some one can help me out.

One last thing, How do I reset the unit without turning the power off, is there a combination of keys I need to press etc?

Ctrl+Amiga+Amiga

Thanks,

Pete

[carls]

The drive doesn't have to be broken.
What kind of disks are you inserting? Does the Workbench disk work, for example? Most older games are stored on "non-dos" disks which means that they use their own kind of file system and boot block. To use PC floppies you'll have to mount the pc0 driver (in storage/dosdrivers). And the A1200 has a DD drive only, so HD floppies won't work.

The clicking noise is a well-known feature of the amiga disk drives. There are lots of "noclick" patches available on aminet (http://www.aminet.net), which is the biggest Amiga freeware/PD/shareware archive in the world.

[xeron]

I've not use the CSA card, but it looks like the end connector is for SCSI.

Now, amiga-hardware.com says that SCSI is optional, so it may be that another card is attached before you can use SCSI (I know the Phase 5 Blizzard cards did that; its quite common).

You can add an ATAPI cd-rom to the internal IDE port with IDEFIX, but I would recommend at least getting a buffered IDE controller first, as you can technically damage your motherboard putting two devices on the internal port directly. The buffered IDE cards give you two IDE channels and proper 3.5" drive connectors. Click here for an example.

As for DF0:?, what disk are you putting there? If you put an MS-DOS disk in there it won't work, and quite a lot of old games are not standard AmigaDOS disks.

Put a double density disk in that you don't mind losing the data on, and in workbench select "Format" from the Icons menu. If the disk formats OK, the drive is fine.

Remember; the Amiga 1200 can't read high-density disks without an expensive external drive (unlike its bigger brothers the A3000 and A4000).

If you want to get rid of the click, click, click when there is no disk in the drive, download a "noclick" utility from aminet.

[carls]

@tickly
Aw, come on, what a ripoff :-D

[xeron]

@carls

*shrug* just wanted to give a full answer, too. and there was a little bit of extra info in mine. I didn't actually read yours first, admittedly, which I probably should. I just read the top post and hit reply.

[xeron]

aaand i've had another thought. If you didn't want to poke around with IDE CD-Roms, you could always get a cnet (or compatible) PCMCIA network card, and network the Amiga to the PC, to use the PCs CD-Rom. You need a TCP/IP stack like genesis or Miami, and a copy of cnet.device from aminet.

Edit: although, unless you get the motherboard fixed (or its already been fixed), you might have to unplug and re-insert the network card every reboot.

[carls]

@tickly
I was just kidding.
I've done similar things quite a few times :-)

[xeron]

Heh, just as the page was changing i caught your sig in the corner of my eye...

A small but loyal fan base of Amiga nuts is holding its breath

and read it as "A small but loyal base of Amigans is holding its nuts"
 :-o  :-D

[Rigger]

Came with a CSA Twelve Guage 1250, to bad. I'm guessing you've got 3.0 roms. Unfortunately if you ever wanted to upgrade to 3.1 roms you will not be able to due to a bug in the CSA Twelve Guage 1250.

[Kronos]

Small sidenote:

A500s had lots of differnt disk-drives during the 7 years
of production ... those lousy big Matushit(a)s the big Chinon
(most common I would guess) 1" Epsons and mine even came with
an 1" TEAC (board revision 6) the 1"s should fit in the A1200,
but you may get a prob with eject-knob if it is a different brand.
It may also be that Escom-A1200 make some troubles, but C= ones
should be no prob.

Thanks people, I just woke up and got onto my computer and wow :-o , lots of replies :-)
Thanks for all the advice. It seems that I've got a lot of learning to do in regards to the basics , even using the work bench etc.

I'm just so used to the PC and using MS-DOS and W98 :-x

The disks I inserted were DD Amiga disks. Most were 'cover' disks, and yeah I think I remember some message saying 'non DOS disks' etc. So what I think I'll do is put one of the disks in and try and format it.
The games CD I got is full of directories (A-Z) with files ending in .dms and also quite a few LHA ; which from memory is amigas compression format ?

In a few days I'll be going to auction again and hopefully I'll pick up some more Amiga stuff, maybe some texts that explain the basics.

I also have another question. The power supply that I'm using looks to be an A500 type. The problem that 'm getting is that to turn my A1200 on I need to toggle the PSU switch several times. At first I thought that it was the power switch itself , but now my suspision in that maybe it's to do with the actual A1200. Any simillar problems?

Well thanks again people for the quick replies.
** I'm not too sure if I'm using this forum correctly. I clicked on 'reply' in the last answered post. I was hoping to be able to scroll thru some of the replies whilst I write this thread. Anyhow I'll have a little more of a mess around

Thanks again,

Pete

 

[Damion]

Hi Pete,

I would say the problem is most likely with
your PSU; they're somewhat known for
problems. Also, I know this may sound
obvious, but I had a similar problem once
and it turned out that the PSU connector
needed a little extra shove into the
socket on the back of the machine.

You could also check your output ratings
with a meter I suppose...but a proper
voltage reading may not always ensure the
condition of the PSU, i.e it may fail
under a certain amount of load...you
could try it without the accelerator,
if it works then it's probably the PSU.

Cool, I'll take the acellerator out and see how it goes. My suspision is that it's not powerfull enought etc. I'll try it in a sec.