rapidroadUSB on A500 Clockport adapter

[darksun9210]

Hi all, me again.
ok so my Vamp2 for my a500 has arrived, but the problem with the A500, no real options for mass removable storage attachment without scsi, and network options are pretty thin on the ground. so.

I've used my individual computers A500 clockport card to lift the vamp clear of the minimegachip and bolted the rapidroad to what I think is port0 of the clock port card.

this should get me both USB network, and USB CD/Flash drive access. two birds, one stone.

I've installed OS3.1, MUI, and Poseidon4.5 USB stack with the rapidroadcpusb.device.

trouble is, when I click on the rapidroad device in in the Poseidon GUI and click "online", the white LED on the rapid road goes out, and the mouse goes into busy pointer mode then the Poseidon window is active. short of that, nothing else seems to happen.

anyone any thoughts?

[darksun9210]

Additional.
the int6 flying lead got damaged that goes to the clock port board from ...somewhere...
I don't know where.
looking up online lead me to think it was either pin25 of Gary, or pin 21 of either of the CIA chips.
trying either of the above , or having it not connected to anything, yelds the same results...

[kirk_m]

As an aside, unrelated to your problem... the vampire has native network support.  There's a driver in the SAGA pacakge called sdnet.device.  The SD slot will give you network capabilities with the SDNET adapter (sd card to ethernet), and, better speeds than you'll get with the USB solution.  There is a person on the Commodore Amiga facebook group that makes and sells the SDNET adapters.

[darksun9210]

hmmm, very interesting! I knew the network adapter was a "potential" thing, didn't realise it was actually out in the wild so to speak
just doing a quick search dug up some you tube videos. looks like this thing can run at about 90kB/s, so just under a megabit. certainly better than serial or parallel; and i'm hazarding a guess those video's were on older cores? but i'm purely speculating here.

i'll have hunt around and see if I can sort out a couple of adapters. would be interesting to side-by-side USB vs SD network connections

[Acill]

hmmm, very interesting! I knew the network adapter was a "potential" thing, didn't realise it was actually out in the wild so to speak
just doing a quick search dug up some you tube videos. looks like this thing can run at about 90kB/s, so just under a megabit. certainly better than serial or parallel; and i'm hazarding a guess those video's were on older cores? but i'm purely speculating here.

i'll have hunt around and see if I can sort out a couple of adapters. would be interesting to side-by-side USB vs SD network connections

If you want to go the SDnet route I can get you in touch with the builder of them. They are very simple to use, and honestly the SD card slot is worthless for using an SD card in. Its very buggy. A large hard CF or SSD on the IDE port is much better.

As far as the A500 clockport adapters and rapidroad I remember an issue being reported with it. I will look for the thread, but I do remeber I quite looking for this adapter once I saw that.

[darksun9210]

yeah I think you're right, that sdnet adapter is going to be the best option. if you could put me in touch with the people in the know for a couple of adapters, that would be amazing

so anyway, in the mean time;
I took the subway out of my A600 and put it on the A500 clock port adapter to rule that out.
it worked first time. but then plugging a FAT32 formatted usb stick in there, USMD fat filesystem reader was having a panic attack with disk block , and looking the Poseidon error log there were fatal errors all over the place.
plugging in a USB lan adapter was a much nicer experience. no errors, all happy. no tcpip stack to test with though.

plugging the rapidroad into my a600/604n however, was a completed carbon copy of the problems I was having with the A500. the light is on, when the machine powers on and boots up. but it looks like as soon as Poseidon initialises the card, the light on the rapidroad goes out, and Poseidon locks up.
I may plug the rapidroad into the x-surf100 I have in my A3000 or dig out an A1200 to make sure it's all ok. as at the moment, i'm not the most confident on the health of that card. but that test is going to take more time and effort than I can afford right this second.

so I put the subway back into the A600. no errors, usb flash drives all ok. very strange. but happy to have a fully functional machine.

so. to surmise.  the rapidroad on A500 clock port. not the happiest experience, and i'm left feeling unsure if the card is actually functional, or if I've damaged it somehow. and still leaves me with no way right now for getting the large amounts of amiga software I have onto my nice fast A500... how did we do this in the old days? parnet.
blast from the past. installed ParNet all fine, but it is taking forever setting itself up!
why is it never straightforward?!?!

[darksun9210]

ok, so the SDnet adapter thing has been rated quite nicely on later cores. getting some very nice transfer rates by the looks of it.

the ParNet/ParBench thing I have going on at the moment -  interesting. the client software locks up  completely and you can't do anything on that machine at all, but is still available to the host machine. so that's fine. just running the 500 as the host, and by a finger in the air calc, it looks like its doing about a meg every 16 seconds - so roughly 70kB/s? not too shabby at all.

[David Wright]

Using the SD slot for file transfer has not been buggy for me. Actually what other option do I have? No PCMCIA slot for an additional CF card available.

I would like to get my 500 on the internet for basic things but Plipbox and maybe the sd adapter are the only options now. Correct?