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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: alexatkin on August 18, 2006, 12:43:03 AM
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Hi all,
I was wondering if anyone knows a nice way to network a stock A1200 to Windows/Linux for transferring ADF files onto floppy?
I havent used the A1200 in a few years but I finally have enough space to set it up again and so fancied transferring stuff over from WinUAE as the games play better on the real thing. I remember last time it was a PITA using PC2AMIGA as it would constantly crash the Amiga so seeing mentions of people using NE2000 compatible PCMCIA cards and even mention that PRISM PCMCIA cards might work I figured id ask around.
I tried a PCMCIA card once but figured it wasnt possible due to the reset problem on A600/A1200 PCMCIA ports. Is this still true or is there a workaround that doesnt involve soldering? Ideally id like to get one of my PRISM2 cards working (I have an unencrypted WiFi network I could use), otherwise wired LAN would be fine. ANYTHING is better than PC2AMIGA. However I know nothing about Amiga networking (though im savvy with Windows and Linux networking) as I wasnt even sure it was possible on a stock A1200.
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CardReset on Aminet
http://www.aminet.net/package.php?package=util/boot/CardReset.lha (http://www.aminet.net/package.php?package=util/boot/CardReset.lha)
I think there may also be another similar program on Aminet.
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Hi,
In addition to CardReset, you'll need a TCP/IP stack. Check out AmiTCP (http://main.aminet.net/package.php?package=comm/tcp/AmiTCP-demo-40.lha) as this'll provide what you need for basic networking and includes the device files required for SLIP networking over RS232. If you want to use a PCMCIA network card, you'll also need either the Prism drivers (http://main.aminet.net/package.php?package=hard/drivr/prism2.lha), NE2000-compatible drivers (http://main.aminet.net/package.php?package=hard/drivr/cnetdevice.lha) or the 3Com drivers (http://main.aminet.net/package.php?package=hard/drivr/3c589.lha), depending on the hardware you have.
Transfer that lot over to the Amiga and install AmiTCP (don't be concerned it's a demo, it's fully functional aside from an enforced 2-second delay when you start the TCP/IP stack). Then install the relevant device driver.
AmiTCP and the device driver files contain full instructions on what to do, and if you're familiar with Linux networking, you should find it fairly straightforward.
Any questions, ask again on A.Org!
- Ali
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Thanks for all the information, looks fairly straightforward as soon as I can remember where I left the A1200 LOL. (how can you lose something that big?)
Might try it on the A600 first as I know where that is, although it doesnt have a hard drive at the moment so that makes things harder it DOES at least have the 1MB RAM upgrade.
I gotta admit I didnt know half as much about Linux when I tried doing this last time and WiFi wasnt even on the market yet. So hopefully it will be a lot more obvious this time around. Its amazing that the Amiga community is still around and actually made a software fix for the reset bug, im pretty sure that didnt exist last time I tried either.
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Hi,
Lost A1200? LOL! Definitely too big to lose!
As for trying AmiTCP on an HD-less A600 - don't bother... You really do need a hard drive to get AmiTCP working. I guess it's just about theoretically possible to run AmiTCP if you have enough external floppy drives and assigns all over the place, but it wouldn't be nice! :-)
Time to find the A1200 methinks! Or put an HD in the A600...
- Ali
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or you can use termiteTCP that even works on an 1.3 A500 and is lighter that amitcp or miami.
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You can also use AmiTCP 3, which doesn't have any pop-up window when you start etc. If you search these forums you should find references to a step-by-step guide to set it up (installation without this guide isn't recommended).
It's also worth noting that the A600 doesn't have the PCMCIA reset bug.
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Well my biggest hurdle so far isnt not finding the A1200 (because at least I have the A600) or putting a hard drive in the A600 (because I have a few lying around I could use), its finding the PSU. LOL
Its another thing that should be too large to lose but I changed rooms earlier this year and loads of stuff ended up in boxes and have pretty much stayed there. I also had no plans to setup the Amiga again so I didnt keep everything where I could lay my hands on it quickly.
Thanks for all the tips though, im sure once I get the thing powered up it will be a lot easier to configure than finding the PSU, mouse and joystick/pad were.
Speaking of mice, are those little apps that let you use serial mice any good? I think theres one or two on Aminet.
I still really wish I could have gotten hold of an A4000 though. If I had one of those I would never have had to pack it away in the first place. Its just these old computer with integral keyboard systems take up FAR too much space when not in use. Thank goodness I dont have my Atari ST anymore, those suckers were HUGE and a lot easier to emulate too!
Oh dear, nostalgia is kicking in. I better fire up the emulators while im looking for the PSU etc. :-D
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@_ThEcRoW:
I am pretty sure TermiteTCP requires KS2.0 as the demo of it on Aminet does.
As far as I know there are no TCP/IP stacks which works on 1.3, except the oldest version of the never publically released AS225. Unfortunately not much software works with AS225 as it is not a bsdsocket.library compatible stack.
/Patrik
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Where can I get a full copy of Termite TCP? The demo limits me to 30 minutes. How much is it to buy if it is still available?
Regards,
Damien
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OK.
Found the PSU, found a 2GB HD and managed to struggle transferring the WB3.1 disk images across by lha'ing the little buggers onto PC DD floppies. Im glad THATS over with I have them back on floppy again. Like a fool I lent most of my Amiga floppies to a friend last month thinking I wouldnt be neeeding them though that was partly because I knew the important stuff I had in ADF on the PC.
Anyway, got the HD formatted and 3.1 installed. Installed the prism2 device. Followed the instructions on installing AmiTCP 3. Installed CardPatch and CardReset in user-startup before AmiTCP fires up and - its not picking up the prism2 card. At least it seems thats the problem as im just getting "no such interface".
Unfortunately the only WIRED LAN PCMCIA card I have
a) I do not know where it is
b) the dongle is broken so its almost impossible to get it to work
Is there any way to check if prism2.device is actually doing anything? Anything to probe if the 1200 is even detecting a card in the PCMCIA slot? The card does seem to be getting warm so at least that would imply its getting power.
At least AmiTCP IS working on some level, I can ping loopback without any problems.
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@alexatkin:
The interface-name defined in AmiTCP:db/interfaces cant contain digits. When that interface is called from the startnet-script, you add the device-number you are intending to use to the end of the name.
All of this is written in the instructions.
/Patrik
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Yup, the relevant line in interfaces is:
wlan dev=devs:networks/prism2.device
and in startnet its:
AmiTCP:bin/ifconfig wlan0 192.168.1.20 netmask 255.255.255.0
I checked the path, the file is there in devs:networks/prism2.device. I checked ifconfig wlan0 and "no such interface".
Interestingly I discovered that cnetdevice contains a card_info app. I tried that which reported that my PCMCIA card is a Belkin 11Mbps Wireless Notebook Network Adapter and that it appears to be a network card. I must also note that this same card has been used with prism2 drivers both under Linux and Windows so theres no doubt about it being a prism2.
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You can use sanautil from Aminet to check if the driver recognises the card etc.:
sanautil device prism2.device status
Are you trying this on the A1200 or A600?
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Sanautil, thanks for the tip. Well, at least it IS seeing the card but shouldnt it have found the access point and be transmitting/receiving to that?
Device 'networks/prism2.device' (version 1.6), unit 0
QueryFormat: 0, DeviceLevel: 0
Address field size: 48 bits, Maximum transfer unit: 1500 bytes
Speed: 11000000 bps, HardwareType: Ethernet
Current addr: 00:00:00:00:00:00, Default addr: [HIDDEN]
Packets received: 0, Packets sent: 0
Bad Data: 0, Overruns: 0
Unknown packets received: 0, Reconfigurations: 0
Last start: --
Special stats:
(1/0) Bad multicasts: 0
(1/1) Retries: 0
(1/2) Underruns: 0
I blanked out the default addr just for paranoias sake but it was correct for the card.
Anyway im using the A1200 with the intention I might at least be able to increast the FAST RAM a little at some point, preferably drop an accelerator in at least an 030. Its not a priority at the moment though, plenty of high-tech stuff I want this christmas. :roll: The A600 would be more of a problem as im not sure where the hard drive bracket is and id have to use the external floppy as I only have the one internal one that works and its in the A1200. Not to mention why use the slower machine when some of the games I will be transferring will be AGA. :-P
Being able to get stuff straight off Aminet onto the Amiga and being able to access my PCs DVD-ROM drive though is VERY useful especially as it shouldnt cost me a penny to do.
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alexatkin wrote:
Sanautil, thanks for the tip. Well, at least it IS seeing the card but shouldnt it have found the access point and be transmitting/receiving to that?
How do you know it hasn't? ;-) Did you set the wireless parameters with SetPrism2Defaults?
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Because it says packets 0 which would implies it hasnt even tried to connect. I DID include "SetPrism2Defaults SSID LCARS" in user-startup just to be sure, it didnt seem to make any difference. This card is DEINFATELY in the MAC allowed list on the Access Point and works fine in my laptop. Strangely another prism2 card I have isnt being detected by the A1200 at all, although that one could have developed a fault as part of the card is snapped (but seemingly just one side of the onboard antenna and the leds light up).
It seems to me that prism2.device isnt initialising the card properly. If I do "sanautil device prism2.device online" I get:
OnLine command failed -- Error: Bad state
WireError: Unit is not configured
If I do "sanautil device prism2.device config" and then the above, I get the same error. If I do "sanautil device prism2.device config address=[the cards mac address]", it still does the same. Clearly the card ISNT initialising, but im not sure what is failing or what I can do about it.
If it was Linux I would check the syslog but Amiga? Is there any way to get more debug information out of AmiTCP?
Anothing thing is the Reset patch seems to be working as I tested with it disabled in user-startup and the card didnt fire up until I plugged it in AFTER booting then. Incidentally, do you need CardPatch AND CardReset? CardReset mentioned needing CardPatch but it didnt say anything more than that. I dont think its related to the problem though, I have both listed in user-startup and card is clearly initialising on some level, just not for AmiTCP.
Is it possibly something stupid like I need a newer version of setpatch? Other libraries AmiTCP depends on? This IS just a basic WB3.1 install. I think I might try softbooting kickstart 3.1 and see if it makes any difference, but I will have barely any RAM left then for testing.
[edit] Kickstart 3.1 did not make any difference whatsoever. :cry:
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alexatkin wrote:
Because it says packets 0 which would implies it hasnt even tried to connect. I DID include "SetPrism2Defaults SSID LCARS" in user-startup just to be sure, it didnt seem to make any difference. This card is DEINFATELY in the MAC allowed list on the Access Point and works fine in my laptop. Strangely another prism2 card I have isnt being detected by the A1200 at all, although that one could have developed a fault as part of the card is snapped (but seemingly just one side of the onboard antenna and the leds light up).
The card can associate with the access point without the packets sent/received stats being affected. However, if you ran sanautil after the interface is suppposed to be online, Last Start should show a time.
It seems to me that prism2.device isnt initialising the card properly. If I do "sanautil device prism2.device online" I get:
OnLine command failed -- Error: Bad state
WireError: Unit is not configured
If I do "sanautil device prism2.device config" and then the above, I get the same error. If I do "sanautil device prism2.device config address=[the cards mac address]", it still does the same. Clearly the card ISNT initialising, but im not sure what is failing or what I can do about it.
This is a limitation of sanautil. After you configure the card with sanautil, sanautil closes the driver and exits, and the card becomes unconfigured again. The only way around this is to keep the driver open, eg. by stopping "sanautil status" before it finishes by typing in the shell window.
If it was Linux I would check the syslog but Amiga? Is there any way to get more debug information out of AmiTCP?
Anothing thing is the Reset patch seems to be working as I tested with it disabled in user-startup and the card didnt fire up until I plugged it in AFTER booting then. Incidentally, do you need CardPatch AND CardReset? CardReset mentioned needing CardPatch but it didnt say anything more than that. I dont think its related to the problem though, I have both listed in user-startup and card is clearly initialising on some level, just not for AmiTCP.
Is it possibly something stupid like I need a newer version of setpatch? Other libraries AmiTCP depends on? This IS just a basic WB3.1 install. I think I might try softbooting kickstart 3.1 and see if it makes any difference, but I will have barely any RAM left then for testing.
[edit] Kickstart 3.1 did not make any difference whatsoever. :cry:
I think the problem is in the configuration of AmiTCP. It gives the error "no such interface", but I think it would say something like "can't open device" if there were a problem with the driver.
In my AmiTCP configuration, I use the number in the interface name in interfaces, so I'd have:
wlan0 dev=devs:networks/prism2.device
My actual line is:
eth1 DEV=DEVS:networks/prism2.device UNIT=0
Are you sure it isn't something silly like the AMITCP assign pointing to the wrong place? You could use SnoopDOS to check for problems opening libraies or files.
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Well, after installing AmiTCP 4 and a little manual configuration, everything is working! :-D So it seems prism2 does not work with AmiTCP 3. I began to suspect as much especially when ncafferkey posted and I noticed it was an AmiTCP 4 configuration. Also the fact that the AmiTCP 3 installer doesnt configure things correctly and 3 is a beta, I was just beginning to think (or at least hope) something was wrong with it.
Anyway, now with AmiTCP 4 I got NFS to mount my ADF directory on my Linux server and it worked first time (which for NFS on ANY system is bloody amazing). Im getting ~96k/sec copying ADF files to the Amiga over NFS, I peaked at 116k/sec over FTP copying a large lha file (averaging about 105k/sec) to my PC using AmiTCPs built-in FTP server, which doesnt seem too shoddy for a stock A1200 especially as these are both hard drive transfers. RAM disk I suspect will be even faster still.
I am having issues with "RPC call timed out" but I guess its to be expected a stock A1200 is just a tad too slow and NFS is a pain in the arse even on PC. Unfortunately smbfs just gave me a "software failure" and the main Samba package looks a tad large. I already lost 50% of the RAM on the A1200 from setting up AmiTCP and tidying up the icons a bit, and thats after moving ENV: over to the hard disk (temporary measure I hope until I manage to get some FAST RAM somehow but it saved me about 300k RAM at the cost of some speed).
Incidentally, I was doing some tests in WinUAE and was wonder exactly what data can FAST RAM contain when you have an accelerator? The reason I ask is I tested reading a large directory on my PC in WinUAE with emulated 128MB FAST RAM and it couldnt cope as it exhausted all the CHIP RAM. I presume it was because it was not patched to use the FAST RAM correctly or are there limitations? I dont think WinUAE emulates accelerators as such so the memory mapping is probably not right?
Anyway, thanks everyone for their help. I think its absolutely astonishing that a stock A1200 can connect to a wireless network nomatter what speed it does. It really show the flexibility of the Amiga and the reason we love it so much even now. It would take a hugely customised Linux-from-scratch build to achieve the same thing on an old PC with even twice as much RAM as the A1200 has and THAT would need an MMU.
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alexatkin wrote:
Incidentally, I was doing some tests in WinUAE and was wonder exactly what data can FAST RAM contain when you have an accelerator? The reason I ask is I tested reading a large directory on my PC in WinUAE with emulated 128MB FAST RAM and it couldnt cope as it exhausted all the CHIP RAM. I presume it was because it was not patched to use the FAST RAM correctly or are there limitations? I dont think WinUAE emulates accelerators as such so the memory mapping is probably not right?
There is no real emulation to an accelerator as such - they're basically transparent for the majority of things, so UAE set to the processor and Z3 memory the accelerator has should appear the very same to the software running on it. I suspect you were running out of chip ram because you're using a native screenmode in UAE for Workbench, and opening the large directory would involve a large number of icons, which Workbench puts in chip ram by default. The best solution as I see it would be to use graphics card emulation through Picasso96, making the UAE Amiga use the RTG memory that you give it in the prefs, but it's a while since I've toyed with it so I'm a bit hazy on the specifics...