Hopefully when I can make more progress when the Gotek arrives.

Very handy devices. Take a bit of getting used to though, they do change the game a lot.

If you are doing emulation in a desktop, you might consider putting a scsi card in that. That way you could setup a new drive on an emulator. On the other hand, drives setup that way aren't guaranteed to work on genuine hardware.

I was a bit mystified why you were using onboard scsi when you have a faster Z3. The trick there is to fit just an external terminator to the onboard scsi, so it can quickly check no drives are connected. EDT: Might not work on the Z3 though. In theory you can swap over a scsi hard drive partition with a Rigid Disk Block and access it on any Amiga wiith any HD controller, assuming it's compliant in size with whatever driver is used on the target Amiga. In theory anything done on the onboard scsi shoud be go to go on the Z3, but no guarantees that anything setup on the Z3 will boot on the onboard scsi.

The thing with termination is - "last device on the cable" changes when you have external drives. If it's occasional use, it makes more sense to terminate the internal drive and the external drive. Because sometimes, the internal drive is the last device on the cable, and sometimes it isn't.

Real Kickstart on an A3000 makes drive replacement a lot easier.

Just tried to use the Z3 to access the CDRom Drive. A3000 wont boot with drive plugged into Z3. I get a black screen. A3000 boots with Z3 in place but without CDRom drive plugged into it.

Couple of questions:

1. The Z3 has the terminating resistor packs in place - should these be removed? The onboard SCSI has the packs removed with them located on the SCSI drive.

2. When using HDToolbox it reports two SCSI devices. SCSI.Device and 2nd.SCSI.Device. It does not report Z3SCSI.device - should it?

Weed

1.Usually not. The convention is that the first device (controller) and last device on a scsi cable have the terminators.

2. HDToolbox has a tooltype in the icon to set which scsi.device it is working with (and so each controller). It defaults to scsi.device. On an A3000, that is the onboard scsi controller. Different kickstart version to A1200 or A4000, which obviously have IDE controllers onboard.

I suspect the Amigsa is having an issue with booting from the onboard scsi, which again is a default behaviour.

I did ask if the A3000 had real 3.1 ROMs or whether it loads up Kickstart from hard drive (original ROMs). These latter systems need care when changing the hard drive, as they need scsi boot partitions set up, They don't have the usual early startup menu (hold down both mouse buttons on booting), they give a choice of detected operating systems to boot from, and will load superkickstart disks from floppy if they can't find a suitable hard drive using the onboard scsi controller.

Bottom line is - your hard drive is almost dead if not totally dead already. Needs replacing. Might be causing an issue just by being plugged in to the onboard controller.

You can download Diskmasher images of the Z3 controller install floppies (various versions from earliest to most recent);-

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/fastlane

Even a manual  if you can be bothered to translate it. The text can be copied and pasted so this isn't so difficult.

Hi all thanks for the ideas. I have tried connecting the CDRom to the Z3 but no joy. Reckon thats cause I dont have the z3 SCSI device. I could create a boot disk using Workbench and adding the Z3 Scsi devise to that but I still need to get "3Scsi device on the floppy. I dont think Ive got the install disk for the Z3. So back to square one.

What I have stumbled across is the Gotek drive. Ive ordered on and will connect it as a second floppy in the A3000 drive bay and then I can use a USB stick to get .adfs from the PC to the Amiga. Gotek was reasonably priced but it'll take about a week to arrive.

Fingers crossed that will work. 

Best.

Weed

Yep, IDEFix97 works fine for me plus Zip0 (Amiga) and ZipC0 (PC) dosdriver Mountlists (names maybe wrong but similar) off an old AmigaActive Cover CD I think.

I think you can also make your own! See below:

https://lyonsden.net/how-to-use-an-iomega-zip-100-drive-with-an-amiga-1200/

Curious about how Follix is progressing? This new preview should quench your thrist...

PREVIEW #3

Latest changes:
 1. added options menu;
 2. added loading/saving;
 3. added option to restart from any of the levels previously completed;
 4. added trail graphical effect;
 5. added music and mute options;
 6. added title screen information overlay;
 7. improved graphics;
 8. improved sounds;
 9. made various internal improvements.

Notes about the changes:
 1. I decided to keep it minimal and stylish, adding new colors and - of course - more transparencies;
 2. the game tries to load the data from both a local file and through nonvolatile.library, and then uses the best data found; the game tries to save the data to a local file and, failing that, tries with nonvolatile.library; at the moment, the only piece of information loaded/saved is the number of the highest level completed;
 5. the music is the one I made for ArtPazz and, therefore, just a placedholder;
 6. at the moment, it is used only to show the "about" page, but I plan to use it to show also times/scores/records (if I ever decide to add them - I haven't made my mind about this yet); technically, it adds a 75% opaque layer on top of the background and of the alpha-cycling logo;
 8. in particular, I have improved the quality of the speech samples, but still they are affected by a light hiss due to quantization, so I'm thinking to use 14 bit playback for them.

General note: the sudden game-overs in the video are not due to a bug or a mistake, but are simply the result of pressing [ESCAPE]