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Author Topic: Best IDE to CF HDD solution  (Read 14961 times)

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Offline Coolhand

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Re: Best IDE to CF HDD solution
« on: June 25, 2013, 07:37:56 PM »
I was running a 4gb CF just fine with an unexpanded 1200, never noticed it was eating a lot of ram, or even any at all.

The speed of the Amiga IDE is a lot slower than most storage solutions so imho there's no need to spend lots on the faster speed etc.  if you just want one drive then go for the CF solution - get a sandisk ultra for compatibility... you can go for SD cards too, which are cheaper than CF but the adapter itself will cost more.

Offline Coolhand

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Re: Best IDE to CF HDD solution
« Reply #1 on: June 26, 2013, 08:34:54 PM »
dont buy one of those overpriced relics, unless you're just interested in collecting the hardware or something.  I don't really see how they can justify those prices when you can get a much better spanking new proper 128mb accellerator for less than a 4mb hawk or something, anyway.

you can run some older games, ones that came on a single disk for example, i think though that most (i'm assuming over 50% but perhaps more even?)games wont actually run on a 2mb amiga - the preloaded cards from ebayers don't cover this point at all, its all very misleading if you're not doing the research into it.

for a proper WHDload rig that will run anything you throw at it, you need at least the 128mb accellerator (yes all that ram is useful, for example, running the 'talky' cd32 beneath a steel sky from CF) (£80?) an adapter and decent CF (maybe 15 total - you can get cheaper from china, but thats what you'll pay for guaranteed amiga compatibility on ebay/uk stock - you'll also have to configure this and load all the WHD load games on yourself) and a WHDload license (another 15) without the license, a few games are crippled or wont run.

so £130 minimum, if you wanted to save some time and get a preload thats £145, (the preloaded cards don't come with a WHDload license either) though that gives you access to a huge library, you could do all that on a fairly old pc with emulator for just the cost of WHDL license but wheres the fun in that.;)

the other way is to get a device that will store and load adf images, a floppy emulator, that you install in place of your floppy drive, allows you to load stuff from virtual floppies, your amiga can't tell the difference.
« Last Edit: June 26, 2013, 08:48:14 PM by Coolhand »
 

Offline Coolhand

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Re: Best IDE to CF HDD solution
« Reply #2 on: July 12, 2013, 12:42:15 AM »
yes its a pain, I had my amiga case open for months.  IMHO, the best ways are:

1, get another CF card and a PCMCIA adapter and with fat95 FS use that like you would a memory stick (you can also easily add a further 4gb (possibly more) storage this way).

2, get a PCMCIA NIC (about 10 quid) and setup TCP/IP stack and dl all the stuff you want directly using the amiga.

they're both worth doing.

what do you want a 2mb SRAM for?

Offline Coolhand

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Re: Best IDE to CF HDD solution
« Reply #3 on: July 12, 2013, 04:02:30 PM »
Quote from: AmigaBruno;740645
It looks like I'll have to remove the card, then copy enough software onto it using my USB CF card reader/writer to keep me occupied for the time being.

If I connect my A1200 to the Internet, then I may find I start doing Internet related things on it most of the time, so that may not be a good idea.

I'm considering getting a 2Mb SRAM card because that seems to be the cheapest RAM upgrade at the moment at £45 compared with £71.99 for an ACA 1220 128Mb accelerator from Amigakit. It may be nice to have the ACA 1220 accelerator, but I don't actually need it. I've read that I DO need more than 2Mb RAM to run various software from a CF card using WHDload, though. I also need to go for some nights out, stop Virgin Media charging me so much, etc. I think I should start doing my personal budget in detail again and using Personal Finance Manager, like I used to. Does anyone else on here use this, or something else they really like?

BTW, I've run into my first problem using this device. I downloaded a copy of Deluxe Paint IV V4.5 AGA, which when booting from floppy displays the message that it's a version included with an A1200 pack and this disk is not for resale. There doesn't seem to be an HD installer included. I copied the program and artwork icons onto both my Work and Workbench partitions. When I try to run it from the CF card it always crashes, though. The Workbench Screen says I've got about 1.7Mb of RAM, then I usually get Guru Meditation #0000000B, which I've found out stands for "Opcode 1111 emulation", but I don't know what that means. Sometimes it crashes with a bright red screen and sometimes there's a more spectacular crash with some kind of interference pattern or loss of sync, horizontal or vertical hold, similar to crashes when using Relokick 1.4. I installed the English, German, and French locales, British, German, and French keyboards, and Epson printer drivers, but I don't know if these would affect it.


I can't help you with your software issues.... but every version of Dpaint I've tried can be 'installed' by copying the contents of the disks, i've never have to make 'assigns' or use an installer - there isn't one, AFAIK.

IMHO Don't waste your money on the 2mb melcard or whatever it is... I don't have one but it seems a waste of money... its probably even slower ram than chip ram. just stump up the extra 30 for the proper accelerator, even with the lowest model you'll probably have a 3x system speed boost, and 64 times the memory of the melcard.  just my 2p.