Using Iomega Zip drive with A500 Plus

[ChaosLord]

FYI: A500 won't drive the parallel port over 40K bytes per second.  40K is what my 25Mhz A3000 used to get.  A plain A500 might be only 25 or 30K I just can't remember.  A floppy drive gets 11K / sec when reading or writing whole tracks (like when copying a disk).

My 060 based Amigas get 60K/s Parallel port speeds.

All PAR: speeds measured with ParNet.  One of the grooviest networking solutions ever made for the Amiga!  1980s technology rulez forever!


A lousy SCSI controller will get 1000K / sec

A decent one will get 2000K / sec

A great one will get more.

I can't remember what speeds I used to get on my A500 SCSI or A2000 SCSI.  Anyway it depends entirely on specifically which controller you used.

[ChaosLord]

The absolute cheapest way would be to pick up a cheap 486 or pentium I laptop from somewhere (don't pay more than $30) and use it via a parallel port cable or null modem cable to act as a file server for your A500.  I'm thinking of something like Amiga Explorer or the old Siamese system.  Essentially, the laptop would be like an external hard drive for your A500.

Heheheh that is what I did!  (And I think he can score something much better than a 486!)

In 2004 Fry's was selling complete brand new PC's for $99.00 on National Capitalism day.  They had 2 PS/2 ports, 4 USB ports, a VGA port and PAR port but I used the Ethernet port instead because Ethernet is massively faster than PAR and my A1200T has a PCI Ethernet card in it that I got for free (they typically sold for $5.00 back then).  It came with a 40GB hard drive, mouse, keyboard and a complete garbage set of speakers.

So I bought the PC and an Ethernet cable and networked them together so my pc could be the file slave of my mighty A1200T. MUAHAHAHA!  
I have been buying CHEAP-O hard drives for the PC ever since.  Using a stack of 2TB drives nowadays.  My ethernet card is a crappy 10 Mbit one so can't do more than 1000K / second max.  I forgot to upgrade to Ethernet 100 Mbit.  Silly me.

But in any case, if you are going to store your media across a parallel port anyway then you may as well use a cheap PC.  I am sure you can buy a junk PC with a 40GB hard drive in it for really cheap.   My 40 GB pc was $99.00 brand new (it came with a 1500 Mhz cpu and all the ports listed above).  I still use that computer right now.  $99.00 in 2004 should mean like FREE in 2013.

If u do a parnet to pc solution you should end up with 37GB or more of storage space for your Amiga.  + u can add more hard drives to the pc.  Like just throw a 2TB drive in there when you get the $$$.

Like the other poster said, only pay $30.00 or less for such a PC solution.  You will get tired of the slow speed after a while.  A 7.15909Mhz 68000 can only drive the PAR port at a certain speed.

You could get one free if you had a lot of friends you could ask.
Check Craig's List
Check Freecycle  Ppl throw away old PC's all the time.  They are too slow to play "modern" games on so ppl just toss them in the garbage.
Go to the local churches and post up a "HELP I NEED UR OLD JUNK PC CALL ME AT 123-456-7890 THANX!"  This method might take a few weeks for someone to notice the note you posted though.  My brother got an old junky laptop free that way.  It prob has only a 10GB drive in it tho and Windoze 98 probably.  He tried to give it to me but I didn't want it.  I will ask him if he still has it , if it is broken, if it has a par port.  I think he threw it away when he moved.  If he still has it and it has a PAR port I will mail it to u if u r in USA, else maybe.

[ChaosLord]

I highly recommend an A500 side-port SCSI connected to anything.  An old 4GB SCSI hard drive or whatever you want to connect it to, zip, cf, sd, etc.

The A500 side port SCSI is what we all used back in the olden days.

[ChaosLord]

@AmigaBruno

I hope someone will sell you a super cheap A1200 so that you can Dpaint to the max in 256 colors.  I luv Dpaint.  And I loved it even more when I got an AGA machine.

What sorts of things exactly do you pixel in Dpaint?

Do u do static gfx or do u like to do animations?

[ChaosLord]

I'm not looking to replace my A500 Plus with an A1200, but would keep both of them. The A500 Plus is quite different to the A1200. I don't think that 100% of software that will run on an A500 Plus will run on an A1200, no matter what you do. I wonder if one possible storage solution would be to connect my A500 Plus to an A1200 with a CF card installed on it, then save data from the A500 Plus to the A1200 CF card.

That would absolutely work!
Positively!
Both A500 and A1200 have a PAR port so if you get a friendly little PARnet cable and run Parnet on both machines (free from Aminet) then you have a super easy and friendly network between your 2 machines.  Parnet is completely groovy.  You can copy files back and forth no problem.

The thing is, if you could get an A1200 then you would be solving many problems for yourself all at once.  You would have a ParNet capable setup.  You would have 16.7 million colors to draw with instead of 4096.  You would have 2MB RAM instead of 1MB.  You would have an IDE hard disk controller so that when someone gives u their old "worthless" 20GB hard drive you will be in heaven.  Plus you would have a free CPU accelerator.  Plus other nifty advantages that can save you $$.


Any gfx software you are likely to run is going to work on the A1200 just fine.  Actually gfx software works better on the A1200 since it has a faster CPU and more chipram.

The stuff I've done in Deluxe Paint recently is some figures of superheroes copied from art books and just one original piece of artwork of a stained glass window. This was a copy of a chalk type pastel painting originally done on black paper. Someone at a meeting said "You didn't draw that with the MOUSE, did you?!" and I replied that I did. I haven't done any animations on this Amiga, especially because some of the examples supplied won't run. I just get an error message that there's not enough RAM to animate. This is a standard A500 Plus with 1Mb RAM, which is all chip RAM. I wonder if Deluxe Paint III expects there to be some fast RAM.

When doing animations it always helps to have more RAM.  If you stick to making AnimBrushes they use a ton less memory when you animate a small size object.

[ChaosLord]

Apart from this, I'll be distracted by other programs, especially web browsers, but with the Amiga A500 Plus I can just sit there are do some artwork with no distractions from the Internet.

hehe Some ppl will think u r weird for saying that.  But it is totally true!  When I am on or near my internet computer it is just tooooo tempting for me to go check the forums real quick.  or to check my email real quick.  Its really hard for me to get any work done.

[ChaosLord]

I'm using DPaint III. The date given in the manual is Copyright 1989. It mentions EHB modes, but I don't think there's any way of using the ECS 1280 horizontal resolution modes. This would require a patch, because those chips weren't released until 1991. Does DPaint IV support those modes?

Just an FYI: you can forget about doing animations in 1280 modes on an A500.  The ECS chipset is just tremendously slow in those modes.   In any event you can't even display a 1280 screen in EHB as that would take more bandwidth than exists.

If you are interested in 1280 resolution screens then you really need AGA.

You can draw static graphics in 1280x512x256 colors in Dpaint 5 (maybe 4 too) and it will be a bit sluggish but still completely usable.

If you cut the colors down to 64 then it will be even faster.

[ChaosLord]

I found the solution for u!  IDE68k is out!

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?p=726957#post726957