My Deneb is here! (a little excited here)

[mbrantley]

The postman just brought me a package from Great Britain. It could only be... the Deneb I ordered from AmigaKit for my 4000. (And another X-Surf card for my 3000, since I've got to spread the love among the Miggies.) It's thrilling to be able to buy a newly developed piece of classic Amiga hardware this far into the 21st century. I'll be just as thrilled when I can order Jens' upcoming scandoubler for the 1200.

Will report how I make out. Got to go move the heavy 20-inch Sony CRT (a recent Craigslist buy) off the 4000... Oh, my back....!

[mbrantley]

The serial number is hand written on the Deneb card. It's either 0073 or maybe 0013. It could be 0043, but I don't think so.

On the back is printed: KEEP THE FIRE BURNING! We all do our best. :-)

[mbrantley]

Yep, it's a "1" -- so lucky 13 for me. Checked it with AmigaKit order history.

Page 2 of manual mentions proper disposal of the product after it has reached the end of its life. Are they mad? I've got a Vic-20 I've never thrown out.  :-P

The 4000 just booted up with the Deneb in "Rescue Mode" as instructed. I see the installation volume on the Workbench. Gotta go get busy...

[mbrantley]

Got up to the Trident configuration screen, but I promised my daughter I will stop playing with the computer and go play with her in the yard. Will get back to it a little later. Sorry for the suspense, guys. :-)

Man, those laserbeam sound effects on the Deneb intro screen scared me to death. I had the sound up high and the monitor turned away from me when it started, so I didn't realize what was happening on the screen. I thought I was frying something good!

[mbrantley]

amigadave wrote:
Take your time and play with that daughter of yours for as long as she stays interested.  They grow up so fast and then they don't want to have anything to do with you, unless it is to ask for money, or borrow the car.  Then they are gone and you are lucky to see them on holidays and birthdays.

Indeed, that's good advice. She's four, about to turn five, and this afternoon was all about having watergun fights on the front lawns of the houses on the street with young children. We had fun.

When you do have time to get back to the Deneb, let us all know what you are going to use.  Are your primary reasons for getting it to use USB keyboard and mouse, or was the KickFlash a primary reason to boot the 3.9OS without the usual double-clutching, or do you have a CSPPC and you are going to boot MorphOS for PuP from the Deneb?

There's no Amgia PPC gear here (although there are a number of PPC Macs). I can't afford to buy the used Amiga PPC hardware at the prices they command, so I'm running a strictly OS 3.9 Amiga shop for now running on the mighty (ahem) family of Motorola 680x0 chips.

I like typing on classic Amiga keyboards and shoving the old Amiga mice around the desk, so I won't use USB stuff for input. Already have a serial Wacom tablet, too.

For the moment the Deneb will get used for mass storage devices. I wasted some time tonight trying to figure out why my 4GB USB thumb drive was only showing up as 1.8GB formatted, then I remembered I actually did buy a 2GB thumb drive and not a 4GB one. That's plugged into the into USB connector on the Deneb.

I've got various external USB hard drives and CD/DVD drives here that get moved around. Now the Amiga can join the party. Then there are printers, although I am hopeful I can  eventually print over my network to the printers shared by a Mac.

I am looking forward to hearing someone's report on an AHI audio device connected to the Deneb USB. I want to know which one to buy and what it will do for me.

Then there's always cheap USB network interfaces, which could potentially free my expensive X-Surf in the 4000 for duty in another of my Amigas.

Lots of possibilities.

[mbrantley]

An observation: It caused me some head scratching to figure out how to enable DMA as opposed to PIO mode. Did get it figured out though.

Some questions: How do I or can I prevent the DENEB intro animation (with the neat lasers) from playing at each bootup? I think it's playing twice for me at bootup. I'd rather not be delayed.

How do I prevent the "Still Alive" requester from appearing? Is it a matter of deleting the material from the flash?

What is this "double clutch" I see referenced above? How should I use the onboard flash memory to my best advantage in OS 3.9?

Finally, a sentiment of gratitude: Thanks to the Deneb makers for creating this product and thanks to the resellers for getting it into the marketplace.

[mbrantley]

mboehmer_e3b wrote:
Simply do a download of all FlashROM contents (Luciferin), create an empty local list and "upload".
Both the DenebIntro and the requester for StillAlive are gone then.
Michael

That did the trick. Thanks, Michael!

Now that the Deneb is up and running on the 4000, I'm off to get the X-Surf working on the 3000... It's like Christmas in Mike's Amiga computer lab.

[mbrantley]

Still enjoying the Deneb in my 4000 and I want to put Kickstart in the flash to avoid the "double clutch" as mentioned aboved.

Not wanting to mess this up as I seem prone to do these days (!) so would someone mind terribly listing excactly what steps I should follow to accomplish that.

I moved the bblank and a1000jingle modules onto the flash. Man, I haven't heard those A1000 test tones in many, many years. My 1000 has has a Kwickstart II with 1.3 and 2.04 ROMs in it since circa 1992, and that's when that little "jingle" disappeared from my daily routine. Now it's back on the 4000. :-)

But I'm hearing it twice. That's the double clutch, huh?

[mbrantley]

Thanks, Lloyd.

I ran into trouble, however. I flashed with the romupdate drawer contents as you advised and then changed the setpatch command to NOROMUPDATE. Then upon reboot I got a visit from the Guru.

Rebooting with LMB down to skip the flashrom brought an error message that scsi.device can't access all my partitions until I edit the startup-seuqnce to remove NOROMUPDATE option.

I removed the romupdates from the flash and everything is back to normal.

Just to be sure, I did all the steps again and same problems. Then I put everything back to normal again.


No doubt I am making a simple mistake somewhere.

[mbrantley]

MozzerFan wrote:
Edit: Check if your current setpatch command skips some
romupdate, for example scsi.device. If it does, don't
put this file in the flashrom.

Just noticed your edit. I don't think I'm skipping scsi.device, but I'll look again tomorrow. It's off to bed now before I mess something up!

Thanks. Will get back to it.

[mbrantley]

Is it the scsi.device update that allows for larger hard disks? If so, I do need it. Interestingly, I found that I used to have IDEfix installed, but the lines are commented out of my startup-sequence.

I guess if I can't eliminate the double clutch it's no big deal. I thought this was causing the A1000 jingle file to play twice (and the Deneb intro to play twice while I still had it on the Deneb flash), but it turns out that was only for the first boot after flashing the file. No double plays now.

[mbrantley]

MozzerFan wrote:
Did you try to flash it with the romupdates and power off
your system, like I said? The rom-updates normally can be

I *think* so, but just to be sure I will try again when I get home. Fortunately, it's easy enough to recover if I mess it up again. Will report back this evening.

Thanks, Lloyd.

[mbrantley]

Darrin wrote:
I just started reinstalling my copy of 3.1 as I couldn't get the previous one to recognise the CD ROM.  I assume that the A4000 allows 2 devices on the internal IDE connector and the CD0: device needs to be set as Unit 1 if the CD ROM is configured as slave?

Yes, that's right. I have just that setup using CacheCDFS, and I've had it working before with asimcdfs.

[mbrantley]

MozzerFan wrote:
Did you try to flash it with the romupdates and power off
your system, like I said?

Gave it another go, ensuring that I cut the power before rebooting, and I got the same results. Copied the romupdates to the flash-rom and used NOROMUPDATE with setpatch. Got the Guru at bootup.

I've put it back like it was for now and I am content if a bit puzzled as to what the problem could be.

You want to see how inept I can be? In a few days I will start a "Please help me, for God's sake!" thread about file sharing between my Amigas. I have three of my Amigas on the network now with plans to get two more X-Surf cards in coming months. And I can't get 'em talking to each other.

But that's for another day. Don't say you weren't warned!

[mbrantley]

MozzerFan wrote:
Well, you could try to add just one romupdate at a time

Good idea. Will do it.