My Deneb is here! (a little excited here)

[mbrantley]

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

Good idea. Will do it.

[mbrantley]

David, don't let my own bit of confusion put you off the Deneb. It is a nice piece of "kit," and I am quite capable of going off course with even the best of instructions. Lloyd described the contents of the package very well. I'm sure I'll get my problems with the romupdates sorted out.

Darrin, if you followed the printed instructions letter for letter, you probably have the hardware hooked up right and the software installed. Now it's likely  a matter of fussing about in Trident in your Preferences drawer. Took me a small amount of head scratching to enable the DMA controller driver, but not too much.

The CD-ROM problem takes me back to setting up my 4000 a couple of years ago. With SCSI CD drives on my other Amigas, I've gotten them to work using asimcdfs, and then used the CD drive to install OS 3.9. The 3.9 installation seems to upgrade the asimcdfs installation to cachecdfs, which I prefer because it allows longer filenames. I deleted the asimcdfs files later.

On my 4000 I use the same setup as you with the onboard IDE controller. I seem to recall that my asimcdfs approach didn't work out well for me, but I don't remember why. What I think I wound up doing was downloading the demo version of IDEfix and using that to get CD support going. After installing 3.9, I got rid of all the extra IDEfix files and the lines it added near the start of startup-sequence.

[mbrantley]

Darrin,

I've been exactly where you are in many ways -- from messed up Amigas to a very ill wife (lupus, a very serious infection, colon rupture and permanent kidney failure last summer). She is doing better, and she and I send our best wishes to you and your wife.

Your Amiga(s) should be a stress reliever not a stress maker. I think you are trying to install too much at once. Seems like you do have a chicken or egg thing with the CD installation. My advice is to pull out the Buddha and run the hard drive and CD-ROM off the internal IDE. I don't think the Buddha is any better. I do have a Buddha card that has never worked for me. Try getting the CD working with IDEfix on the internal IDE header.

If you have multiple Amigas, consider getting a Parnet cable and download Parbench from Aminet. That's handy for transfering install files from Miggy to Miggy. AmigaKit sells Parnet cables, I noticed. I'd go for a 3.1 Kickstart, too, to allow a 3.9 install if you want.

Good luck with the Miggy stuff and best wishes for your wife's recovery.

[mbrantley]

The above assumed you're trying to run the CD from the Buddha. If that's not the case, then nevermind.

Would it help to post my CacheCDFS CDO mountlist?

[mbrantley]

Hurrah! Let us know how the USB CD-ROM goes. I've got a USB CD burner here but have not connected it to the Deneb. So far just a USB memory stick and (temporarily) a USB mouse.

As to my issue, I'm going to go try the romupdates again, one by one.

[mbrantley]

Darrin wrote:

IF you could, assuming you have your CD ROM drive set up as slave, can you please email me your CD0 DOSdriver file to "DARRIN01311 at AOL dot COM".  Cheers.

Will do in a bit.

[mbrantley]

I will have to order one of those from Tiger.

I sent you my CD0 Dosdrivers file by e-mail. Here's what's in it...

/***************************************************************/
/*  CacheCDFS mountlist entry © 1993 Elaborate Bytes, O. Kastl */
/***************************************************************/
   FileSystem     = L:CacheCDFS /* The name of the game */
   Device         = "scsi.device" /* Name of exec device driver */
   Unit           = 1 /* exec device unit */
   Flags          = 0 /* OpenDevice flags */
   BlocksPerTrack = 351000 /* Unused */
   BlockSize      = 2048 /* True, but unused */
   Mask           = 0x7ffffffe /* Memory mask for direct read */
   MaxTransfer    = 0x1000000 /* Maximum amount of bytes for direct read */
   Reserved       = 0 /* Unused */
   Interleave     = 0 /* Unused */
   LowCyl         = 0 /* Unused */
   HighCyl        = 0 /* Unused */
   Surfaces       = 1 /* Unused */
   Buffers        = 50 /* Number of cache lines */
   BufMemType     = 513 /* MEMF_PUBLIC|MEMF_24BITDMA */
   BootPri        = 2 /* Boot priority for MountCD */
   GlobVec        = -1 /* Do not change! */
   Mount          = 1 /* Mount it immediately */
   Priority       = 10 /* Priority of FileSystem task */
   DosType        = 0x43443031 /* Currently unused */
   StackSize      = 3000 /* Minimum stack required is 3000! */
   Control        = "MD=0 LC=1 DC=8 L LV AL LFC=1 S"
   /* The Control field is for special adjustments */
   /* L/S convert all file/volume names to lowercase */
   /* LV/S convert volume names to lowercase */
   /* AL/S Auto-Lower converts only non-Amiga CDs */
   /* LFC/N start converting at this character */
   /* LC/N/A number of blocks per cache line */
   /* DC/N/A number of cache lines for the data cache */
   /* MD/N/A number of blocks, when starting direct read, not using */
   /* the cache. 0 will be a reasonable default (LC*DC+1) */
   /* S/S Do SCSI direct commands, no Trackdisk like commands! */
   /* NC/S Do NOT use TD_ADDCHANGEINT, poll for DiskChange! */
   /* M/S Issue a TD_MOTOR (OFF) command after read */

[mbrantley]

You'll whip the problem eventually.

Now to my issue....

The problem seems to be centered on the scsi.device romupdate. If I flash to Deneb with all the romupdates except for scsi.device, the 4000 boots with no guru. This is with me running the setpatch command unaltered, so I am still double (or is it triple?) clutching.

Is there a way to tell setpatch to only run the scsi.device update and leave the others on the Deneb? There is an advantage to that right?

Or is there some other OS3.9 scsi.device file I should use to flash the Deneb with? Something somebody can e-mail me?

thevideojunkie AT comcast DOT net  (to follow Darrin's wise no-spam measures!)

[mbrantley]

Darrin wrote:
I hope you realise that I'm not even going to screw with the Flash ROM until I see you work it out.   :lol:

Hehehe. I hope you realize how close I am to forgetting about it. :-P  Really, my machine works just fine without it. At best I'm only going through all this to save a very few seconds at bootup!

Actually, I'm just stalling. The daunting project that faces me is getting Samba file sharing working between my networked Amigas.

That's another thread for another day, but soon.

[mbrantley]

Lloyd,

You're awesome. Please send it to me: thevideojunkie AT comcast DOT net

--Mike

[mbrantley]

Lloyd, thanks very, very much. That version of scsi.device does the job, and now I'm running with NOROMUPDATE on the setpatch line. It does shave a small amount of time from bootup.

I've learned some stuff here that explains to me why I can't get my SCSI port on my 1200 working. I forget which SCSI expansion it is, but I think it was by the Dataflyer people. It plugs into the IDE header and allows five SCSI devices and two IDE devices. I can't get it working with OS 3.9, and that's why I no longer have a SCSI CD-ROM attached to my 1200.

I think it must patch scsi.device to make it work, but I'm relying on the newest OS setpatch to patch scsi.device to allow larger hard drives. When I was fighting this I was trying to do it by skipping the romupdate for scsi.device, which caused problems with the hard drive.

Oh, well. The 1200 is OK without a CD-ROM drive since it is on the network with a PCMCIA card. Now to get file sharing working...

[mbrantley]

countzero wrote:
also having USB ports on the back of your unit is rather awkward. Does somebody have a good idea for a A4000 case mod ?

I'm planning on finding a nice looking powered USB hub that I wouldn't mind having seen on the desk. Then I can plug stuff in without the blind reach around, plus I won't have to worry about drawing too much power from the Deneb USB ports.

if I find the deneb put my x-surf useless, I may put them in sale and buy another for my a3000

For the moment I have an X-Surf and a Deneb in my 4000 and a X-Surf in my 3000, with plans to buy two more X-Surfs for my 2500 and 2000. But it might make more sense to buy another Deneb for my 3000, then use a USB networking solution on the two Deneb machines and move the X-Surf cards to the 2500 and 2000.

I'm just waiting for somebody else to do the USB networking thing first and tell me what to buy and how to install it. Same with USB/AHI audio. :-)

[mbrantley]

 :-o

[mbrantley]

Darrin, glad your wife is home. Hope the doctors get to the bottom of what ails her soon.

Also pleased to hear you got the USB CD-ROM working so well. The Deneb really does drag us into the new century when it comes to modern, common peripherals. If I didn't already save several external NEC SCSI CD drives from the trash at work, I'd go with USB for optical drives sure.

My final vote of confidence for Deneb and Poseidon: I ordered a second Deneb from AmigaKit yesterday and a couple of Belkin F5D5050 USB Ethernet adapters from Amazon today.

Once I get networking through USB/Deneb working on two Amigas, I will have freed up two X-Surf cards for two more of my Amigas.

[mbrantley]

amigadave wrote:
Let us know how the USB networking goes on the Amiga, what was the price for the USB networking adapters?

Will do. The Belkin adapters were $21.27 apiece, and I ordered two. I was hoping to find one in town today (Staples had this on their Web site), but I had no luck with that. So this will be a project for next week, maybe.

Edit: I guess one of these posts made me a "Technoid." Gotta get me a propeller hat.
 :-P