SpiderUSB, OS3.9 and a printer..?

[Leifern]

Hi,

I've been thinking of getting a printer to go with my not-yet-installed SpiderUSB. But i've been reading around a little.. Do i really need to register both Poseidon and TurboPrint in order to use an USB printer? And if i do, can i use ANY printer? Laser and inc..?

Also, can someone please give me a little intro to using USB (Storage, Printer, tablets).
Thanks.. ;-)

[Dandy]

Leifern wrote:
Hi,

I've been thinking of getting a printer to go with my not-yet-installed SpiderUSB. But i've been reading around a little.. Do i really need to register both Poseidon and TurboPrint in order to use an USB printer? And if i do, can i use ANY printer? Laser and inc..?

Also, can someone please give me a little intro to using USB (Storage, Printer, tablets).
Thanks.. ;-)

Well, I assume you are going to install your SpiderUSB in an Mediator.

I have an Spider2 USB 2.0 highspeed in my A4000PPC with Mediator and I have to say that this is really what I missed all the time.

I can only advise you to register Poseidon - its not very expensive and its worth the money. Chris Hodges (platon42) did a very good job and I would say its a very nice move from him to sell his product to Mediator users and so enablíng us to have USB working, although this was not planned from the beginning.

Regarding TurboPrint - IIRC, this is the only printer driver system for the Amiga that has support for USB printers (above TP version 7.0).
If you don't want to buy it new - I have a redundant registered copy of v7 lying around (that I got when I bought a second hand A1200) that I could send you.
You can easily upgrade from this version to the version 7.x that has support for the USB printer of your choice for a special upgrade price.
But you should of course check which USB printers are supported by the latest TurboPrint version before you go and buy one, as not every printer is supported.

USB usage:
Well, I already used USB-sticks (1 gB), mp3-player (1 gB), several DigiCams (1 gB) and external HD - all worked flawlessly except my latest DigiCam (Practika), which gives me a "Not a DOS disk" currently.

I'm still in contact with Chris Hodges to work out what causes this error message and to get this dammn thing working as the other DigiCams (even an other "Practika" among them) did before...
 :-?

Normally all you have to do is just to plug your USB device in and be happy.
I already tried an BlueTooth stick - it gets recognized, but unfortunately there currently is no BlueTooth stack for the Amiga - but as far as I know Chris Hodges is working on one.

One more thing:
In my system I have a 4-port-USB2.0-Hub for the front panel connected to the Spider2, which shows a strange behaviour most of the time:
When I copy files to my USB stick or mp3-player, I get an read/write error after copying 2-5 files - then I unplug the stick, re-plug it to a different port and click "Retry" in the pop-up error message window and so on.
A little bit annoying sometimes if you have to copy a bigger amount of data, but in the end all the copied files are O.K..
This only happens when I plug the devices into that front panel hub - if I plug them directly into one of the Spider ports at the back of my tower I don't have these probs.

[CLS2086]

Spider2 USB 2.0 highspeed

yes usb2.0 compatible but in low low speed mode.
Only highspeed in usb 1.1 mode.

[Dandy]

CLS2086 wrote:

Spider2 USB 2.0 highspeed

yes usb2.0 compatible but in low low speed mode.
Only highspeed in usb 1.1 mode.

Hmmmmmm - well, I didn't do any benchmarking - but from my feeling I would say its not significant slower to transfer data from/to my USB-stick/mp3-player than the USB2.0 highspeed on my Dell PC @2.5gHz at work...

[keropi]

I had a spider2.0 ... there is no way it can reach real high-speed usb2 transfer rate... amiga is the limit.

[Leifern]

My SpiderII performs at about the same rate as my SCSI.. About 500kb/sek.. Insanely slow!!;-)

But it works like a dream with Poseidon though.. Great stuff!!

[adolescent]

@Leifern

What type of SCSI?  That's horrible speed!

[Leifern]

Thats the Blizzard SCSI-II connected to my 1260.. It's always been that slow.. Wierd!

[marcfrick2112]

Leifern: Your SCSI is way too slow...Just checked my speed
with SysInfo, Even my lowly Zip drive does about 998K/second,
my Quantum Fireball HD does 3MB/second. I also have a 1260,
but my SCSI module is one made by DCE...it should be identical
to the Phase5 module, right? I know there is some prog. on
Aminet called 1230scsifix.lha, I believe. It was not stable
on my system, but maybe you should try it. Also, check for other
SCSI utils., the 1230 module is the best SCSI I have ever had
for my Amiga, funny that you have some trouble. My config:
1200 PowerTower P5 1260/50MHz 1230 SCSI, 2MB chip, 128MB Fast,
OS3.9 w/BB1 and 2, 8.5GB IDE HD, 2.1GB SCSI HD, Zip drive 100
MB SCSI, etc....

[pVC]

Leifern: should definitely be much faster.. I'd say roughly about 10 times faster At least I get such values on my b1260 with scsi-kit. I'd check version of 1230scsi.device and settings for your scsi devices. I'd recommend V8.5 or later for 1230scsi.device and "reselection" and "synchron" for scsi options for all devices. Especially if you have more than one device Otherwise it could be like having "ide emulation" turned on as someone nicely said once
And you have terminated your scsi-chain correctly?

[Boot_WB]

The scsi speed depends whether you're talking about the speed shown by a benchmarking tool such as scsispeed, or whether you're talking about actual transfer speed of files.

In the first instance you will probably get benchmark speeds of around 8.5 - 9 MB/s (with sufficiently high buffer settings) independent of the filesystem used.
If you try - for example - dragging a 100mb file into your ram disk, then copying/moving that to a device on your scsi chain the speed will probably be around 1-2 MB/s - maybe 3MB/s at a push.

Theoretical vs actual speeds. The scsi bus may be capable of transferring at that speed, however add the inefficiencies of filesystem, transfer protocols, disk access speeds, etc and the actual transfer speed is a lot lower than the nice high figures shown by scsispeed. At least that's my experience.

However, nearly 100% cpu free whilst doing large transfers and still significantly faster than the on-board-PI/O IDE port, and up to 7 devices (including scanners, etc). SCSI is still well worth the investment IMHO. Just don't expect 8MB/s read/write speeds on your hard disks :-).

Might be worth checking that you have sufficient buffers assigned, and that your Mask settings aren't restricting you to chipram or 24-bit ram - this topic may be useful insight into the settings.