A1200 and Dazzle 4-in-1 PCMCIA Adapter

[JLF65]

Some months ago, I dug out my A1200 and upgraded the harddrive to 20G. I wanted to do some work on it, but lacking a CD, it was hard to get stuff transferred to or from it. Rather than getting some wacky PCMCIA CDROM, I just bought a 4-in-1 PCMCIA media adapter.

This works great. Get cfd.lha from AmiNet, and fat95.lha (if you don't already have it). The first gives you compactflash.device so that media cards in the adapter appear like removeable drives on the computer. The second allows the Amiga to mount the cards, which are normally always FAT formatted.

Once the software is in place, just stick a media card in the adapter (I am currently using a 256M SD card), then plug the adapter into the PCMCIA slot on the side of the A1200. The media card pops right up on Workbench, and transfers are pretty fast. Just pull it out when you are done and it dismounts, just like other removeable media on the Amiga.

On the PC side, you can use the adapter if you have a PCMCIA slot (like a notebook), or get a PC media card adapter (I have a USB one). You can also use a digital camera. I often use my Vivicam hooked to my PC via USB to transfer files to/from the SD card.

It's like having a CDRW, but faster and smaller.  :-D

Next month, I'm getting a 1G SD card. They're under $50 now.  8-)

So to sum things up, just google for the Dazzle DM-9400. You'll find them all over for $30 to $35 shipped. Mine was $32.35 with shipping, brand new. So if you've gotten frustrated trying to get a CD/DVD for your A1200 or A600, you might consider a media card adapter instead.

[amigagr]

good idea but i have to say that cdrom is usefull too in other sectors and at least at half of the price these days.

[Darrin]

Great information.  It's always good to know about PC hardware that will also work with the Amiga.  Cheers.

[InTheSand]

Yeah, thanks for sharing the info.

CF and SD cards are so useful! I use a USB multi-reader on my A1200 via the Subway USB interface. Works very well, though I dare say a PCMCIA-based solution would be the cheaper option.

 - Ali

[amigagr]

yes but the usb can be used for a lot of other hardware and give a lot of new possibilities.

[CD32Freak]

Great, thanks for the info! :-)

[JLF65]

My A1200 is one of the original run and doesn't have the clockport header, so I can't use USB without putting it in a tower case and getting one of those expensive expansion chasis. While I have SCSI on the PPC, I don't have a cable, plus SCSI CDROMs are rather expensive. I could have made some hack for an IDE CDROM, but that would have either required a tower conversion, or a nasty external hookup.

Any way you look at it, using the PCMCIA media adapter was my best option short of spending several hundred dollars. I was letting folks in the same position know that this particular hardware has been tested and works just in case they were looking for something cheap and effective, but scared to try it without reassurance from someone who had it.

[amigagr]

no one blames you for anything, of course anyone of us doing the best he can for his amiga

[beller]

Thanks so much for the info!  I just went to CompUSA and had one put on hold with a 1gb sd card!  I'm moving into a new A1200 so I've been trying to squeeze stuff onto floppies!  I was about to move Miami over this evening...this will make that much simpler.

This will do fine until I can get a blizzard and scsi drive!  Heck, I've been using this sort of file transfer on my C64 for a bit now...didn't occur to me this would also be available on the Amiga!

This board rocks!

Bob

[JLF65]

That's why I posted my results. You know how much trouble it is filling a 20G harddrive with a floppy?  :lol:  At least now I can transfer 243M (formatted size) at a time, and 1G some time next month.

I saw that C64 adapter while looking around for an adapter for the A1200. I've got my C64 in a box somewhere. Maybe I should get one of those as well.  :-D  All this stuff may be old, but it's still a lot of fun to work with.

Boards like this are great because sometimes you'll run across something that really helps. That's how I found the Dazzle - I read a post where someone mentioned using the 6-in-1 adapter. That's the USB model. However, the 4-in-1 adapter said it was PCMCIA Type II compatible - a PC Card type adapter rather than Cardbus type adapter, so I decided to give it a try.

[amigakit]

Similar to our PCMCIA to CF adapter package

[beller]

I picked up my Dazzle last night and got it up and running fairly quickly.  One thing that wasn't clear from the ReadMe's was how to access the sd disk.  I thought...plug in adapter, boot the card driver, load sd card.  Nope!

After reading the posts again I figured out that the Amiga could only sense a PCMCIA card change!  So the only way to get the disk recognized was to boot the CF0: device and then insert the pcmcia card WITH the memory card in place.

Worked like a charm after that!  BTW, I had a 1 gb sd card around so I thought I'd try it.  Either it's too big and I didn't wait for it to validate, or it's just too big.  The system wouldn't recognize it.  Is 256mb the largest usable card size?

Bob

[JLF65]

I don't have any cards (yet) larger than 256M, so I can't say for certain. It's possible that the 1G card is simply formatted in a way that compactflash.device doesn't handle. I know that some flash devices will have multiple partitions on them, and getting them to work (on linux for example) basically entails removing the extra partitions. You might check that out. If you don't have anything important on it, you should try to format the SD card on the Amiga. From the readme for cfd, it should be able to do that.

As to disk changes with the media, I suspect that autodetecting a change only happens when the adapter is unplugged and replugged. The readme does say that is the best way to do it, but that unplugging and replugging the media alone is perfectly okay. I further suspect it would show if you ran "c:DiskChange cf0:" after plugging in the media.

[JLF65]

Just an update. I've gotten two more SD cards. Insert the SD card into the adapter, then insert the adapter into the A1200. The SD card is recognized automatically. When you remove the adapter, you need to run "diskchange cf0:" to get it to recognize the SD card has been removed. It will recognize the next card insert automatically. It's just removals it seems to have trouble sensing automatically.

The cards tested are:

256MB TwinMOS Ultra-X 66X
512MB A-Data Turbo-SD 150X
2GB A-Data SD 50X

The 2GB card is a real deal - $60 for a 2GB SD card. A-Data makes a 150X version of the 2GB card for $25 more, but the A1200 port isn't fast enough to take advantage of the extra speed. I got the 150X 512MB card just to check if the high speed cards work with the Dazzle. So far, the three cards I've gotten work fine despite three different speeds, and three different sizes. If I get more cards, it'll probably be more of the slower 2GB cards. They're a great bargain.