Some questions for the PCMCIA gurus

[Tenacious]

1.  Could someone recommend a PCMCIA to CompactFlash card converter known to work on Amigas.  I just want to move pics from my camera, not replace the hard drive.

2.  The PCMCIA is mapped into fast memory on the A600.  Is the PCMCIA disabled on the A1200 if it is expanded to 8 Megs (no accelerator) of fast ram?

3.  How does ram added to an accelerator affect the 1200's PCMCIA?

4.  Can fast ram for the A600 still be found (please recommend a specific card)?

That's a lot of ground.  Help me out guys. Grin.

[Daedalus]

1. AmigaKit (Clicky) sell adaptors and software which are tested on Amigas. You could probably buy one for a lot cheaper on eBay but with no guarantee it'll work.

2. The PCMCIA is mapped to the same place on the A600 and the A1200 - 4MB into the fast RAM area. It doesn't automatically disable it, so you'll have problems trying to use more than 4MB of fast RAM in either machines with a PCMCIA card, as PCMCIA accesses will also get written to/read from the RAM, usually resulting in a crash.

3. Better accelerators get around this issue by mapping the memory into Z3 space, totally separate and safe from motherboard peripherals, but some basic ones don't, suffering the same issues as a RAM-only card.

4. Can't help you there I'm afraid. They were far rarer than the A1200 versions to begin with, I'd imagine they're almost impossible to find now.

[Matt_H]

1. It's a generic part. I got one off the shelf at Radio Shack and it worked fine.

2. Depends on the accelerator.

3. Daedalus' response pretty much covers it. The hardware databases might have data on which RAM boards are PCMCIA friendly.

4. "PCMCIA SRAM" is the magic search term. These will probably work, but they seem too small to be useful.

[Daedalus]

Ooh, yeah, totally forgot the SRAM cards angle. These are PCMCIA cards that can be configured as fast RAM or a disk, though "fast RAM" is probably a bit of a misnomer. These obviously rule out the possibility to use any other PCMCIA cards, and you're limited to 4MB due to the addressing issue...

[alexh]

1) All PCMCIA adapter boards are pretty much the same. It's the CF cards which make them problematic. Get the cheapest PCMCIA->CF adapter you can find and the latest CFD and FAT95 software from Aminet

2) Yes you cannot have 8Meg of trapdoor RAM (no accelerator) and use the PCMCIA slot with the CFD driver

3) The A600's 68000 and the A1200's 68EC020 both have a 24-bit address bus. This limits them to a total memory space of 16Mbytes (some of which is taken up by ChipRAM, KS-ROM, Registers etc.) leaving only 8Mbytes for PCMCIA and FastRAM.

Most accelerators the 68030 chip has a 32-bit address bus (giving a total memory space of 4GByte) and it can allocate FastRAM above 24-bits. Thus leaving room for the PCMCIA within the 24-bit address space.

[amiga1260]

I can recommend the SAN Disk CF PCMCIA cards. They work ver good on the Amiga 1200. You can buy them from your local shops where the sell Photo cameras.