using DMS

[Will-i-am]

And yet another issue with me and the A4000... I am trying to use DMS to get some PicassoII utilities that did not come with the card (from ebay). I got PicassoII-Install_Last.dms, among others and got DMS to create itself on a disk and then install itself on the HD. Then I tried to get it to take that DMS file and create a disk to install some PicassoII junk in order to make the damn card allow games to play. The button and menus all seem to click and drop etc but in the end it says it is doing it's thing to the floppy, although it says something about the disk having a non-bootable block and then it says it's done. I examine the disk in dopus and it is empty. Nothing, nada... after all that work, lights flashing etc and it produced a blank disk. I got a different version of DMS and got the same results working from a CLI. Any ideas? The A4KD is using OS 3.1 and has a Cyberstorm PPC/060 CPU and MUI. That's about it. It's all up to you now... 8-)

[Dr_Righteous]

Me myself personally, I usually convert DMS images into ADFs and use Tracktool to plunk em on a disk... Oh, and make sure you're using a REAL DD disk, not an HD disk, not even with tape over the other hole.

...tho your problem is likely due to using a high density disk without covering the hole... WB sees the disk as HD, you're putting a DD image on it... Thus, blank disk. Either way, I HIGHLY recommend using real double density disks for disk images.

[motorollin]

Search Aminet for diskimage.lha. It will allow you to mount your DMS image rather than writing it to a disk. Then you can copy the files out of it to a folder on your hard drive.

--
moto

[Jose]

The A4000 has an HD floppy drive, shouldn't be a problem using HD disks.

SUGGESTION:
Format the disks first. I remember having that problem using a command line version of DMS sometime ago and if the disks were not formated first the drive would take ages to write the image to floppy and the result would be garbage or something. Formating first solved the problem.

[Framiga]

or use DMS2HD from Aminet

[_ThEcRoW]

What's wrong in using hd disks for dd use?. With the hole taped they function very well. I have recently regenerated some of my old 500 games on hd disks and work perfectly on my a500 chinon drive.

[Will-i-am]

I tried a few of these suggestions, mostly to see how things worked out and finally came to the conclusion that I was beating my head on a brick wall. I then took the one self-extracting dms prog that did in fact make it to a disk and fired up the old A2000 ('030, os 2.1) and installed the disk masher into that machine. Went smoothly. I did the exact same thing I did in the A4000 ('060/PPC, os 3.1) and it chugged along like before except when I looked at the disk, everything was there! Worked fine. I was able to install the missing PicassoII files and get my extra resolutions! (YAY) except when I try to run virtually any program other than dopus and workbench itself I get scrambled screens and when I try various offered resolutions the screen hiccups, goes to black, comes back up scrambled and then offers me another resolution. Brilliance does not work, Art Dept does not work, VistaPro doesn't... etc. So much for my 17" NEC monitor. Oh, and all the instructions are in GERMAN so I can't figure out how to reconfigure the damn board to see if the defaults are de fault. grrr. I'm gonna go play Megaball on the A2000. It never fails to boot and the screen is never scrambled.

[zipper]

The only sane suggestion has not been made - bin or archive everything concerning the original Picasso software and download Picasso96 from Aminet. The functionality and speed difference is vast.

[Will-i-am]

I have Picasso96. I couldn't get it to do anything. The install script failed and attempts to work it out failed. I tried actually reading the script and loading the parts myself... which is ridiculous and shows how desperate I had become... That's when I began to download the other software.

 I am considering removing the card from the A4000 and installing it in the A2000(030/os 2.1), which handled DMS easily and could certainly benefit from the card. I can stick with the C=1960 on the A4K if that's the only monitor that'll work with the machine. I am simply trying to get all my miggies the best monitor they can handle. I also have a Spectrum card that I might try. What I really need, obviously, is a simple scan doubler/FF, but until I can scrape up the $150 plus or minus and Softhut actually gets the cards, I have to make do.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I suspect that having a used harddrive is a part of the problem. I kept the files and progs for historical value but they did a lot of hacking on this puppy and maybe a new blank HD would be the best route. It's just such a pain working with antiques. Even my Windoze box is ancient... another gift from a "friend" with strange attitudes. It, does, however, recognize the router, which is more than any of my Amigas do so far. 8-(

[zipper]

If your PicassoII is jumpered to segmented mode, that may cause problems with P96; I never tested what happens.

[Will-i-am]

zipper wrote:
If your PicassoII is jumpered to segmented mode, that may cause problems with P96; I never tested what happens.

well, with the manual only in German I may never know. My high school German is 40 years rusty. BUT the good news is that somewhere along the line I managed to find some kind of a switch, or setting or something because the last time I booted up I start getting requesters on all my programs' screens to modify the screen mode and I am now testing which modes work with which progs. Still haven't tried any games but the point of this machine was graphics/animation and perhaps if I can find a good book on TCP/IP, even get onto the internet thru my cable modem. So far that is a dead end as well. But the PicassoII card seems to work, so maybe the ethernet connection will someday too. Thanks for all the help!!