Anyone used Siamese System

[m1screant]

I have long been an admirer of Paul nolans siamese system. Has anyone ever used it. What thoughts?

More importantly, does anyone know where to buy it?

Cheers.

[Erwin-K]

At one St. Louis show I talked with Paul about it.

He told me that while it worked as advertised, the data transfer rate was too low for programs requiring real time display updates. In this catagory he included Photogenics.

[m1screant]

The reason i ask is because i was just flicking through an old amiga format magazine which reveiwed a tower system from eyetech which housed both pc and amiga. It claimed proper cutting and pasting was possible between OS's. This sounded great to me.

[PaSha]

I used this once upon a time. Basically a very clever hack, but not quite compatible with OS3.5/3.9 and somewhat buggy.
Current status: Unsupported and abandoned
Where to buy: eBay, AmiBbench and similar

Never tried the copy/paste stuff.

[adolescent]

I use the PC Server program.  It's much more stable on my system then the SMB ports, and it works just fine with OS3.9 and Windows XP.  Not sure about the RTG as I haven't used that since I had my A3000 setup, but IIRC it worked well for most normal programs.  I think now VNC would probably be faster.

[motrucker]

I still use Version 2, with the ISA card in the PC (I'm using an rather old Athlon K6-2,3D (900MHz) w/1Gb RAM & XP home with an A1200 running 3.5OS. It works well, although, as noted, it is too slow for real time projects.
I have never used the version 2.5, which doesd not use the hardware switcher, so I cannot say how well they work.....

[Darrin]

PaSha wrote:
I used this once upon a time. Basically a very clever hack, but not quite compatible with OS3.5/3.9 and somewhat buggy.
Current status: Unsupported and abandoned
Where to buy: eBay, AmiBbench and similar

Never tried the copy/paste stuff.

That's not true.  I used Siamese v2.5 to install OS3.5 on my A3000 as it had no CD ROM drive.  I've only used it via a serial link, but I've recently puchased a PCMCIA network card for my A1200 and I'm looking forward to testing it on a TCP connection.  RTG worked fine even when I was using it on a big standard serial connection between an A1200 and a Pentium 1 133MHz.

[Darrin]

It is a bit of a bugger to set up, but you need to read the docs.  Two main tips:

Make sure you are using a null modem serial cable.
Remember to edit the PC preference file as per the instructions.
Make sure you match the baud rates on the PC and Amiga and do exceed the maxium baud rate of the Amiga (remember that A1200 computers have piss poor serial ports).

[bhoggett]

I bought the Siamese System second hand from someone, and what I found was that it was a pain in the backside to use reliably. Not to mention that it was one of the buggier pieces of software I ever purchased. I know I gave up on it soon after - not sure if I still have it or whether I sold it on at some point.

A big thumbs down from me, and while it did most of what it claimed to do, it didn't do it very well.

[The_Editor]

Yeah.  I had good experiences with my Siamese 2.1 (serial) too. I sold it to JerryUK about a year back.


Very true about the baud rate... rather critical to slow it down.

I copied a fair few of my floppy based apps over to my pc using siamese.  worked a treat.

[amiga2000]

I have Siamese installed on my Amiga 2000 with a SBC installed in the same A2000 tower (powered by the A2000 ISA slot), with the Siamese video switcher card installed.

Sadly, I really just use the video switcher now; actually, mounting the PC drives via the Siamese system was pretty convenient, but you can arrange that with a regular network. The cut and paste function between Windows and the AmigaOS used to come in handy, but I have not used it in a while. It just is cool to be able to switch between the Amiga and Windows with the F12 key.... Although, again, with a video switcher, it is more of a cool hack.

I was never able to get SiSys RTG to work properly on my Amiga 2000 (to open the Amiga screen on Windows)... I bought another Siamese video switcher card, but never got around to installing it into my Amiga 1200 tower. I guess I will eventually though.

Roy

[Boot_WB]

I have the non-ethernet version (is that version 2?), and am looking forward to setting it up using a scsi network, although after reading this thread I'm tempted to try VNC for Amiga instead using ethernet, and set up the scsi network for data sharing and using my scanner on PC and Amiga.
Still waiting for the Cyberscsi mk2 at the moment though.