My Deneb is here! (a little excited here)

[Phantom]

At a glance, I thought that you said "Cool piece of sh1t"! :crazy:  :crazy:

[mbrantley]

amigadave wrote:
Take your time and play with that daughter of yours for as long as she stays interested.  They grow up so fast and then they don't want to have anything to do with you, unless it is to ask for money, or borrow the car.  Then they are gone and you are lucky to see them on holidays and birthdays.

Indeed, that's good advice. She's four, about to turn five, and this afternoon was all about having watergun fights on the front lawns of the houses on the street with young children. We had fun.

When you do have time to get back to the Deneb, let us all know what you are going to use.  Are your primary reasons for getting it to use USB keyboard and mouse, or was the KickFlash a primary reason to boot the 3.9OS without the usual double-clutching, or do you have a CSPPC and you are going to boot MorphOS for PuP from the Deneb?

There's no Amgia PPC gear here (although there are a number of PPC Macs). I can't afford to buy the used Amiga PPC hardware at the prices they command, so I'm running a strictly OS 3.9 Amiga shop for now running on the mighty (ahem) family of Motorola 680x0 chips.

I like typing on classic Amiga keyboards and shoving the old Amiga mice around the desk, so I won't use USB stuff for input. Already have a serial Wacom tablet, too.

For the moment the Deneb will get used for mass storage devices. I wasted some time tonight trying to figure out why my 4GB USB thumb drive was only showing up as 1.8GB formatted, then I remembered I actually did buy a 2GB thumb drive and not a 4GB one. That's plugged into the into USB connector on the Deneb.

I've got various external USB hard drives and CD/DVD drives here that get moved around. Now the Amiga can join the party. Then there are printers, although I am hopeful I can  eventually print over my network to the printers shared by a Mac.

I am looking forward to hearing someone's report on an AHI audio device connected to the Deneb USB. I want to know which one to buy and what it will do for me.

Then there's always cheap USB network interfaces, which could potentially free my expensive X-Surf in the 4000 for duty in another of my Amigas.

Lots of possibilities.

[mbrantley]

An observation: It caused me some head scratching to figure out how to enable DMA as opposed to PIO mode. Did get it figured out though.

Some questions: How do I or can I prevent the DENEB intro animation (with the neat lasers) from playing at each bootup? I think it's playing twice for me at bootup. I'd rather not be delayed.

How do I prevent the "Still Alive" requester from appearing? Is it a matter of deleting the material from the flash?

What is this "double clutch" I see referenced above? How should I use the onboard flash memory to my best advantage in OS 3.9?

Finally, a sentiment of gratitude: Thanks to the Deneb makers for creating this product and thanks to the resellers for getting it into the marketplace.

[amigadave]

sandpiper wrote:
@amigadave & all

I just put a Deneb in my A3000 (serial #31!). I have now eliminated the "Double clutching" by moving the rom update & scsi 43.45 patch to flashrom. It now boots about 3x as fast. A 1gb USG thumb drive measures faster than my 9GB SCSI hard drive connected to my WarpEngine. Cool piece of kit!

Nice!  I think that is one of the best selling points, moving the ROM and all the updates to the 2mb Flash memory. @mbrantley, the double clutching is that second boot when running OS3.5, or 3.9.  It causes very long boot times, at least for an Amiga that is.

Let us know how the printing works out, I am wondering if it needs special drivers for each printer other than the parallel port drivers when used via the USB of the Deneb?

[mboehmer_e3b]

Simply do a download of all FlashROM contents (Luciferin), create an empty local list and "upload".
Both the DenebIntro and the requester for StillAlive are gone then.

And in case you have the backup on harddisk.

Michael

[alexh]

mbrantley wrote:
What is this "double clutch" I see referenced above?

It is the double reboot sequence that takes place on cold boot, I think when the OS patches the KickStart ROM

With the patches in flash ROM no reboots required.

[spirantho]

Re the USB audio thing...

I got a £10 "laced" USB audio adaptor.... I plugged it into my Deneb, told AHI to use the USB Audio device, and away it went, first time. No problems at all. Any cheap USB sound card will probably work.

On 3.9 anyway. On 4.0 it's a different story, takes a bit of hacking to get that to work (but work it does).

[quenthal]

Just got my Deneb - excellent piece of hardware.

FlashROM part of it is really good. I used custom Kickstart with Kickflash and quite often on cold boot I had to additional Ctrl-A-A to finish up booting. Now with Deneb I can use same kickstart with no similar problem.

I also bought AOS4 for my classic, but it will take time before I try it out more seriously, as I currently feel that I can get better results out of my miggy with OS3.9.

Main questions I'm still having when thinking about OS3.9 and OS4 are:
1) Is it possible to use NoIDE and/or AOS4 loader modules on Kickflash or Deneb?
2) Is there Deneb-driver for OS4 native USB stack? What are the main disadvantages of using Poseidon over it?
3) What are the main disadvantages of using Elbox m68k drivers over OS4 native Mediator/Voodoo3 -driver?

[mbrantley]

mboehmer_e3b wrote:
Simply do a download of all FlashROM contents (Luciferin), create an empty local list and "upload".
Both the DenebIntro and the requester for StillAlive are gone then.
Michael

That did the trick. Thanks, Michael!

Now that the Deneb is up and running on the 4000, I'm off to get the X-Surf working on the 3000... It's like Christmas in Mike's Amiga computer lab.

[Darrin]

Well I got back from Brazil today and my Deneb card was waiting for me along with an A4000 I'd won on eBay (one of that batch of 20 that was for sale earlier this month).

The A4000 had WB3.1 installed on a 800MB hard drive and KS3.0.

First thing I did was remove the internal SD/FF from my A1200 and install it in the A4000 to use a PC monitor.  Everything worked so far... 2MB Chip, 16MB fast.

Then I installed the Deneb with the jumper set for Rescue and booted.  I found the flash hosted Deneb software off the bottom of the screen and tried to install it - could not find "Installer".  Bugger!  I found my AmigaKit PCMCIA ethernet software install floppy and dragged the Installer command from that to my hard drive and tried again.  It seems this is an older Installer and the Tools fails due to a script error, but Luciferin and Poseidon seemed to install OK.

I removed the jumper and rebooted and got the Deneb boot screen (very pretty) and after loading WB I was prompted to watch the animation which I rejected due to not having the correct files installed to watch it.

The A4000 came with no keyboard so I tried an old Logitech one that I had lying around (probably a USB1.1 with a built in 2 port 1.1 hub) - no joy, no power lights, no nothing.

I formatted a 2GB Cruzer memory stick to FAT16 and tried it in all ports with no response which was a shame as I wanted to use this to transfer files over from my PC (latest Installer, MUI, FAT95).  I tried a USB IDE/SATA adapter which at least lit up when plugged into a PC, but the LEDs stay dead when connected to the Deneb.

I can't run Trident prefs as it needs MUI and I found Psddromtag in my utilities draw, clicked on it, it asked if I wanted to add Poseidon as reset-resident, I said OK and then it told me "something went wrong" and removed Poseidon.

I've set the A2000 up to that I can burn some file from the PC onto a CD, put the CD into the A2000 and then copy the files to Amiga floppies (none of my ****ing PCs have floppy drives any more).

Am I missing something obvious?  Is the memory stick not showing because I don't have Fat95?  Is it because I couldn't install the Deneb tools?

Any suggestions would be appreciated and now I have to take the wife out to dinner. I'll have another go at it in the morning.

I also hope my A4000 PC keyboard adapter shows up soon as using an Amiga with no keyboard is a pain in the bottom.   :-D

PS.  I also loved the typo in the English manual on page 6:

"The bus type is sensed automagically"

I assume this is similar to automatically, but the sensing is done by some pixies or elves?    ;-)

[amigakit]

Glad that your Deneb USB arrived safely.

I would recommend installing MUI - you need to add USB hardware to the Poseidon configuration file to tell it to use Deneb.

You can use the command line instead (but this is more complicated)

You are right, you will need FAT95 in the L: drawer.

[Darrin]

amigakit wrote:
Glad that your Deneb USB arrived safely.

I would recommend installing MUI - you need to add USB hardware to the Poseidon configuration file to tell it to use Deneb.

You can use the command line instead (but this is more complicated)

You are right, you will need FAT95 in the L: drawer.

Cheers, I appreciate the help.

Any news with regards to that PM I sent you?  I need to order those KS3.1 ROMS.  Do A1200 3.1 ROMS work in an A4000?

[mbrantley]

Still enjoying the Deneb in my 4000 and I want to put Kickstart in the flash to avoid the "double clutch" as mentioned aboved.

Not wanting to mess this up as I seem prone to do these days (!) so would someone mind terribly listing excactly what steps I should follow to accomplish that.

I moved the bblank and a1000jingle modules onto the flash. Man, I haven't heard those A1000 test tones in many, many years. My 1000 has has a Kwickstart II with 1.3 and 2.04 ROMs in it since circa 1992, and that's when that little "jingle" disappeared from my daily routine. Now it's back on the 4000. :-)

But I'm hearing it twice. That's the double clutch, huh?

[MozzerFan]

When you install Luciferin, it asks you to split
the Amiga Romupdate. When you replied with 'yes',
it installs these files in the Modules/Romupdate drawer
of the Luciferin drawer. You can put these files in the
flashrom of the Deneb. Then change the setpatch command
in your startup-sequence to 'setpatch NOROMUPDATE QUIET'
This should get rid of the double clutch.

Edit: Check if your current setpatch command skips some
romupdate, for example scsi.device. If it does, don't
put this file in the flashrom.

Regards,
Lloyd

[mbrantley]

Thanks, Lloyd.

I ran into trouble, however. I flashed with the romupdate drawer contents as you advised and then changed the setpatch command to NOROMUPDATE. Then upon reboot I got a visit from the Guru.

Rebooting with LMB down to skip the flashrom brought an error message that scsi.device can't access all my partitions until I edit the startup-seuqnce to remove NOROMUPDATE option.

I removed the romupdates from the flash and everything is back to normal.

Just to be sure, I did all the steps again and same problems. Then I put everything back to normal again.


No doubt I am making a simple mistake somewhere.

[mbrantley]

MozzerFan wrote:
Edit: Check if your current setpatch command skips some
romupdate, for example scsi.device. If it does, don't
put this file in the flashrom.

Just noticed your edit. I don't think I'm skipping scsi.device, but I'll look again tomorrow. It's off to bed now before I mess something up!

Thanks. Will get back to it.