born again amigan!

[gunni]

Hi all,
thought I'd better stop lurking and say hello!

Got my first Amiga as a much needed upgrade from my Amstrad CPC back in the day.
My trusty A600HD was the most amazing thing of my school days and unfortunately we parted company when I went to college as I "needed" a PC.
Things then went from bad to worse as my initially DOS based system moved on to OS/2 and then Windows 3.1
More recently I became a Linux user after one too many blue screens of death from Windows Vista, discovered Amiga emulation and got the Amiga bug again.
After moving house I came across some old Amiga floppies and decided to get a proper Amiga again. I acquired a non-working A500, swapped in a refurbished motherboard from Amigakit and got stuck into a serious session of Turrican 2!
Since then I've kitted out my pride and joy with a GVP hard drive and upgraded kickstart and workbench to v2... and replaced the floppy drive a couple of times
I know you can attach a SCSI CD-ROM to the GVP hard drive, is this a worthwhile upgrade for a 500? Also I've seen SD floppy emulators on ebay, would anyone recommend one as an alternative to relying on a dwindling supply of A500 floppy drives?

[Karlos]

Welcome aboard!

A CDRom comes in handy if you want to get access to a lot of old shareware and magazine coverdisk content. However, you can live without it. A cheap laplink style cable used with PC2Amiga might be an alternative for that purpose though.

[Matt_H]

Welcome back!

Seeing as you already have a SCSI interface, I think a CD drive is a worthwhile investment. It should be quite cheap, and, as mentioned, it will open the door to some more libraries of software. If you get one that can read CD-RWs (some particularly old SCSI drives can't, like my 4x one), you might find it an easier way to transfer files from your Linux box (could be faster than a serial link). There are more modern solutions (clockport card + USB card + USB thumbdrive) but they'll require more of an investment.

It's strange that your floppy drives are wearing out so quickly. They might just need a substantial cleaning - the kind that involves opening the drive an cleaning the mechanical bits with alcohol. I need to do that on a few of my drives

[gunni]

thanks for the advice guys. with regard to the floppy drives the first one was the original and the second I picked up on ebay. will have a bash at opening one up and see how that goes however

[trekiej]

Welcome.

[Templario]

Welcome to the Amiga community and the best computer system!

[Heiroglyph]

Welcome back!

Be careful, the bug was nagging at me for quite a while and now I'm obsessed again

[klx300r]

welcome back:)

[Cammy]

Hi gunni, welcome back.

I think a smart investment for your A500 since you have SCSI is a SCSI card reader. These things can read CF, SD and other flash media cards, and are the size of a 3.5" floppy drive. I'm not sure if it would be possible to mount it inside the GVP case, but it should be fine without a case. You can mount up to five cards at once, and they can all be booted from as regular hard drives. The advantage is they are silent and load data faster than an old hard drive, and you can easily get them from local shops. You can buy them here if you're interested: http://a4000t.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=68&products_id=184&zenid=55e0eddb694bed9b4883cd70b3c5adaa

If you don't want to accidently break something by opening it up and poking around, you can clean a floppy drive's heads with a special floppy drive cleaning kit, which comes with a cleaning disk and some fluid to drop into the cleaning pad of the disk. You might be lucky to find one at a local computer or stationary shop, or you can find them on eBay here:

UK: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Floppy-Disk-Drive-Cleaner-Wet-Dry-Cleaning-Kit-/190406236846
US: http://cgi.ebay.com/Gemini-3-5-3-1-2-Floppy-Disk-Drive-Cleaning-Kit-NEW-/200614297787
AU: http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Halloa-3-5-Floppy-Disk-Drive-Head-Cleaner-Kit-/260775532907
HK: http://cgi.ebay.com/3-5-Floppy-Disk-Drive-Cleaner-Wet-Dry-Cleaning-Kit-/160576872586

I hope you've got some extra RAM too because a Kickstart 3.1 upgrade (maybe with a ROM switcher to choose between 1.3 and 3.1) would really help out. You could install WHDLoad and hundreds or thousands of your old favourite Amiga games without needing to resort to using old, unreliable floppy disks. You can also install some pretty slick Workbench setups and game selector menus to boot into too. If you're interested in a ROM switcher or a S-Video adapter (perfect for a crisp display on a LCD screen) you might want to check out this site: http://amigamaniac.com

Good luck with everything, don't forget to search for Amiga stuff on YouTube to get more ideas of what you can do with them, there's plenty of stuff on there.

[gunni]

Thanks for the links Cammy card reader could well be next on my list!
I haven't actually checked how much RAM I've got in the GVP unit, how much do I need for the upgrade from kick 2.05 to 3.1?
Tried a floppy cleaner already with the floppy drives to no avail, the last one as I recall kept having problems with a particular disk sector regardless of the disk in the drive...
Thanks again

[TheGoose]

SCSI card reader! Whoa ! Holly Toledo! I never heard of this. This would work in my A3000 Cammy?

Hmm, sucks that the A3000 front end is so floppy only, customized. Still, might be worth a go for replacing my old as hell 100MB original drive.

I need to calm down... whoooo.

[Cammy]

It should work fine on the A3000, and any other Amiga with SCSI. But remember the cards are treated as internal hard drives, so they're mounted the same way and aren't hot-swappable like USB or PCMCIA card readers (I guess they're more like the IDE ones many of us use in our A1200s and A600s).

[smerf]

Hi all,
thought I'd better stop lurking and say hello!

Got my first Amiga as a much needed upgrade from my Amstrad CPC back in the day.
My trusty A600HD was the most amazing thing of my school days and unfortunately we parted company when I went to college as I "needed" a PC.
Things then went from bad to worse as my initially DOS based system moved on to OS/2 and then Windows 3.1
More recently I became a Linux user after one too many blue screens of death from Windows Vista, discovered Amiga emulation and got the Amiga bug again.
After moving house I came across some old Amiga floppies and decided to get a proper Amiga again. I acquired a non-working A500, swapped in a refurbished motherboard from Amigakit and got stuck into a serious session of Turrican 2!
Since then I've kitted out my pride and joy with a GVP hard drive and upgraded kickstart and workbench to v2... and replaced the floppy drive a couple of times
I know you can attach a SCSI CD-ROM to the GVP hard drive, is this a worthwhile upgrade for a 500? Also I've seen SD floppy emulators on ebay, would anyone recommend one as an alternative to relying on a dwindling supply of A500 floppy drives?

Hi,

Well welcome back to the loony bin amiga.org.

This is the place were you will soon realise that there is nothing that we can agree on.

But

You have really picked the right time to join back up, since we lost Franko, the most argumentative, dunderhead that ever showed his writing on Amiga.org. This guy disrupted every forum we ever posted on. Luck on our side this Scottish (he claims, but I really do think he was Irish by the way he acted) phoney says he has made his last post, so we won't be a wee bit bothered by him again.

So welcome back to the Amiga, the most Amazing computer ever built.

smerf

[lunithy]

Hello