OS 3.9 crazy boot time????

[AmiDude]

Is that CD/DVD combo drive a recordable deal by any chance? Every Amiga I've ever hooked one of those to, or any SCSI device that records, besides a HD, has always been a thorn in my side boot time wise. Something about logical unit numbers or some stupid **** that nobody should ever be bothered with. Even dealing with all the stupidity like changing drive and device numbers makes no difference.

To make matters worse, no version of your commercial software such as AsimCDFS, diddling termination or changing jumper settings (timeout or otherwise) has ever fixed that little "minor" irritation, which currently has me frosted with my current setup. Like I'd ever go through all the hoops necessary to burn, close and finalize a CD or DVD (even if it did accidentally work) using an Amiga. Pfffft.    :mad:

Seriously, anyone want this recordable SCSI Plextor/Plexwriter, whatever it's called POS? Gladly exchange it for a nice read only drive. Wish I never sold my nice read only NEC that worked flawlessly and allowed my system to boot in mere seconds, like a regular Amiga should and would running 3.1.  

I never had any problems using recordable CD drives on any of my Amiga's. I'm using MakeCD for burning CD's without any problems. Here's a tip for y'all:
Don't mount CD0 at the startup-sequence, but only when you need to read/write data from/to a CD (when Workbench is already there). This way it decreases boot-time.

[Bamiga2002]

I never had any problems using recorable CD drives on any of my Amiga's. I'm using MakeCD for burning CD's without any problems. Here's a tip for y'all:
Don't mount CD0 at the startup-sequence, but only when you need to read/write data from/to a CD (when Workbench is already there). This way it decreases boot-time.

But wouldn't that go against the "plug'n'play" philosophy of the Amiga? :rtfm:

[Thorham]

Seriously, anyone want this recordable SCSI Plextor/Plexwriter, whatever it's called POS? Gladly exchange it for a nice read only drive. Wish I never sold my nice read only NEC that worked flawlessly and allowed my system to boot in mere seconds, like a regular Amiga should and would running 3.1.  

My A1200 boots the way it should be and I have a DVD rewriter hooked up to it. You're doing it wrong :p

[Daedalus]

From what he's saying, it's only 45 seconds until the icons are visible - that doesn't sound like anything's holding up the startup sequence all that much, especially if the machine's loaded with graphics cards, network cards, lots of drives etc. If it's just the background image that's taking that long, I'd put money on it being a JPG image, and possible even set in the preferences to "Scale well", which is very, very slow on anything other than a simple IFF. Load the background pic into ImageFX, TVPaint or something and save it as an IFF with a similar resolution to the Workbench screen, and set the prefs to "Centred" instead and it'll cut 2 minutes off that time.

Edit: Just read the advert now - if the background picture has more colours than the Workbench has free pens then that'll add to the delay as well. And whatever about an 060, an 030 is going to take an age to scale any image.

[AmiDude]

But wouldn't that go against the "plug'n'play" philosophy of the Amiga? :rtfm:

I guess you don't understand it entirely... You can hook up a CD player/writer to you Amiga, but only run the CD0 mount file (mine is in "Storage/DosDrivers""} whenever
you really want to use the CD drive. It's got nothing to do with plug 'n play...

[Ancalimon]

Edit: Just read the advert now - if the background picture has more colours than the Workbench has free pens then that'll add to the delay as well. And whatever about an 060, an 030 is going to take an age to scale any image.

Yes...

That's why we need a new accelerator for A1200 with a cheap 16 or 32mb 24-32bit rtg solution. Don't we?

[bbond007]

In that case he will need to use blizkick if his accelerator supports it. Have been using it for a long time. Great program

Yeah, I'm using BlizKick with modules for shapeshifter, hsmathlibs, noclick, bblank and my favorite, the A1000 jingle!

also, this program is pretty cool

http://aminet.net/package/util/boot/BootPicture

that way you can at least see a nice amiga logo instead of staring at nothing...

I just was counting like one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand (not very accurate) but from cold boot mine takes around 35 seconds and I have a FastATA and a 060...

[fitzsteve]

The high colour .jpg image is going to be the issue here.  You can get nice results with even a 16 colour workbench.

Check out the awesome work in this post over at EAB:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=51657

You don't have to strip right back either, you can play with 64/128 for example and still get great speeds.

There are other ways to get faster booting too like having a custom rom made up and getting rid of the reboot.

I suggest starting with a fresh workbench and building it up yourself, you could keep that old one as a backup and then you could build you own to your own spec.

If you want somewhere to start, check out the Classic Workbench packs as they are a great base to build on:

http://classicwb.abime.net/

All the best,

Steve.

[save2600]

Here's a tip for y'all: Don't mount CD0 at the startup-sequence...

Even when it's not invoked in Startup-Sequence, my system will still waste at least 32 seconds, diddling itself (the HD LED literally blinks 32 times) before it loads WB with this PlexWriter hooked up. I've tried every possible termination combo on the 2091 and the drive itself. Even upgraded to 7.0 ROMS on the SCSI card, but no change. What I do to help speed things up is keep a CD in the drawer. As soon as it spins up and gets a read, the computer proceeds to boot, shaving lots of time off the "normal" boot process.

Not trying to de-rail the thread, but thought *maybe* the OP was experiencing something similar - but yeah, seems like he's experiencing the super slow picture rendering times. Easy to do with OS3.9 and Alice and her AGA buddies, as they trick you into thinking they can handle even moderately sized .jpgs. Hell, even the dock likes to take its own sweet time loading.

[AmiDude]

Even when it's not invoked in Startup-Sequence, my system will still waste at least 32 seconds, diddling itself (the HD LED literally blinks 32 times) before it loads WB with this PlexWriter hooked up. I've tried every possible termination combo on the 2091 and the drive itself. Even upgraded to 7.0 ROMS on the SCSI card, but no change. What I do to help speed things up is keep a CD in the drawer. As soon as it spins up and gets a read, the computer proceeds to boot, shaving lots of time off the "normal" boot process.

I don't have any experience with an 2091/PlexWriter combo, but maybe you should
move over to another SCSI controller and/or CD-player/writer if the system struggles
to recognize the PlexWriter..
I've succesfully mounted CD-writers to my A600/A1200 (PCMCIA CD1200 controller)
and A3000 (external SCSI CD-burner).

[save2600]

I don't have any experience with an 2091/PlexWriter combo, but maybe you should
move over to another SCSI controller and/or CD-player/writer if the system struggles
to recognize the PlexWriter..

System mounts the Plexwriter just fine and I use it all the time. Btw: I also tried it with a GVP HC+8 and it exhibited the same nonsensical 32second wait time, so it has to be the goofy nature of this particular drive. Years ago, I remember when I had an A4000 hooked to a SCSI Syquest 52mb removable magnetic drive deal, same exact thing.

[Thorham]

an 030 is going to take an age to scale any image.

Not with optimized scaling routines. I have some experience with writing those in assembler, and you can actually scale pretty quickly in good quality on a 68030.