Exploring retro Computers, Consoles, tech and games from the 1970s to the early 2000s.
My name is Chris Thomas. My life has been a journey through an amazing evolution in computing. Firstly as a consumer of the new games consoles and micro-computers in the 1970s and 80s. To working in various branches of computer based media production, from PC video games, to visualisation and movie VFX.
I want to share my experiences and passion for computing with you. And explore the range of wonderful retro computers, consoles and software that made the modern world the fun place it is to be today.
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there is NO riser card in an amiga 4000 it's a daughter board and i'm preaty sure you won't get the floppy to work since you didn't connect the power to it, at least not in the video
Here is the definition of what a riser card is, from Wikipedia "A riser card is a printed circuit board that gives a computer motherboard the option for additional expansion cards to be added to the computer" and I did apply power to the drives at a later point.
It could be, one is labelled as 0 / 1, which could be ID 0/1 or indeed off/on. But, Id honestly expect on/off to be labelled as such. Using 0/1 for on off, is a bit to techy, even for an Amiga external drive.
(as was suggested in the last video comments) ( "which you didnt do again in this video " test it in xcopy ) i think these dives are only going to be good for your uses and not for most peoples uses .. but good enuff to do basic read and sometimes writes in workbench senarios ( depending which external drive your using ) the results will not be god enuff for 98% of us amiga users that require them to actually copy disk's . hopefully youll get round to doing actual x-copy testing and realise this for a future video .
Not sure 98% of Amiga users will be wanting to copy disks in XCopy. I'm pretty sure 99% of Amiga owners want to read disks? And a good number will want to write to them maybe? But I get your point. From what I understand, the Samsung drive definitely has a Ready signal, and I connected that to 34. But that drive is only available in 25mm high models AFAIK, so its only really of use in external drives with reversed data/power connectors, or in an Amiga 3000/4000. Still, its more the overall gist I was getting at in the previous video i.e. Pin 2 goes to Disk Change, 34 goes to Ready, DS1 is changed to DS0n and if your very lucky, you an lock it to readying HD disks as DD. But milage certainly varies, these were generally NOT intended for use in an Amiga, so....
Glad I could help. IF you can discern which model a drive is, there is often a tutorial out there for it. Mind you, they vary in quality. Myself, I could only really try out the drives I have. Maybe if I have some time, I will try and get that Samsung drive to be DD moded as well, that would be ideal.
I have quite a few models and brands. Some have jumpers and some clearly have pads. The bulk i have are Panasonic drives they seem to be not possible to convert. I also have Amiga drives pulled from systems. Im going to see what i can compile
When I tested these, I set the drives to DF1 and with the ID select switch in either position, the drives were not recognised. No life, nothing. And I had the same experience with my Amiga 4000, when I used the Samsung drive (shown in previous video). Only when I set them to DF0 did they work. So I'm not sure what the situation is with your enclosure and the Gotek.
Have you tested transferring data between a PC HD floppy and an Amiga using one of these drives? Many (20+) years ago I heard about converting PC HD floppies, but the problem was the Amiga slows the motor to 150RPM for HD disks, and floppy drive motors are tuned for 300RPM. Slowing down a standard motor resulted in instability and data jitter bad enough for the disks to be unreadable in other drives. The actual Amiga HD floppies had special motors/circuitry to handle both speeds correctly.
I think you answered your own question. From what I understand, its as you say. Amiga HD drives needed specific electronics to get the drives to run at a specific speed. And drives today would be 99% generic PC drives, many of which were made post 2000. I say that, as eventually they became obsolete, would I assume there are still hoards of new/old stock out there, which are good to use, as they have no mechanical wear.
Sorry, but those drives can not provide100% amiga compatibility. RD means Read, not ready. Samsung has ready, yes, but format a disk with kick 1.3 and WB 1.3 in the CLI, after that try read the directory in the workbench...it will fail.Test all drives as internal with both external drive togehter (xcopy, games who make use of more drives). Try amiga test kit and show what ready signal says, it should be between 200-500ms. You might find problems.
I'll give it a go, the tutorial which had that advice, stated that they had tested it, and it worked. I must admit, I'm not THAT likely to use X-Copy myself, my pirating days are far behind me. However, its worth trying. Have you one of these Alps drives yourself, which you have tested? You sound like you have walked this walk?
Both my Amiga 3000 and 4000 came with HD floppy drives (1.76 MB). This was fully supported in the OS starting from 2.0 if I remember correctly. I often used HD disks for doing backups and storing data. But I never came across any software being shipped on HD disks or anything being distributed on disks that size. And it was convenient that I could use 1.44 MB PC formated HD disks to transfer data between PCs and my Amiga with CrossDOS - but this is not something you are likely to do today. So yes, for most practical retro purposes, focusing on getting a modern drive to just handle common 880 kB disks make sense.
I think if management at Commodore took things more seriously instead of acting like they were trying to get "rich quick" they we would likely seen games and or demos come out in 1.76MB format.
Fab vid! Just FYI… there’s a GitHub project called Amiga-HDDLW that aims to replicate an old adaptor to allow specifically modded PC drives to format to 1.76MB, for later Amiga’s like the A4000. I’ve literally just modded a Sony drive and am going to give this adaptor a test soon… fingers crossed!
No, because PC drives are hardwired to be drive 1, and for an Amiga it needs to be drive 0. The Disk Change signal from pin 34 could be swizzled over to pin 2, but then what about the Ready signal? This is not connected at all, so again an intermediary board would not do the job. So yeah, on balance, some wire, a soldering iron and a bit of patience is more effective in this case...
Then get to it. Mind you, my experience is, there is certainly a lot of variety in manufacture and how you convert them. Would be interesting to see if someone can get the Samsung drive to be forced to DD mode by default. Thats quite a useful feature in these conversions. I may get another one and have a go at it at some point.
I would love to know if its possible to convert an Apple Mac floppy to an Amiga drive. The sony drives were actually able capable of doing 2MB. Or use a PC drive to create an HD drive for an Amiga. I know some amiga's had HD drives; 1.7MB.
From what I understand, there is no way to get a PC 2mb drive, to work on the Amiga. I understand there was some extra circuitry and the drive had to run at a different speed. Now, having said that, yes, from what I understand newer Amiga models sometimes had 2mb drives. But, here is the question. Are they REALLY that useful today? Quite often we have Goteks, or data transfer via SD card or CF Card. So I personally think a drive that can read 880k disks, is generally the most useful, as pretty much all games/apps/cover disks etc came in that format as it was compatible with ALL Amiga models.
@@andrewenglish3810 Well, the top right one works, and is there to read any disks I do have, because I do have some games on floppy disk. The disk to its left does not work, but I could replace it now, as I have a spare. However, below them is a Gotek, and this is the most useful drive right now as of course I can fit hundreds of floppy disk images on it. But... the issue is, these HAVE to be in adf format, and so they have to have been created by others, or myself, and they are not a direct replacement for a floppy disk. Still VERY useful. But, I think having a physical floppy drive in there will be useful on the occasion when I DO want to use real disks. For example, I might get drivers for a card, which are NOT on the web in any archive, and if I am going to use those drives, I need a real drive. Of course, these situations are rare these days, but there is certainly software out there which has NOT been archived.
Great video as always. Here are some thoughts: - If the ISO images are mounted like scsi devices through the bluescsi, you should see them in the HDToolBox. This way you can see the unit number. - About the Wi-Fi, I do not have an idea how to make it work. I think Rob Smith shared that info in one of his video. But even if you make it work, when you close the case that might fail, since the whole case is metallic and the Wi-Fi signals might not get where the bluescsi is. But I think it should be tested. - If you have one of the latest P96 releases from the iComp, you can install it on your machine, even if you do not have a picasso card, along with the NATIVE driver from aminet. That will help you save some valuable chip memory. I made a video on my channel on how to do this on an A1200, but it should work on A2000 just fine. - Your gotek has a big faceplate. Maybe if you remove it, you could put it in place of the left disk drive, and have a CDRom in its place. Have a great fun with this exceptional computer.
Video Notes: 8 Bit Dreams informed us some interesting tid-bits about the Dicke Olga.... * The Olga has a Master/Slave jumper for the CFlash slot (accessible from reare of machine) so it can be used as the secondary drive on the primary channel, so the extension card I used in the video is not needed. * Amiga OS 3.2.1/2 supports Fat32 straight out of the box. So its possible to insert a Windows Win95 formatted CFlash card, to transfers files more easily betweem WinUAE virtual Amiga's and my real A2000.
I'm just curious why don't You use onboard CF Slot? It works exactly the same way to that adapter with long IDE cable, You just need to set jumpers correctly, to get SATA /M.2 as master and CF as Slave...
I did not know off the top of my head that the CF port had a jumper allowing it to be SLAVE. I was thinking back to when there I recall issues were mentioned about using it. But that was an earlier revision. I switched that jumper to Slave, and indeed, the CF Card can now go on channel one, as SLAVE using the built in port. Another feather in the Dicke Olga's hat. I have an idea, why not add more Answers to you Q&A section in the manual, to cover solutions, rather than problems. Like this was a good suggestion others may not think of.
Cool video. With the Fat Olga, just sell the Trump card. It is odd and not very usefull. Cant wait to see that machine with a ZZ9K. I need to order one for my 2000EATX. Keep the videos coming.
I may keep it for a while. Might reach out to Rob Smith, to see if he is up to updating his DaynaPort driver. I think the issue is it may have non-standard SCSI commands going on, which is why the CD-Rom support is not working, and the WIFI drive is not working. If those prove to be dead-ends, then I may indeed sell it, so someone else can have a SCSI controller for their A2000.
Thanks, indeed. Hopefully anyone watching these vids that like them will share their links with friends. Word of mouth can be very powerful, especially if they then also pass on the joy!
I've never had a trumph card but it looks like that boot jumper is not a boot jumper but a rom jumper, becaus the device has to be mountet befor you can boot and if it was only the boot feature you disabel with the jumper the rom would still supply the machine with the device... a strange way of doing it. But enabling the boot driver (and nothing in the expansion folder) you should have a much faster boot an the hd's on the trumph should jus not be set as bootable.
Did You know that IDE of the Olga supports Windows formated CF cards? You just need to install FAT95 (it's actually installed in Your system, so You can just transfer files between PC and Amiga quite easily...
With 3.2, fat95 isn't even needed. The os ships with a version of crossdosfilesystem that supports long filenames and the mbr partition table. Instructions for making mount files are in the 3.2 faq and online help.
Indeed, previous show, it was just me and my camera, and I filmed most of the day. This time, I also had to explain to people what the SGI Octane was all about, plus of course the BBQ! Still, there is, as you say, always next time :)
No vendors on this occasion as far as I could see. Though there were some accelerators near the 3D printing table. I guess its Summer and people are busy with other things. Also, there was the Greenford event the previous weekend (which I missed) and next weekend there is the event in Nottingham, which sadly I also HAVE to miss due to some DIY at home. Gah, really wanted to attend that, but there you go.
@@sw4ine Ahhhh…Thought I’d recognise that shiny Bald head and douche bag beard when he tried to hide his face on the stage.. No wonder he didn’t wanted to be identified with the disgruntled customers he is leaving in his wake…. 😳🙄
I thought "That's my A4000 on show!"... But it was Vin's! It was a great meetup, and it was good to see you again... Reminds me to subscribe and watch your previous vids :) Next year hopefully I will have a fleet of working Amigas to show off :D
Yes, think that was Vins, as you bumped into on the way up there with your A4000 board clutched to your breast. Nice to chat, and nice to meet a fellow A4000 owner :)
I would have liked to see some real world examples to gauge it's overall speed. Playing mp3 (without a prelude), some rendering, i-browse, things of this nature.
I appears to be the number of devices. Im putting my Amiga 2000 back together right now, and trying to get a Network and CD-Rom working on my SCSI bus. Adding the Network increased the boot time a bit, adding the CD-Rom and it took even longer. So, with SCSI it seems its best to use less, but larger devices( HD) with more partitions, rather than many devices with a partition on each.
@@RetronautTech Not so sure about that. Back in the 90's I ran a BBS with 5 drives connected to the GVP controller and it didn't boot any slower. After adding a TF536 my boot time increased immensely though.
@@anakondase Im using a BlueSCSIv2, which is acting as multiple devices. I think with real devices, you'd be right. But I have used a BSv2 on a Fastlane Z3 SCSI card, a GVP SCSI card and also a TrumpCard SCSI card and all showed similar behaviour. One device, and its pretty fast to boot, more than one and it can take an age. In my A2000 without the TrumpCard drives, it boots in about 20 seconds. But as soon as I got drives working on the TrumpCard, booting took much longer, and when I tried to add a Network card and CD Rom it was talking 60+ seconds.
@@RetronautTech I see. Sad to say my GVP controller seems to be at the end because I can't get anything to boot from mine anymore. Tried three drives but the same result.
They put two 100+10 nF caps in parallel because they have different ESR spec. And not because they wanted to put 110 nF. Ceramic caps also do fail. They are very fragile and sensitive to mechanical stresses.
excellent video and very good presentation, but of course I don't understand the purpose of these cards anymore, when for much less money you can have a pistorm which is clearly much better in many things, if you want to work natively on the amiga you just have a 68040 that you can do everything, once again you want to work with caffeine os and take your amiga to new levels and this is also easy, it's good to move forward and not stay stuck in the old if we want to see new things in the amiga, and thinking about what was the real reason that our beloved amiga, came to the point where people gave up on it, I'll tell you just one game Wolfenstein just that.
It's to do with what we want, subjectively. Some want to move the Amiga on. For me, the Amiga ended in the 90s when Commodore went bust. Commodore for me was like a family, from the C64 onwards. So once Amiga was not owned by them, I was not interested. I know, for some that is sacrilege, but the truth is Commodore failed to update the platform in a timely manner so it could not compete with the surging rise of PC technology. To be fair, that was the same for Apple too, they nearly went under as well, until Steve Jobs took a daring step and made machines that were totally different to PCs of that era. So to be fair to Commodore it was a REALLY difficult fence to jump. Remember Amiga had PC bridge-boards so it was actually riding that wave as well, to its own detriment... Now, I LOVE my Amiga's as I did back then, but for me, its more about making machines that are true to what Commodore produced. So I like to use real hardware as much as I can. Though that is something of a losing battle, and can be expensive. I took a PiStorm2000 OUT of this machine and replaced it with this card, and for me it was a good move. A PiStorm is for me an emulator embedded in an Amiga case. If you don't mind emulators and you ONLY want to use software, then thats cool. There is WinUAE, its free and to be fair its a LOT less hassle then owning a real Amiga. But I want these old machines, to put old cards in, accelerators, new ones as well, as long as they are hardware based. Its the physical aspect of retrotech I think people miss out on. The sometimes crappy keyboards, the floppy disks, SCSI controllers, etc. For me that is what I am going back to experience. I spent days repairing this A2000 and then refurbishing it. So gutting it and putting an emulator in it felt bad. Thats just me. The PiStorm IS a good product, and if you found say a totally knackered A2000 and a PiStorm2000 gets it to be usable, then thats a good thing. But yeah, each to their own.
@@RetronautTech I really understand what you mean and how you think, many people think exactly like you, this is also a way of how each person sees things from their own side :)
Not only is Z2 RAM slower than what a CPU slot accelerator can give, but Zorro cards can also stop working if that 8MB limit is reached. RTG, SCSI, and even an x86 bridgeboard all count towards that 8MB.
Most components have a tolerance value, and it is rare for cap values to be particularly critical. Of course 100 to 5 is more than a bit out of spec! As you found it is usually very difficult to measure caps in circuit, and while resistors are sometimes easier, they can also easily show misleading values in circuit because of the interaction with other parts. I agreed that the digital side was very unlikely to be the fault, and the gradual way the brightness faded made me immediately suspect a capacitor. Good tracking nonetheless.
Yes, in hindsight, it becomes more obvious that a capacitor was more the likely issue. But I'm still a relative noob at diagnosing issues like this. I made this video, because watching videos on A4000 battery damage and what it can cause, was very helpful in fixing my own A4000. So this is passing it on, if someone else's DAC circuit has issues in their A4000 or A1200 (quite similar setup) this video should help them I think.
Yes, I guess first thing is, DONT PANIC. Its usually diagnosable. Sticky part here was measuring items in circuit. The resistor read exactly as is, but they can return false values. The capacitors though, were all over the shop and could only really be measured once removed from circuit. So, unless you do that first, to pinpoint the issue, do what I did and hedge your bets with your parts order. TBH I want to build up a supply of components, so ordering 30 when I need one, is not much of an issue. But you may as well do that, as the part cost £0.20 whilst postage was £6.50+ :/
The default amount of chip memory on the Amiga 2000 and 500 was 512K not one meg. Most Amiga software runs fine on 512K of chip memory and 512K of fast memory (one meg total). 😃
The Image Engine card looks like it uses the TI 340 (10 or 20) chip which is the same used in the A2410 from Commodore and DMI Resolver graphics cards. Those are interesting since that is an actual processor and software runs on them, not just a display card. So my Resolver came with a paint program that actually runs on the card itself which is why those cards have so much RAM. Have you tried to find the software for either of those? I know the software for the DMI cards is obtainable as I did download it once a while ago. I should hunt it down since I see it's not on the Amiga hardware database which would be a good place to have a resource like that. No guarantees the software is interchangeable but, there is always a chance. There, IIRC, was even an older version of Cybergraphics that supported these types of cards but I'm pretty sure if it did exist, later versions removed it once these cards were no longer a thing. They were never very common due to the high cost of them due to them being almost a complete computer in themselves. Amiga UNIX also supported the TI graphics processor cards and was the reason for the 2410.
Wow, can you email me please, via the channels email address? So, where to start.... I need to do a short video on this card, as its worth focussing on, certainly. It was intended for use in broadcast TV AFAIK, as it has a 768 x 574 24bit buffer, which supports an 8bit alpha channel. On top of this, it can scroll an image on top of that, again in hardware. So it sounds like the perfect card for sports broadcast, or maybe a weather spot? In terms of the chip, yes its a Texas Instruments 34020. There was a paint package for it, which also worked on Amiga Centre For Scotlands card, the Harlequin. I THINK the software for the Harlequin, works on this card as well, not sure about drivers. The paint app was called Imagica, and yes I have searched for that, and I cant find ANY sofware of that name archived. Same for the Harlequin, there is a game of that name, but no archived drivers. BTW the hard disk was missing from this machine when bought, and no floppies or any other packaging were provided so. Please reach out via email, and we can discuss further?
Very nice video and a lot of good information. What I would be curious to see is how fast is the drive when the CPU is under heavy load. I do not know if this card has some kind of DMA. On my A1200 with a FastATA I can get around 6.5-7 MB/s but when the CPU is on heavy load that drops to 1.5 MB/s. This is a problem in real life situations, i.e. you use the IBrowse to load websites with images and that loads slowly because the image writing on the disk is slow, unless if you save them in memory. Or if you put your machine to play back some mods while you copy files, this will increase the completion time. That's why preferred to switch to a SCSI solution.
I agree, SCSI using DMA would be the trick in this situation I think. Maybe have a read up about the LIDE ROM, maybe it has some kind of DMA tricks up its sleeves?
@@walkero Im afraid this machine has no network solution as yet, though I guess I could try and get a tracker setup on it and try that out. I think in the end though, if you want autonomous data read, then you need SCSI with DMA. Not sure there are that many period correct solutions with that (Fastlane Z3) but I guess more modern accelerators might have that combo?
Why do 99% reviewers have Data Burst of 030 set to off? Is it really that pointless to have it on with such (fast) Fast RAM? I remember it added some 7-8% speed on my M-Tec 030 card on A1200
@@wishusknight3009 I did try turning it on in SysInfo, and ran a speed test, and... no difference. I then ran SpeedTest and the same. In which specific benchmarks does it have an effect. Id be willing to have a look, if I knew where to test it. But if the comment above is right, and its a crash monkey, is it worth it?
@@RetronautTech From what I understand, Zorro has no provisions for snooping. Which makes data caches on Amiga very hit and miss for software compatibility. And hardware compatability as well. Basically data caches needed to be disabled for area's of ram occupied by things like x86 bridgeboards and RTG cards for example. I am not sure but I think most 030 libraries disable this feature further up the chain which makes turning them on in sysinfo etel make no difference? That is my guess. The machine I swore i used to see the difference on was an A2000 which had an A500 socket accelerator, but had no fast ram as I was missing that part of the accelerator (it was a separate clip on). So it got all its bandwidth through the zorro bus. (yeah it was pretty pokey). I swear I used to notice a few percent differences with it on and thought that is what happened with all Amiga's. As to what cpu libraries or version of sysinfo I had, I couldn't tell you, i have not had that machine for several years. It was workbench 3.1 with a few things added. I will try this out on my accelerated A500 when I get a chance. Which currently runs WB 3.2 and its default libraries. I suspect I will see no difference and be scratching my head as to why I remember things so wonky.
