What to add to an A600 - Page 3

TroyWilkins · 08 September 2016, 09:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by Predseda

I have a bad experience with some joystick / mouse autoswitchers. They work perfectly with analogue ball mice, but the do not work with optical ones. So beware.

Ahh, thank you for the warning. I'll be using it with the joysticks above and what appears to me to be a standard A1200 mouse - unless the A600s also got the same mouse my A1200 used to have, the white rounded one, not the "tank" mouse...

TroyWilkins · 09 September 2016, 07:26

Another item arrived for it today!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...2014.26.58.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...2013.36.19.jpg

TroyWilkins · 17 September 2016, 12:34

I finally got all the items required to add a 16GB mSATA drive to my A600 as shown here: Hack@Home: 16GB mSATA SSD to Amiga IDE - for about £10

So now my A600 has more storage than I could have ever dreamed of back in the day, and has been brought up to 2MB chip RAM.

I've spent some time learning about the limitations and workarounds for large hard drives, and have got my A600 booting successfully, patching scsi.device, and have got Classic Workbench Green Amiga Alien Edition working quite nicely.

I'm far from finished, but I do feel like I'm making progress. It certainly seems I'm going to need to add some fast RAM, as the buffers from the several partitions are eating far too much ram. And yes, I know there will be other benefits too. I keep looking at the Furia and contemplating if I can justify that, considering I also am interested in a Vampire, knowing that I'll have to wait for a Vampire... Also the Indivision ECS, although expensive, looks mighty tempting, it would certainly be better than the composite video output I'm using now, which isn't the best...

This really does feel like coming home again after all these years, and I'm so glad I've done it.

Zetr0 · 17 September 2016, 13:05

Quote:

Originally Posted by TroyWilkins

I finally got all the items required to add a 16GB mSATA drive to my A600 as shown here: Hack@Home: 16GB mSATA SSD to Amiga IDE - for about £10

So now my A600 has more storage than I could have ever dreamed of back in the day, and has been brought up to 2MB chip RAM.

I've spent some time learning about the limitations and workarounds for large hard drives, and have got my A600 booting successfully, patching scsi.device, and have got Classic Workbench Green Amiga Alien Edition working quite nicely.

I'm far from finished, but I do feel like I'm making progress. It certainly seems I'm going to need to add some fast RAM, as the buffers from the several partitions are eating far too much ram. And yes, I know there will be other benefits too. I keep looking at the Furia and contemplating if I can justify that, considering I also am interested in a Vampire, knowing that I'll have to wait for a Vampire... Also the Indivision ECS, although expensive, looks mighty tempting, it would certainly be better than the composite video output I'm using now, which isn't the best...

This really does feel like coming home again after all these years, and I'm so glad I've done it.

+1 ( welcome back home =D )

Also welcome to the problem of what upgrade do you get next ? (please note I said next and not last lol)

The Furia is a nice card and will offer a little more "Ooomph!" (is that a word?) than the ACA620 - while a fraction more in cost atleast its available now, and will hold its value should that you come to sell it later.

I still have my ACA620 and its unlikely I will part with that - it, like the Furia 020 these are delightful little upgrades - and great to have as either a Spare or Secondary machine.

The Indivision ECS is quite a delight, however you can opt for a cheaper option for scan doubling the video output - the GBS 8220 is a great little adaptor from eBay for about $25 and will scan-double your Amiga output video so it will work with VGA equipment such as monitors and newer TV's (and Plasma Panels

) I have one of these floating around and use it for my Spectrum's / Amstrads / Commodore 64 / Atari ST and Amiga's - I have a particular version here that also takes an SVideo in signal (Chroma / Luma / Ground) so my 3DO can display on the VGA of my Plasma Panel.

You can now get both Component SCART (RGB) and Composite SCART (Composite RCA / CBVS) to HDMI out as well - so there is some fun to play with their as well sir!

TroyWilkins · 17 September 2016, 13:36

It feels good to be home again. I have to say, I'm surprised at how snappy the A600 really is as it is now, it really is a delight to use when compared to the PC I'm typing this on now.

Ohhhh, thank you so very much my good man! I'm actually surprised how well our TV is coping with the composite video output from the A600, the first time I tried an interlaced screen-mode, I was happy to see there was none of the headache inducing flicker that I remember so very well showing on the 42" Sony screen. The only real issue is that it's not as clean and crisp as I'd like, because composite. Although it would also be nice to be able to use it with one of the LCDs we have spare here. Thank you so much for the lead, I'll look into that once I've finished this reply.

Am I right in thinking that the Furia has the ability to load a kickstart into RAM and use that instead of the onboard, so I could upgrade to Kickstart 3.1 without touching my existing kickstart ROM? It seems to be that a 3.1 ROM is almost a necessity for me, as so much of what I want to use won't run on KS 2.0.

You speak of a spare or secondary machine... If I could get my hands on an A1200 at a reasonable price, I'd be proud to have 2 Amigas again...

Zetr0 · 17 September 2016, 14:09

@TroyWilkins

Re: Furia
Yes the latest model does support a MAPROM feature which will load (upto) 1MB Kickstart - ROM File (most are 512KB - including the custom 3.9 I am using) - This is loaded at Run Time to FAST RAM and will take 0.5MB from the 9.5MB - Giving you 9MB of FAST RAM, 2MB of CHIP RAM and a 3.x ROM in FAST MEMORY - quite tasty

The latest Furia 020 offers a 33MHz 020 and a 40MHz FPU - which will give you about 6 MIPS and about 1 MFLOP - which is very nice on an A600! (considering this is a tad faster than a stock A3000!)

You should be able to achieve about 1.6MB per second transfer via the native IDE (possibly more). So for the price (about 100 Euros) its pretty impressive.

TroyWilkins · 18 September 2016, 09:48

In that case then, I know what my next purchase for the A600 is going to be now

Once again, thank you my good man, I really appreciate the input.

TroyWilkins · 20 September 2016, 12:09

Bit of a change here, after bending the pins slightly on the IDE to mSATA converter (not enough to stop it working, just enough to make it that little bit harder to plug and unplug), I've decided that the next thing should be a PCMCIA file transfer solution of some kind, so I don't need to keep opening up my poor little A600 each time I want to put something on the mSATA drive that is its hard disk drive.

Still looking at my options here, but from what I've found so far I think some sort of flash memory adapter will be suitable. would prefer SD card, as I have a heap of them laying around of various sizes and CF cards aren't as readily available or cheap, but it seems CF adapters are much easier to get. Of course, if anyone has any thoughts or suggestions, please feel free to respond.

And yes, I know I should be more careful, so I don't bend any more pins.

Arnie · 20 September 2016, 15:08

PCMCIA adapters & CF Cards are by far the most readily available and cheapest solution.

Look on e-bay, there are loads of CF cards & adapters. One card and adapter was selling for £15, or if you don't mind the wait, adapters from Hong Kong/China for £2. CF cards start from £5 for a 4gb card.

Personal experience has taught me that Sandisk cards are best for PCMCIA, Kingston the worst.

The software for mounting the card as CF0: is available from Aminet or you can buy a ready made disk from Amigakit (EasyADF).

You can get a CF card to SD card adapter, they are a bit bulky so may not fit in the PCMCIA adapter (anyone had any experience with this?) and are a bit expensive at around £8-10.

TroyWilkins · 28 September 2016, 10:30

Ok, so I got another extra for it today, my mouse/joystick auto-switcher arrived in the mail. Fantastic!

https://www.instagram.com/p/BK42TpajHrV/

So then I thought I'd get lemmings all sorted out so the kids can have a go, they watched a bit of a play-through of Lemmings on YouTube and they all said it looks easy, hahahaha.

So, no dramas, I have that on the SSD, so I tried running it.

Fail.

The WHDLoad version won't load, as it appears to require fast RAM, and of course I currently only have 2mb of Chip and that's all.

So I decided to unplug the SSD from the A600, plug it into the USB adapter, and copy across the 2 ADFs for Lemmings, as well as a few other games, so I can write them to real disks and load them that way. So, first step was to ensure that those ADFs work in an emulated A600 exactly the same as mine (same hdd setup, same ram, same ROM, PAL A600), and sure enough, worked no drama when booting from the ADF. So after copying all the ADFs to the SSD, safely remove hardware from the PC, plug it back in home into my A600 and...

Why am I seeing the insert disk kickstart screen?!?

Even worse, after unplugging and plugging it back in, I didn't even get any screen. Bump the composite cable and oh, there it is again, the insert disk screen... It's not booting from the SSD...

Everything was/is plugged in correctly...

Ok, unplug everything and walk away from it for now, before I get too annoyed with it...

TroyWilkins · 29 September 2016, 01:48

Came back to it just now, unplugged the 44pin IDE to mSATA adapter with the 16Gb SSD attached, plugged it into my USB adapter, fired up WinUAE and WinUAE happily booted from it in my emulated A600 environment... So I know it still works fine... Will try plugging it back into the 600 and see if it will come back to life, but at least I know I have not fried it...

Amiga1992 · 29 September 2016, 16:24

Do you have it attached by a cable? Those cables break easily.

I get this issue many times and I have to open the thing up and re-seat it. Doesn't usually happen in the models that don't connect with a cable.

TroyWilkins · 30 September 2016, 07:48

Weirdly enough, I got annoyed with it and gave it the 3 finger salute while the 'insert disk' kickstart screen was staring me in the face, and it booted from the SSD... So now I don't want to touch it, just to be on the same side. All the more reason to purchase a solution for file transfer, and a PCMCIA CF adapter and CF card is looking like the best bet.

I got Lemmings working and was entertained watching one of the kids having a go at saving all the lemmings, but they gave up on level 9 of the 'fun' levels.

https://goo.gl/photos/MyAfZpHqJuArjaNr5

@Akira, yes, it's connected with a cable, good point, I hadn't thought of that, thank you. I shall be extra careful with the cable with that in mind.

DopPie · 30 September 2016, 08:08

Maybe the ssd is slow to initialize. I had this with a good old mechanical harddisk in the past. The software in the ROM only retries a couple of times. In the 3.1 ROM the time the software waits for the harddisk was increased.

The advantage of the software not detecting the drive in time is that you get to see the boot screen :P I never see the bootscreen.

TroyWilkins · 30 September 2016, 08:38

I did think of that, but every other time when I've done this it just works the very first time and I don't see the kickstart screen. This is what made me worried.

Arnie · 30 September 2016, 15:36

I second the cable suggestion, it's easy to miss a row of pins at the end of the mb socket. I find it really fiddly at times.

Amiga1992 · 30 September 2016, 18:51

Most of the times I had cable issues, the cable looked perfectly fine to me. It's such a thin cable that an internal break would not be noticed easily. This is why I avoid IDE CF or else adapters that need a cable to be connected.

TroyWilkins · 15 October 2016, 06:36

Ok, I'm starting to get a little annoyed with the composite video output I'm currently using, it's nowhere near as good (obviously) as how I remember things looking on my 1084s back in the day, or the NEC multisync I replaced it with. So I started looking into what my options are.

My display devices here are:

the Sony HX900 in the lounge room (which is what I'm using at the moment), which has composite in, HDMI, VGA, component, and RF.
Several different LCD PC monitors with VGA and/or DVI input.
Soniq L42V12A-AU in another room, composite, RF, VGA, HDMI

The Indivision ECS looks like it would be perfect, as I could then connect to pretty much anything, and I've already got the A604n, but ouch on the price. I realise it's an item that is a low-volume sales, made for a niche market, but I'd rather put that sort of money towards an accelerator and some fast RAM for the A600.

I found that there have been threads here about Amiga to component options, but those looked like dead threads, which is sad.

While I'd love to get myself another 1084s, or even better a nice multisync, I doubt those would be cheaper than the Indivision ECS.

I know there are other options, but from what I've found, they look like they have their own hassles, such as needing their own power input.

So, does anyone have any ideas. It looks like if SCART was an option here it would make things so much easier, but I don't think I've ever seen a scart connector on a TV here in Australia, sure there may be some, but I've never seen it as an option.

ajk · 15 October 2016, 15:02

With some luck, one of those monitors with VGA input might be able to display the Amiga RGB signal. There are threads about this here on the board. Certain Dell and BenQ models for example work with just a simple adapter/cable.

idrougge · 15 October 2016, 17:41

I recommend the Benq. The Dell is not satisfying me, though I'm more picky than most.

15 October 2016, 06:36	#58
TroyWilkins Registered User Join Date: Jan 2015 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 548	Ok, I'm starting to get a little annoyed with the composite video output I'm currently using, it's nowhere near as good (obviously) as how I remember things looking on my 1084s back in the day, or the NEC multisync I replaced it with. So I started looking into what my options are. My display devices here are: the Sony HX900 in the lounge room (which is what I'm using at the moment), which has composite in, HDMI, VGA, component, and RF. Several different LCD PC monitors with VGA and/or DVI input. Soniq L42V12A-AU in another room, composite, RF, VGA, HDMI The Indivision ECS looks like it would be perfect, as I could then connect to pretty much anything, and I've already got the A604n, but ouch on the price. I realise it's an item that is a low-volume sales, made for a niche market, but I'd rather put that sort of money towards an accelerator and some fast RAM for the A600. I found that there have been threads here about Amiga to component options, but those looked like dead threads, which is sad. While I'd love to get myself another 1084s, or even better a nice multisync, I doubt those would be cheaper than the Indivision ECS. I know there are other options, but from what I've found, they look like they have their own hassles, such as needing their own power input. So, does anyone have any ideas. It looks like if SCART was an option here it would make things so much easier, but I don't think I've ever seen a scart connector on a TV here in Australia, sure there may be some, but I've never seen it as an option.

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09 September 2016, 07:26	#42
TroyWilkins Registered User Join Date: Jan 2015 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 548	Another item arrived for it today! https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...2014.26.58.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...2013.36.19.jpg

17 September 2016, 12:34	#43
TroyWilkins Registered User Join Date: Jan 2015 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 548	I finally got all the items required to add a 16GB mSATA drive to my A600 as shown here: Hack@Home: 16GB mSATA SSD to Amiga IDE - for about £10 So now my A600 has more storage than I could have ever dreamed of back in the day, and has been brought up to 2MB chip RAM. I've spent some time learning about the limitations and workarounds for large hard drives, and have got my A600 booting successfully, patching scsi.device, and have got Classic Workbench Green Amiga Alien Edition working quite nicely. I'm far from finished, but I do feel like I'm making progress. It certainly seems I'm going to need to add some fast RAM, as the buffers from the several partitions are eating far too much ram. And yes, I know there will be other benefits too. I keep looking at the Furia and contemplating if I can justify that, considering I also am interested in a Vampire, knowing that I'll have to wait for a Vampire... Also the Indivision ECS, although expensive, looks mighty tempting, it would certainly be better than the composite video output I'm using now, which isn't the best... This really does feel like coming home again after all these years, and I'm so glad I've done it.

17 September 2016, 13:36	#45
TroyWilkins Registered User Join Date: Jan 2015 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 548	It feels good to be home again. I have to say, I'm surprised at how snappy the A600 really is as it is now, it really is a delight to use when compared to the PC I'm typing this on now. Ohhhh, thank you so very much my good man! I'm actually surprised how well our TV is coping with the composite video output from the A600, the first time I tried an interlaced screen-mode, I was happy to see there was none of the headache inducing flicker that I remember so very well showing on the 42" Sony screen. The only real issue is that it's not as clean and crisp as I'd like, because composite. Although it would also be nice to be able to use it with one of the LCDs we have spare here. Thank you so much for the lead, I'll look into that once I've finished this reply. Am I right in thinking that the Furia has the ability to load a kickstart into RAM and use that instead of the onboard, so I could upgrade to Kickstart 3.1 without touching my existing kickstart ROM? It seems to be that a 3.1 ROM is almost a necessity for me, as so much of what I want to use won't run on KS 2.0. You speak of a spare or secondary machine... If I could get my hands on an A1200 at a reasonable price, I'd be proud to have 2 Amigas again...

17 September 2016, 14:09	#46
Zetr0 Ya' like it Retr0? Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: United Kingdom Age: 49 Posts: 9,768	@TroyWilkins Re: Furia Yes the latest model does support a MAPROM feature which will load (upto) 1MB Kickstart - ROM File (most are 512KB - including the custom 3.9 I am using) - This is loaded at Run Time to FAST RAM and will take 0.5MB from the 9.5MB - Giving you 9MB of FAST RAM, 2MB of CHIP RAM and a 3.x ROM in FAST MEMORY - quite tasty The latest Furia 020 offers a 33MHz 020 and a 40MHz FPU - which will give you about 6 MIPS and about 1 MFLOP - which is very nice on an A600! (considering this is a tad faster than a stock A3000!) You should be able to achieve about 1.6MB per second transfer via the native IDE (possibly more). So for the price (about 100 Euros) its pretty impressive.

18 September 2016, 09:48	#47
TroyWilkins Registered User Join Date: Jan 2015 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 548	In that case then, I know what my next purchase for the A600 is going to be now Once again, thank you my good man, I really appreciate the input.

20 September 2016, 12:09	#48
TroyWilkins Registered User Join Date: Jan 2015 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 548	Bit of a change here, after bending the pins slightly on the IDE to mSATA converter (not enough to stop it working, just enough to make it that little bit harder to plug and unplug), I've decided that the next thing should be a PCMCIA file transfer solution of some kind, so I don't need to keep opening up my poor little A600 each time I want to put something on the mSATA drive that is its hard disk drive. Still looking at my options here, but from what I've found so far I think some sort of flash memory adapter will be suitable. would prefer SD card, as I have a heap of them laying around of various sizes and CF cards aren't as readily available or cheap, but it seems CF adapters are much easier to get. Of course, if anyone has any thoughts or suggestions, please feel free to respond. And yes, I know I should be more careful, so I don't bend any more pins.

20 September 2016, 15:08	#49
Arnie R.I.P Smudge 18-08-16 Join Date: Aug 2005 Location: Leicester/UK Age: 66 Posts: 3,968	PCMCIA adapters & CF Cards are by far the most readily available and cheapest solution. Look on e-bay, there are loads of CF cards & adapters. One card and adapter was selling for £15, or if you don't mind the wait, adapters from Hong Kong/China for £2. CF cards start from £5 for a 4gb card. Personal experience has taught me that Sandisk cards are best for PCMCIA, Kingston the worst. The software for mounting the card as CF0: is available from Aminet or you can buy a ready made disk from Amigakit (EasyADF). You can get a CF card to SD card adapter, they are a bit bulky so may not fit in the PCMCIA adapter (anyone had any experience with this?) and are a bit expensive at around £8-10.

28 September 2016, 10:30	#50
TroyWilkins Registered User Join Date: Jan 2015 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 548	Ok, so I got another extra for it today, my mouse/joystick auto-switcher arrived in the mail. Fantastic! https://www.instagram.com/p/BK42TpajHrV/ So then I thought I'd get lemmings all sorted out so the kids can have a go, they watched a bit of a play-through of Lemmings on YouTube and they all said it looks easy, hahahaha. So, no dramas, I have that on the SSD, so I tried running it. Fail. The WHDLoad version won't load, as it appears to require fast RAM, and of course I currently only have 2mb of Chip and that's all. So I decided to unplug the SSD from the A600, plug it into the USB adapter, and copy across the 2 ADFs for Lemmings, as well as a few other games, so I can write them to real disks and load them that way. So, first step was to ensure that those ADFs work in an emulated A600 exactly the same as mine (same hdd setup, same ram, same ROM, PAL A600), and sure enough, worked no drama when booting from the ADF. So after copying all the ADFs to the SSD, safely remove hardware from the PC, plug it back in home into my A600 and... Why am I seeing the insert disk kickstart screen?!? Even worse, after unplugging and plugging it back in, I didn't even get any screen. Bump the composite cable and oh, there it is again, the insert disk screen... It's not booting from the SSD... Everything was/is plugged in correctly... Ok, unplug everything and walk away from it for now, before I get too annoyed with it...

29 September 2016, 01:48	#51
TroyWilkins Registered User Join Date: Jan 2015 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 548	Came back to it just now, unplugged the 44pin IDE to mSATA adapter with the 16Gb SSD attached, plugged it into my USB adapter, fired up WinUAE and WinUAE happily booted from it in my emulated A600 environment... So I know it still works fine... Will try plugging it back into the 600 and see if it will come back to life, but at least I know I have not fried it...

29 September 2016, 16:24	#52
Amiga1992 Registered User Join Date: May 2001 Location: ? Posts: 19,644	Do you have it attached by a cable? Those cables break easily. I get this issue many times and I have to open the thing up and re-seat it. Doesn't usually happen in the models that don't connect with a cable.

30 September 2016, 07:48	#53
TroyWilkins Registered User Join Date: Jan 2015 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 548	Weirdly enough, I got annoyed with it and gave it the 3 finger salute while the 'insert disk' kickstart screen was staring me in the face, and it booted from the SSD... So now I don't want to touch it, just to be on the same side. All the more reason to purchase a solution for file transfer, and a PCMCIA CF adapter and CF card is looking like the best bet. I got Lemmings working and was entertained watching one of the kids having a go at saving all the lemmings, but they gave up on level 9 of the 'fun' levels. https://goo.gl/photos/MyAfZpHqJuArjaNr5 @Akira, yes, it's connected with a cable, good point, I hadn't thought of that, thank you. I shall be extra careful with the cable with that in mind.

30 September 2016, 08:08	#54
DopPie Zone Friend Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Den Hoorn, NL Age: 44 Posts: 259	Maybe the ssd is slow to initialize. I had this with a good old mechanical harddisk in the past. The software in the ROM only retries a couple of times. In the 3.1 ROM the time the software waits for the harddisk was increased. The advantage of the software not detecting the drive in time is that you get to see the boot screen :P I never see the bootscreen.

30 September 2016, 08:38	#55
TroyWilkins Registered User Join Date: Jan 2015 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 548	I did think of that, but every other time when I've done this it just works the very first time and I don't see the kickstart screen. This is what made me worried.

30 September 2016, 15:36	#56
Arnie R.I.P Smudge 18-08-16 Join Date: Aug 2005 Location: Leicester/UK Age: 66 Posts: 3,968	I second the cable suggestion, it's easy to miss a row of pins at the end of the mb socket. I find it really fiddly at times.

30 September 2016, 18:51	#57
Amiga1992 Registered User Join Date: May 2001 Location: ? Posts: 19,644	Most of the times I had cable issues, the cable looked perfectly fine to me. It's such a thin cable that an internal break would not be noticed easily. This is why I avoid IDE CF or else adapters that need a cable to be connected.

15 October 2016, 15:02	#59
ajk Registered User Join Date: May 2010 Location: Helsinki, Finland Posts: 1,341	With some luck, one of those monitors with VGA input might be able to display the Amiga RGB signal. There are threads about this here on the board. Certain Dell and BenQ models for example work with just a simple adapter/cable.

15 October 2016, 17:41	#60
idrougge Registered User Join Date: Sep 2007 Location: Stockholm Posts: 4,332	I recommend the Benq. The Dell is not satisfying me, though I'm more picky than most.

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