Using a Compact Flash card on a600/a1200 PCMCIA

[Jope]

Originally Posted by A600

I've tried a 128 MB SmartMedia Card and a 16 MB SD card and both worked flawlessly on my A1200 after installing fat95 and cfd. I had to reinsert the pcmcia card a couple of times but other than that, I haven't found any problems.

I got tired of my 8MB CF cards, and I remembered that I have a PCMCIA -> MMC/SD converter sitting on a shelf somewhere (bought it for my girlfriend to put MP3s on the mem card of her phone).

Both MMC and SD cards are detected and run fine.

Only thing is, that someone decided to put a CardBus sized "insert protector" on the left side of the PCMCIA connector, it wouldn't fit in the A1200's PCMCIA slot. I just shaved off the thick slip of plastic and it works just fine. Aren't standards great, especially when people don't care about them. ;-)

BTW, high capacity CF cards are sometimes very expensive compared to CF/SD cards.

Oh, and I split the CF thread into two, since the CFIDE problems are totally different to the CF->PCMCIA problems. (actually, there are no problems with PCMCIA adapters ;-)

[Zetr0]

@jope

good work on splitting it was getting a bit heavy with many pages to go through.

Hi, I've read through the thread and am still not sure what brand PCMCIA->CF adaptor to purchase, hope to get one here to save on shipping from AmiKit etc.

Is there a list of brands/models of adaptors that are known to work with 1200?

Thanks

[Jope]

No list, they're all pretty much identical. Very bad luck if you encounter a non-working one..

[Zetr0]

@esclipse

If i can suggest anything, ask the seller if these items are able to boot / load from ?

[adonay]

I use a Sandisk compact flash adapter and several sandisk cards they all work 512mb - 2gb i also have a Puremedia 2 gb hs CF card that does NOT work at all people please stay away from those puremedia cards.....

[elmasta]

a newbie question follows...

Is there any way the Amiga can recognize a CF card on PCMCIA as FastRAM?
say... the first 4 megs of a 16mb card. It would be interesting, since pcmcia ram cards are hard to find, and cf is cheap.

What happens if you run prepcard on a cf-pcmcia adapter with a card attached?

[ppill]

Originally Posted by elmasta

a newbie question follows...

Is there any way the Amiga can recognize a CF card on PCMCIA as FastRAM?
[...]
What happens if you run prepcard on a cf-pcmcia adapter with a card attached?

Too good to be true. Not possible. Prepcard just displays an error.

[elmasta]

Originally Posted by ppill

Too good to be true. Not possible. Prepcard just displays an error.

Would it be possible with the use of a driver? for example a modified compactflash.device. Or maybe by patching card.device or something?

[Zetr0]

@elmasta

If memory serves correctly it comes down to speed / refresh and access time.

Compact flash although fast is still woe-fully slow compared to PCMCIA - SRAM which functions from 250ns to 100ns, where CF is measured in milliseconds (for both reading and writing)

the 4MB SRAM i have operates at 150ns read / write and refresh

although i believe it would be possible to configure the CF card as memory (after a lot of effort), it would be that slow it would be unusable .

because A600 ram and cpu expansions are so rare I decided to hit up Aminet and see if i could redevelop some of the hardware upgrades for the A600 since they are pin-compatible on the CPU, i have some success but only in the schematic and pcb design, i have yet to build one

but when i shake this god damn flu and finish of some Svideo units then whoot thats my next thing

in fact I hope to be able to put a small card with 4MB of ram AND an EC020@20mhz I hope to be able to keep it under £20 too

[elmasta]

@Zetr0

Absolutely right, access time is an issue. I googled for some test on flash cards and it seems the typical access time is around 1.5ms so, access time wise, it would be 10000 times slower than 150ns SRAM :S

But, on the other hand, we all see windows using virtual memory every day. Access times on HDs, from what I see are around 13-15ms. That's 100000 times slower than 150ns !! And we notice it's slow, but not unbearable. So the question remains...

[Zetr0]

@elmasta

as you probably know windows uses virtual memory in a paging system, from this it shunts (pages) un-used or less priority data to the hard disk and then when call it loads it all in and shunts something else out... this is known as Thrashing the disk, and Windows has been abusing hardware in this way since Win98

as modern windows determines a programs runtime amount of memory when that program is non in use or only in an idle state it will page it and its associated memory's out to disk and when in use it will lump it back into main memory hence the delay on calling up a back ground program.

Windows is particularly crap at its Virtual memory handling and will page out to disk even when there is plenty of free ram available.

the real essence of my overly long story (sorry about that) is that Virtual Memory is not instant access.. you have to page out and then load back in again and again... this VM feature is supported by an MMU on the chip or board, however in an Amiga all the work would have to be done by the CPU and oh my..... even if the access speed wasn't an issue.... it would completely cripple the system..

the real crux here is imagine having to load information from the CF card to the ALU on the CPU is 10,000 times slower than in SRAM, so essentially you would slow down your Amiga.... 10,000 times...

[elmasta]

Originally Posted by Zetr0

...Virtual Memory is not instant access..

some little detail I forgot

Originally Posted by Zetr0

the real crux here is imagine having to load information from the CF card to the ALU on the CPU is 10,000 times slower than in SRAM, so essentially you would slow down your Amiga.... 10,000 times...

touché

[PoliceQuest]

Old thread, but i will stick on this anyway.
I have a PCMCIA CF adapter with a 2gb CF Kingston memory and want to know how to set up this with my A1200 to work.
I have installed the compactflash.device and CF0 files into SYSEVS (i have not found CF0.info? anywhere)

The funny thing is that with a SANDISK 256MB CF card, the unit is working.
Is there a limit of size of cf memory thru PCMCIA?

I have read that some changes must be done, like FLAGS=2 and so on....in what file shall i do the changes?

regards

[Amiga1992]

Seems like some readers are to blame for card size limit.
My reader, for example, I think doesn't take anything higher than 2GB.

[rkauer]

One more issue if someone wants to use a CF as memory expansion: the lifetime of each cell!

OK, each cell is able to be written ~1000 times until fail. For a HD, that's fine (even brilliant), but not for RAM! RAM cells are written/read dozen times. The CF card will fail in a week or so.

[DJBase]

Originally Posted by PoliceQuest

The funny thing is that with a SANDISK 256MB CF card, the unit is working.
Is there a limit of size of cf memory thru PCMCIA?

I have a 4GB Sandisk working. I guess its also more a matter of the device like the ide port.

[Photon]

Who would use a memory card of any type for ram expansion anyway? Memory cards are removable media, like hyperspace floppies or harddisks.

And rkauer, most modern cards allow hundreds of thousands of writes to each cell - ie. lasts much longer than the average harddisk. Check your facts.

[Toni Wilen]

Corsair has nice document describing flash wear leveling: http://www.corsairmemory.com/_faq/FA...r_leveling.pdf

All Corsair flash drives are built with memory components that can handle AT LEAST 10,000 write cycles; typically they will handle an order of magnitude more than this. So, this means that in order to exhaust the drive in ten years, one would have to write to EVERY BLOCK in the device about 2.7 times per day, every single day.

[Photon]

"With these, one can write over 210 GBytes of data to the drive each day, for ten years!"

OK, so I skipped some text. Anyway, better than I thought

I read 100,000-1,000,000 writes in another doc that was for CF.