My Garage A1200 find

[Aughie]

I was clearing out my garage and discovered a box with my old A1200 with an 8 meg in the trapdoor plus a couple of 4gig 2.5" HD and a 3.5" one. There was a small ribbon cable for the 2.5" drive.

I recall that the smaller HD was never installed in an Amiga so is blank while the 3.5" has my old Towered A1200 WB on it.

The problem is there are no leads no PSU and no discs with the A1200

I have ordered a A500 PSU off Ebay plus a gadget to allow a PC mouse. I still need a 23pin to Scart. I also have a copy of Amiga Forever on my 32bit Windoze 7 machine PLUS a DVD I was given by a guy I bought my first ever Amiga off who ran an Amiga software business back in the day. It has all kinds of stuff on it PLUS WB 1.3; 2.0; 2.04; 3.0 & 3.1 all in DMS format but as I have neither a working Amiga nor any blank discs its useless to me at the moment.

What are my best options without spending a fortune to get this sad Miggy working again?

[roomeo]

Originally Posted by Aughie

I was clearing out my garage and discovered a box with my old A1200 with an 8 meg in the trapdoor plus a couple of 4gig 2.5" HD and a 3.5" one. There was a small ribbon cable for the 2.5" drive.

I recall that the smaller HD was never installed in an Amiga so is blank while the 3.5" has my old Towered A1200 WB on it.

The problem is there are no leads no PSU and no discs with the A1200

I have ordered a A500 PSU off Ebay plus a gadget to allow a PC mouse. I still need a 23pin to Scart. I also have a copy of Amiga Forever on my 32bit Windoze 7 machine PLUS a DVD I was given by a guy I bought my first ever Amiga off who ran an Amiga software business back in the day. It has all kinds of stuff on it PLUS WB 1.3; 2.0; 2.04; 3.0 & 3.1 all in DMS format but as I have neither a working Amiga nor any blank discs its useless to me at the moment.

What are my best options without spending a fortune to get this sad Miggy working again?

Hi.


get hold of a cf-ide adapter with a cf card. Then you can setup this cf card with winuae. You need a cf-card reader for the pc , but they are cheap..


You can also connect your 3.5 hd to winuae..
Br

[Aughie]

You can also connect your 3.5 hd to winuae..
Br

This is an old IDE connection not sata but the CF sounds like the way to go

[Arnie]

Ide pci(e) cards are quite cheap these days.

[roomeo]

You can find cheap external usb-ide caddies.. I have one for each 2.5 and 3.5 drives..

[Aughie]

As I have a 3.5" drive with workbench and all Amiga software already on there I have seen a convertor cable for 40 pin to 44 pin drives. However the 4 pin power connector seems to be for connecting a 2.5" drive to a PC

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Laptop-2-5...-/200612126786

Would the A500 PSU im getting power the 3.5 inch HD or would I be better converting and using a PSU from a Windoze XP computer I still own.

[Arnie]

You'll need to get additional molex power cables with that adapter.

1 x female to female 4 pin molex.

1 x male molex to 2 x 3.5" floppy drive power.

[Aughie]

When you mentioned the molex connectors I had another look at my old XP desktop computer and it turns out it was a bit of a hibred. The HDs were SATA but the CD Roms were IDE 40pin

The 40 pin cable fits my old Amiga HD perfectly but there's a red jumper wire looped across the top of each of the connectors.I dont know if thats a problem or not.

The cable allows connection of two devices. Would it be suitable and could I bodge using one of the CDRoms on the Amiga along with the 3.5" HD using it.

The more I think about this the more its looking like I would really need to tower this thing up to do it right

[Arnie]

I would concentrate on the HD first. You really need a CF/SD/SSD replacement drive. Those old HD's are too noisy and may fail (that's if it still works).

[Aughie]

Originally Posted by Arnie

I would concentrate on the HD first. You really need a CF/SD/SSD replacement drive. Those old HD's are too noisy and may fail (that's if it still works).

Theres a problem as I dont possess any WB3.0 floppies so I cannot use my miggy to partition the cf card.

What I do have is a DVD with every version of WB on it but in DMS format. If I could find a kind Amiga owner who would UnDMS the discs I need (I think I have 6 blank discs somewhere) from my DVD I would pay postage plus they can keep the DVD. It has something like 640 megs of other Amiga software on it.

I was given it by a guy I bought my 1st Amiga from many years ago who was quitting his Amiga software business

[Arnie]

You can buy a new set of 3.1 floppies from Amigakit.

Complete CF setup here......

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/...oducts_id=1214

[Aughie]

Im WB 3.0 im afraid so it wont work for me and I have spent quite a bit on this already. The PSU came today and I plugged it in but nothing happened no power light nothing.

I could hear it humming when I held it up to my ear so it seemed to be OK. I opened it as I saw there is a fuse in them but it was fine.

In desperation I then stripped my A1200 completely removing the shield in case there was a fuse or somthing in under there. Nothing so I reassembled it all and plugged it in again. Lo & behold this time all worked perfectly. There was quite a bit of HD activity but as the 23pin to Scart cable hasnt arrived yet I have no idea what that means. I really thought this was a blank 2.5" HD. The disk drive clicks which I assume is another hopeful sign.

PS I bought this item as it promised to work with older computers plugged in my PS2 optical mouse but it dosent work, so I ordered a new genuine Amiga mouse instead as I dont want a large adaptor hanging off the back of it]

[jayminer]

You should be able to use composite to connect your amiga to a screen, the picture quality will be bad but atleast you will get video. If there is a workbench installation on the HD you can transfer files to and from the amiga with floppies with crossdos (if you have any old PC with a floppy drive that is, or have a USB-floppy). Other ways to transfer files is to get a network card (they are quite cheap, but you need to get the drivers and a tcp/ip stack to the machine aswell). There is always the old and slow serial cable that can be used to transfer files, but this ofcourse also need software on the amiga to get going.

Regarding WB3.1, it works on an Amiga that has Kickstart 3.0 (even though amigakit says you need kick 3.1) so no problem using WB3.1 diskettes with it.

[Aughie]

I dont know yet if the real 2.5" HD has got WB on it but I have ordered a CF adaptor and a 4 gig card. My 3.5" HD definitely has WB on it. I have read that I could also use a PCMCIA CF adaptor as well thus making transfer of files easier. Can the PCMCIA be used to get an Amiga wirelessly online that would be cool

[DDNI]

Hey Aughie, drop me a message if you need some help. We're practically neighbours.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Aughie

PS I bought this item as it promised to work with older computers plugged in my PS2 optical mouse but it dosent work, so I ordered a new genuine Amiga mouse instead as I dont want a large adaptor hanging off the back of it]

That's a serial adaptor, for using with old PCs rather than old Amigas... Same connector, totally incompatible unfortunately. What you actually need is something like this: http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/...products_id=88

A lot more expensive because it has an active chip in it to convert the signals, but it does allow the use of nice optical mice.

[Daedalus]

I have read that I could also use a PCMCIA CF adaptor as well thus making transfer of files easier.

Yep, you need to install compactflash.device for that to work (and Fat95 if you want to read PC formatted CF cards) - you can get it on Aminet. It works great, but not every card is compatible and it's best to keep cards used as internal hard drives for that purpose only, i.e. using cards set up as hard drives in the PCMCIA slot can be tricky.

Can the PCMCIA be used to get an Amiga wirelessly online that would be cool

Yes it can, provided you can find a compatible card. Prism2.device on Aminet works with cards based on the Prism chipset, see the readme for details. It works fine but don't expect web browsing to be up to much. Email, IRC, FTP etc. will all work fine though.

[Aughie]

My mouse and scart lead arrived together today and there is indeed a workbench on the 2.5" drive I thought was empty. However the whole system boots straight into something called Parbench boot script by Vernon Graner which hogs the whole system and allows nothing else to be done. There is no tick box to stop it. I cannot do anything with the computer. Im stumped Hold a minute just went back and the prog finished whatever it was doing and I have WB back again However the keyboard dosent operate as I fired up Wordworth but no response. I took it apart and the ribbon cable seemed quite loose so hopefully thats fixed.

How do I stop this Parbench thing?

[ajk]

You should be able to get to the "Early Startup Control" by holding down both mouse buttons as you switch the power on. There you can select "Boot With No Startup-Sequence" which should bring you to a blank command line window. Type in "loadwb" and enter, you will probably get a few windows pop up that you need to cancel but Workbench should load up behind the command line window (which you can resize or close).

As to how to get Workbench back to normal... most likely you need to edit or entirely replace the sys:s/startup-sequence script, but I am not familiar with Parbench. Perhaps someone here will know how it works.

[Daedalus]

I'm not all that familiar with it, but it's probably just an entry in the S:Startup-sequence that runs it during bootup. I presume it's waiting to find another Amiga connected to the parallel port before it continues booting.

To see the startup script, open a shell window and type

ed s:startup-sequence

You can comment out any lines related to Parbench by putting a semicolon at the start of the line, then saving the script. If there's nothing in the startup-sequence file related to Parbench, try the s:user-startup file instead.