Using a Compact Flash card on a600/a1200 PCMCIA

[pedrorq]

Bought 2 more 4gb CF cards. The Fujifilm one works nicely so I'm guessing that's the end of my issues! Thanks everyone!

(Although I could replace that 1Gb internal HD for another 4GB CF card, hmmm...)

[fgh]

Good! (What an idiot selling that kit with an image of it inserted in an A1200 though..)

Printing a sticker with a Sandisk logo isn't that hard. Your card could be fake, difficult to tell..

With 2MB chip ram (video/audio memory) and 4 or even 8MB fast ram you can run all the WHDLoad games easily. With only chip or fast some will work but many will not.
WHDLoad requires some memory by iself, so requirements are higher than playing from floppy.

To move contents from one card to another, WinUAE has a feature that lets you create an hdf from it. Then mount both the hdf and the new card and copy back..

And the sandisk card probably still works on the internal a600/1200 IDE by the way.

[pedrorq]

My A1200 HD was partitioned in a strange way, that's why I'm not sure it's easy to "copy" it to a CF. And as much as I'm indeed tempted to move on of my "extra" cards as a new "HD", that's the least of my worries and probably out of scope of this thread

[Nobby_UK]

WHDLoad requires some memory by iself,

Especially older games where it loads a ROM.

[wiggydiggypoo]

Ive just bought and used this: http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=440{20}24

Worked great I have to say, I had WB2.0 originally so needed to boot 3.0 from floppy for it to work, once I got 3.0 installed I had the PCMCIA CF card appear as a drive on WB. Perfect (-;

[CoCan]

Originally Posted by wiggydiggypoo

Ive just bought and used this: http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=440{20}24

Worked great I have to say, I had WB2.0 originally so needed to boot 3.0 from floppy for it to work, once I got 3.0 installed I had the PCMCIA CF card appear as a drive on WB. Perfect (-;

I just bought the same device recently, but can't get it to work.

I bought the CF card from amigakit as well to avoid all the headache of finding and setting up a compatible CF card. It's a Sandisk ULtra 4GB, which probably doesn't mean much.

I have no idea if it's my aging amiga 1200 that's to blame, amigakit say they test the kit before they send, so they know it's fine.

And I don't have another amiga 600/1200 to test it in. opened the amiga up this morning and the pcmcia pins looked fine and not bent. Gave them a blow and wipe anyway (as best I could with the plastic housing)

Does anyone have any ideas? Is there a way to test my pcmcia slot without having another pcmcia device?

[Arnie]

Open a shell window and type info. If CF0: doesn't appear in the list of mounted drives then the software isn't installed correctly.

I'm assuming you have installed the software to a HD?

[CoCan]

Originally Posted by Arnie

Open a shell window and type info. If CF0: doesn't appear in the list of mounted drives then the software isn't installed correctly.

I'm assuming you have installed the software to a HD?

Cheers Arnie!

I will try the shell thing from workbench.

I don't have a hard drive in my amiga. I'ts a stock amiga 1200 3.0 rom, THe amigakit device can be run off floppy apparently though. Requires a boot from the floppy supplied, swap to workbench disk, back to the floppy then it should be ready to use.

[CoCan]

I can't get it to work unfortunately. I can run shell from workbench and do the info command and it doesn't show CF0, however the boot disk they provide (ADAPCMCFL) patches the pcmcia port or something so I'm not sure if the pcmcia device would work straight from workbench?

Anyways can't get shell to run after booting the ADAPCMCFL disk, my Amiga skills are a bit rusty now, but after booting I put in the workbench disk and try to run shell but it doesn't want to work.

[Arnie]

If you run EasyADF and you get a systen request 'Please insert volume CF0: in any drive', then CF0: isn't mounted.

You can click on the left most gadget of Easyadf (where it says CF0:) and it will throw up a select volume requester with the mounted drives listed.

[CoCan]

Thankyou Arnie, yes in that case it isn't mounted. I get a similar error message about CF0 and the only 2 volumes in EasyADF are Df0 and Ram.

It's looking like it can't be fixed, pretty annoyed tbh. amigakit say "Its going to be a timing incompatability with your machine." whatever that means, I should have gone for the IDE method perhaps.

I just wanted to archive my old floppies I created before they are gone for good, but it's turning into a massive balla*he. Tried the 2 floppy drive method on PC last year but found out my motherboard only supports 1 floppy.

Anyway, have to put my Amiga back in storage now due to circumcstances, so will have to come back to it later on.

[amiwolf]

Help, please.

I've an A600 with AmigaOS3.1. I'm trying to cajole compactflash.device V1.32 into working with PFS3-aio formatted CF cards in the PCMCIA slot. So far, I've got a Sandisk 4Gb Ultra (7751 cylinders) PFS3 card mounted as CP0: using this mountlist:

/* compactflash.device $VER: 1.32  */
/* PFS3-aio file system by Toni Wilen */

FileSystem    = l:pfs3
Device        = compactflash.device
Unit        = 0
Flags        = 0
LowCyl        = 2
HighCyl        = 7749
Surfaces    = 1
BlocksPerTrack    = 1008
BlockSize    = 512
Buffers        = 15
BufMemType    = 1
BootPri        = 0
Stacksize    = 4096
Priority    = 5
GlobVec        = -1
DosType        = 0x50465303

Must admit, I'm more than a bit out of practice with all this. So how do I make CP0: mount any other sized capacity CF-PFS3 card, the same way CF0: does with CF-FAT32 cards? I'd like to avoid a separate device entry tailored for each card, eg; CP0:, CP1:, CP2: etc. Any hints would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[Arnie]

I don't think you can. Every card needs it's own mountlist.

To Keep CP0: you could make separate mountlists with CP0: as the device. You can name the mountlist what you like they will always load CP0:

If you add CP0: to the top of your example and # at the bottom you should be good to go. You will most likely need to add mount =1 and activate = 1 as well.

You would probably have to dismount the previous CP0: before mounting another one or just reboot.

P.S Don't add an .info to the mountlist or double click it, it will not work, call it from shell or a script.

examle mount CP0: from <your mounlist> (can be CP1, CP2, CP3 etc)

[amiwolf]

Thank you for replying, Arnie. I figured it wouldn't work. So how does CF0: work its magic? It mounts almost any sized FAT32 card!

[Arnie]

Don't know. It has fat95 & compactflash.device, they most likely communicate between them.

BTW, I use giggledisk to make the mountlists for the CF Cards. Just type giggledisk compactflash.device 0 to ram: (with a card inserted)

[amiwolf]

Ah, sneaky! So I need a new PFS3 aware compactflash.device. Easy!

BTW, I use giggledisk to make the mountlists for the CF Cards. Just type giggledisk compactflash.device 0 to ram: (with a card inserted)

Thats great, thanks for the tip.

[Arnie]

Yeah, piece of cake. Post here when you're done.

[amiwolf]

Originally Posted by Arnie

Yeah, piece of cake. Post here when you're done.

Of course I will! You can run it on your brand new Amiga 5000.

[Arnie]

I use WinUAE these days, I can't afford to keep up with the Amiga Hardware.

[Cobe]

I got Transcend 4GB 133x CF. That wont show up in WB.

CFD and Fat95 latest versions installed.
After mounting CF0: Disk not present

Prepcard(I know its just for old SRAM) gives some info when I insert the card:
I/O Device: 400ns
Format N/A
Geometry N/A
Battery N/A
Product: Vendor CF_Card Version 4.1

Although Fat95 should read both I tried formatting card in both Fat16 and 32 and various allocation unit and partition sizes and nothing.

Although with latest CFD, cardreset and cardpatch are not needed I tried that too and nothing.

Is that it? Just a bad luck?