Anyone got an A4000 with working PAR card?

[Starglider 2]

If you have that setup up and running, please reach out. Thanks!

Your friend in retro, Perifractic

[Locutus]

Yes, i have a working parallel port on a VarIO card, what do you need to know?

...

Oh silly me, i suppose you meant: http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/par

No nevermind!

[Starglider 2]

Yup but thanks anyway lol

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by Starglider 2

If you have that setup up and running, please reach out. Thanks!

Your friend in retro, Perifractic

It's not up and running at the moment as I have it stored away, but I do have a working (last I checked) A4000 in storage with DPS Personal Animation Recorder and TBC IV.

Do you have a PAR hard drive that needs extraction or something? You might be able to just extract it with a Linux box.

[Starglider 2]

Originally Posted by AmigaHope

It's not up and running at the moment as I have it stored away, but I do have a working (last I checked) A4000 in storage with DPS Personal Animation Recorder and TBC IV.

Do you have a PAR hard drive that needs extraction or something? You might be able to just extract it with a Linux box.

That's exactly what I need yes. However I have someone else on the task now. Thank you!

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by AmigaHope

Do you have a PAR hard drive that needs extraction or something? You might be able to just extract it with a Linux box.

As far as I'm aware, PAR hard drives use a proprietary file system.

Last time I checked Linux only had support for Amiga FFS partitions. So it would be no more helpful than a real Amiga (without PAR card) in this case.

Unless, of course, you could dd the drive and reverse engineer the resulting data. Needless to say, this is likely going to be extremely difficult.

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

As far as I'm aware, PAR hard drives use a proprietary file system.

Last time I checked Linux only had support for Amiga FFS partitions. So it would be no more helpful than a real Amiga (without PAR card) in this case.

Unless, of course, you could dd the drive and reverse engineer the resulting data. Needless to say, this is likely going to be extremely difficult.

Yeah dd the drive basically. You don't even have to totally reverse-engineer the filesystem, just be able to extract the raw jpeg frames. AFAIK the PAR just uses JPEG instead of a proprietary compression scheme. It also just stores individual frames rather than any sort of complex motion-based compression, and it doesn't do audio at all so there's not interleaving of data.

For instance this tool is great for extracting from known data formats even if the filesystem isn't understood:

https://www.r-studio.com/

[DiMaestro]

This guy does. [ Show youtube player ]

And it's pretty neat.

[Starglider 2]

Originally Posted by DiMaestro

This guy does. [ Show youtube player ]

And it's pretty neat.

Haha that's me!

[Pyromania]

Since you brought up the Personal Animation Recorder. that’s another card that WinUAE should emulate. The DPS PAR is a cool card, I sold tons of those when I worked at a Amiga dealer in California in the mid 1990’s. Starglider 2, I love your channel on YouTube and watch most of your videos. You videos are well done and fun to watch.

[Starglider 2]

Thank you for your kind words! Means a lot

It would be great if it could emulate it!

[dschallock]

I have a Amiga 3000 tower with a working PAR card and TBC IV card connected, just like the setup was you showed in the video. Love that card. Use it for playing traditional animation tests.

[mark_k]

If you want to help with reverse-engineering the PAR, please see this thread I posted asking for info...

[SantiDarkG]

starglider 2...... I have an Amiga 2500 with all those boards and VAmpire too, and I am in Santa Monica, very close if you need help.

[Starglider 2]

Thanks everyone! I'll reach out if needed ?

[Acill]

I have a working PAR card here, but its not setup on my system. Let me know if you want it on loan. We can maybe work something out. Message me (Paul Rezendes)

[Starglider 2]

Well I have the PAR, it's the A4000 battery damage that's the issue, but I'm working on it. Thanks!!

I was previously looking for someone with the PAR working on their system so I could export the footage but I have that in hand too now

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by Starglider 2

Well I have the PAR, it's the A4000 battery damage that's the issue, but I'm working on it. Thanks!!

Maybe a good excuse for a modern repro motherboard replacement project? Puppyfractic can learn how to do SMD soldering and Ashley can hold the heat gun.

[slaapliedje]

Originally Posted by AmigaHope

Yeah dd the drive basically. You don't even have to totally reverse-engineer the filesystem, just be able to extract the raw jpeg frames. AFAIK the PAR just uses JPEG instead of a proprietary compression scheme. It also just stores individual frames rather than any sort of complex motion-based compression, and it doesn't do audio at all so there's not interleaving of data.

For instance this tool is great for extracting from known data formats even if the filesystem isn't understood:

https://www.r-studio.com/

Interesting, I should throw testdisk at it, as it also does some deep level investigating and may be able to pull jpegs out of the image.
Edit: Testdisk couldn't decide anything was on it.

Side note: I got my PAR working with the drive that came with it from the eBay auction for it. It's an 8GB drive (so the question elsewhere about what the limit is, it's at least 8GB). This one had a capture from the menu of Spider-man (I believe it was the original one with Toby McGuire).
When I tried using the Gnome Disk utility to restore the 4.0GB image the first time, bits of Spider-Man were still on the drive. So I wiped it with the PAR utility, and then imaged it again and it found... NOTHING!
Then I wiped it again and tried the 1.4gb hdf image... the one that should have had the Titanic stuff on it, but again nothing showed up.

@Starglider 2
How did you image these? I'm going to write the image I made back and make sure that's even working.... I did open up the Hex editor that's built into the PAR test software (which I made ADFs of) and it looked like it had some headers and such on the drive. So that'd be a start in figuring out the format.

Also, it's a shame you can't use the PAR as a standard IDE interface for the Amiga, it's fairly fast at 7MB/s I think my Ultra SCSI on my CSPPC only goes about 9MB/s

[Locutus]

If you have disk images and by the sound of it PAR writes sequential jpeg's in one go to it.

Have you tried just running binwalk on them?