CompuServe Messages

(You'll get lots of answers to your question. Here are mine.) 1. You should have a separate VGA card and you'll probably want to get a switch box in order to switch back and forth from your PC and Amiga display modes. Under no circumstances should you attempt to run the BB from a partition on your Amiga drive. Buy a separate controller and hard drive for the BB. An IDE controller with several external ports is only about $20. (But get a SCSI if you later want to add CD ROM.) 2. Nope. No drives come with it. You have to buy them. You CAN share the Amiga drives, but that is a very poor and unsatisfactory option. I have a 5 1/4" and a 3 1/2", but a lot of people just by two 3 1/2s. 3. I have DOS 6 running on mine with one relatively minor problem – annoying, though. Others have reported serious problems, but I suspect that these might have been caused by installing while having a 3rd party memory manager or some sort of ram device active. DOS 6 appears to interfere w/the byte count as perceived by C='s startup program. This being CI$, I'm sure someone will figure out a solution and post it. (Don't count on C= for much BB support.) 4. Yep. Janus has a device for switching the printer device by clicking on an icon. However, I've found that this program doesn't work with my multi-port card, so I have a nifty little sensor device set up with both printer cables running into it. With a modem, as far as I know, you should decide on one or another. I think you could possibly use a sensor device or switch box, but I haven't tried it, because the mouse switching routine already makes the COM ports a little screwy. (And Windows, itself, plays heck with the COM ports.) At present, I'm still communicating from the Amiga side, but I may switch to the PC side in order to be able to use WinFAX Pro instead of GP FAX. 5. Yes. 6. No, it's too bad they don't collect threads and post them here the way they do on some of the other forums, because everyone is always asking questions. I ask a question (sometimes silly) about once every two weeks, and always get an answer. There are some very patient, and highly expert, participants in this forum. Good luck. If you ordered the $200 BB, you're getting a super deal. (I paid $550 Canadian for mine – and, at that time, the price was about $200 cheaper than any other dealer in Edmonton.)