#Emplant Update 🙁
16 messages in this thread
Don't feel bad, Utilities Unlimited has found three people who have
Emplant working pretty good, I'm sure they'll figure it out.
Paul,
Honestly, the only hangup I have now with the Emplant is the crummy floppy
support. If they did a better job with that, I believe that I'd be up and
running right now!
Oh well…guess its time for an HD drive…
Jonathan
"…Oh well…guess its time for an HD drive…"
Jonathan,
Are you saying that the hard drive support for the Emplant is now working?
That would be great! But without floppy support how do they intend to
tranfser the data to it?
Chris
Fellow Emplantees,
I have been struggling with trying to get a Syquest drive set up for use
with the emplant. The aproach I've taken is to format a cartridge and copy
on the system files from a real Mac. Then connected it up to the Amiga.
Next I created a mountlist entry for the drive/cartridge and then Mount the
device. This is all according to coaching from Jim Drew at UU. The trick
I'm told is to get the hi/low cylinder entries in the mountlist correct.
This would seem to be easier said than done although Jim says many users
have done it. We have left messages on the UU BBS asking someone to come
forth but as yet no one has. I have tried searching for the Mac boot block
on the drive with a sector editor as Jim tells me this would mark the
beginning of the first cylinder. The results so far have been inconclusive
because although I have found the boot block, it turns up in different
places depending on what I had for the low cylinder value in the mountlist
when I mounted it. And in no case did it appear as the first sector in any
cylinder as Jim led me to believe it would. In case anyone would like to
help me track this down the Mac boot block starts with the string "LK`".
In passing I'd like to say thanks to Jim Drew at UU for his help and
patience in explaining things to me and fixing bugs. It has been one
hurddle after another getting the Emplant to the point that it is on my
system. I must be the only one using 1.3 on a superkickstart A3000, at
least according to Jim. He and Joe seem to work tirelessly, putting out
upgrades and bug fixes every 3 or 4 days.
Ron
Whapping — with a Phoenix A1000 no less
Ron,
Why on earth are you running _1.3_ on your A3000?! Yecch! The first
thing I did after installing 2.04 on my 3000 was to wipe the 1.3 partition
and very willingly forget it ever existed. You must be either a developer
or a masochist. 8^)
-Dave (via AutoPilot)
David, Ya know this is really a matter of personal preference. I don't use
the workbench and spent a lot of time tuning up my cli environment so it's
just the way I want it. Some of the important utilities and window
dressings I use just don't work with 2.xx so I have almost no incentive to
change.
Ron,
Well, your preference is _your_ preference, of course. But AmigaOS 2.x
(and up) offers a lot more than just a 3D GUI. As an OS it's _far_ more
stable than 1.3, with many new and/or enhanced features that would get a
lot more notice and appreciation if software developers weren't held back
by so many people still running 1.3. 🙁
-Dave (via AutoPilot)
Could you post your Mountlist for the Syquest? And what is UU BBS #?
Thanks,
-Jerry
I've actually gotten the Emplant to work from a Syquest drive. First I
formatted and loaded the system from a Mac. Then I connected the drive to
the Amiga and issued a mount command with a standard Syquest mountlist
modified in the following way:
Surfaces = 1
BlocksPerTrack = 32
LowCyl = 3
HighCyl = 2307
The rest is just the ordinary scsi disk mountlist. The point of this mount
list is to put the first block of the Mac HFS at the first block of the
mounted partition. This is where Emplant looks for it. My Mac formatters
put this block at block 96 (1 * 32 * 3 = 96). I would assume yours would do
the same.
The UU BBS # is (602) 453-9767
Hope this helps, Ron
Chris,
They have hard drive support (although I cannot try it out). When I
mentioned an "HD Drive", I meant a high density floppy to help beat the
Sybil blues…:)
Jonathan, via AutoPilot // Only Amiga makes
\\// it possible…
Ah, I sometimes miss the distinction of HD standing for High Density
rather than Hard Drive. Maybe we should add a lowercase [i] to that
acronym? HiD? Military types can help us out here.
Still I don't understand UU's decision on the floppy drive support. It
goes back to the "chicken or the egg", which came first. How can you have
info on your Hard Drive, without copying it from some other storage
device, usually in most cases a floppy drive?
Chris
Chris,
Don't forget…UU claims that the Sybil works for almost all users…and in
the same sentence, says that they are backing away from having folks load
up Mac disks direct! In other words, their floppy I/O solution of choice
is to first convert a Mac disk to Emplant format, and then use the Emplant
formatted disk. Afterwards, the user must go back the other way to get
stuff out of the machine.
This is a pretty nasty solution, IMO. I think that if enough users got
together, we could lobby for a better solution. I suggested the UU put out
a Mac floppy adapter…and they said that almost all DD drives are out of
production now, and it makes no sense. However, I would be all for a Mac
Superdrive adapter…that would solve all the problems, although be a
fairly expensive way to go.
Oh well…
Jonathan
Jon,
Ok, I'll bite, how does one "convert a Mac disk to Emplant format"…
without using a floppy drive on the EMPLANT to read the mac disk format?
Chris
Chris,
I forget that I am not dealing with someone that has dealt with the grief
an Empant brings to your life:) OK, here goes…
* The Emplant emulation software uses the Sybil hardware and the
sybil.library to read DD Mac disks.
* The Convert utility, which only converts disks from format to format,
uses the same hardware and sybil.library
* The Convert utility is much more robust than the Emplant software; I
don't know why. Additionally, some users can only get their Sybils to work
by adjusting a pot on the Sybil during a disk read. Convert flashes your
power LED during disk reads, Emplant does not. Convert handles "bad data"
gracefully, Emplant does not.
In other words, they are substituting a more robust, although more
cumbersome kludge, for what passes for normal floppy I/O. Not terribly
acceptable, IMO.
Jonathan
Jonathan,
Yoww! I think I'll stick for now with my AMAX. <grin>
Now tell me how do I go about finding the high low cylinders on a MAC
formatted disk? I saw someone asking for help to do this and since I have
SyQuests that work as MAC, and Norton Utilities that has a disk editor, I
can find out lots of things about the cartridge's sector format. I just
need to know what to look for, besides the "LW" which, BTW, are the
initials of the programmer who originally wrote some of the OS. So far, I
know that there are 86,693 sectors or 0 thru 86,692. Now what else do I
need to compute the cylinders for a mountlist entry?
Chris
Chris,
Sorry, can't help you with finding "high low" cylinders on a Mac formatted
disk…
Jonathan, via AutoPilot // Only Amiga makes
\\// it possible…