Which Amiga
17 messages in this thread
I use the AT BB with my A3000 and have a 3 1/2" 1.44 meg high den. drive in
the other internal bay also. I tossed a VGA card in the other slot and am
pleased with the setup.
Also the A3000 has 32bit Zerro III slots, and the A2500 has the older 16bit
Zerro II slots. Another big speed difference!
Tim
Tim, where did you get your 3 1/2" IBM drive for the other drive bay? Is it
a Chinon drive that has the wide button? I'm looking for a 720K drive to
hook up to my XT BB in the 3000, but not sure where I can find one with the
wide drive eject button.
John (in beautiful downtown Walla Walla) – via Whap!
John,
Well the story is, when I first ordered my A3000 back early last year, I am
the dealer, had no idea that they were still shipping 5 1/4" drives with
the AT BB, we thought that CBM had a 3 1/2" drive for use with the A3000,
as their origonal ad's claimed that the BB's would work with the A3000. So
when the computer showed up with the AT BB and a 5 1/4" drive we called
CBM, they then said that they did not recommend using the BB's with the
A3000, and if I had gotten it thought the educational discount they would
have cought it and not sent it along. Guess what? I DID get it thought
the educational discount. So much for that guy. Anyway, they said that we
are out of lick more or less. Needless to say I was not a happy camper, so
I insisted that my dealer do something about this as it was HE that said
that the BB would work with the A3000, or I would not have order it. So he
agreed to swap me the 5 1/4" for a 3 1/2" 1.44 meg floppie.
He then found out that he had to build a speical cable, as the one that
came with the AT BB had the wrong size connector with it for both power and
attaching to the 3 1/2" IBM drive. sigh….so he managed to do this (I
dont know how, he took care if it) and then what do you know? The button
for the drive would not fit in that slot…..SOOO I had to shave it down
(it was to think) and now it fits, but it does not stick out as far as it
should and the light does not line up very well so the entire front of the
drive kinda has this dim glow when accessed. But it did work I dont recall
the name of the driv,e but I will look the next time I open up my A3000 and
let you know.
Tim
John, you can use the drive Commodore sells as a second Amiga drive for the
3000. It has the wide button. There's also third party drive – the 'Air
drive' for the 3000. BTW, the button itself is available as a spare part,
assuming it will fit the drive. It's made for the 2010 drive…. which are
getting hard to come by.
-Jim
Jim, the 2nd 3 1/2 drive is to be hooked up to an XT Bridgeboard, not the
Amiga side. Now someone did tell me that you could hook up an Amiga 3 1/2
drive to the Bridgeboard but you have to put a different connector on the
cable coming from the BB. Maybe someone can verify that an Amiga drive can
be used with the Bridgeboard?
John (in beautiful downtown Walla Walla) – via Whap!
John, I'm using a MAST 3.5 floppy drive as the B: on my xt BB. The one
caveat is that you need to have the version that does NOT have noclick
enabled. I use it as a 720k floppy drive, mainly for backups.
Ron
John, an Amiga internal 3.5" drive is just a generic drive mechanism. It
will work fine on the XT Bridgeboard, so long as you put the right
connector on the end of the cable from the BB. I set one up like that for a
guy a year ago and it works fine. The reason I suggested getting an Amiga
internal drive was so that you could get one with the right button and LED.
If you're handy with plastic, you could get the 'official' 3000 button and
attach it to whatever drive you get.
-Jim
John:
I have the Amiga A1010 3 1/2" disk drive and an Amiga 2000 with the
A2088 XT Bridgeboard. Half the time the A1010 is connected to the external
drive plug of the A2000 and functions as DF2:. Half the time the unit is
connected to the connector of the A2088 bridgeboard and functions as the B:
drive. No special cables needed. I just unplug from one connector and plug
into the other. Note however, the A1010 cable is VERY short. If desk
space is limited you may need an extender cable to plug into either
connector.
Note also. To function correctly with a 720K drive the file CONFIG.SYS
need to be modified. The Janus 2.0 software manual at p. 96 recommends:
DRIVEPARM=/D:01 /F:2 /B:02 /S:09 /T:80
Hope this helps.
– via Whap!
That's good to hear. People are always asking me if the AT works in the
3000. All I could have said from experience was that the XT worked. There's
still not much room for PC style cards in the 3000 though.
The Zorro III slots are certainly faster with 32bit cards, but so far as I
know there are no such cards on the market. The Zorro III buss falls back
to Zorro II when accessing those cards. The bridgeboard won't gain anything
from the ZorroIII buss.
-Jim
That is VERY true, the Zerro III bus only runs the AT board at 16 bits.
The A3000T shold be an ideal system for a Bridegboard, what with its 4 AT
slots, one can have the BB, a VGA card, Multi-function card with Hard drive
ram, serial mouse game etc ports, have have a slot left over for a sound
card of other devies, and with its 5 1/4" drive bays, it can hold both 5
1/4" and 3 1/2" MS-DOS drives internally.
As it is I have a VGA card in my other Zerro slot, and I did the hack to
speed things up on the HD access via the virtual drive. The dataswitch
lets me switch back and forth between my Amiga and VGA displays on the 1950
The only thing I dont have it access to the serial port, as Janus does not
supprt it, and there is no room for both a VGA card and a serial port. The
only way around this is to get one of the slotsNmore type things that give
you more slots via a ribbon that runs out the back of the computer, but
those things are impossible to find these days.
Tim
I heard a rumor that there might be an adaptor in the works to put a 3000
in the Bomac Tower case…. but that only addresses the drive bay shortage.
That could be easily solved with a drive box sized to fit the top of the
3000 instead of the massive tower. 🙂
Ya know, I was looking in a surplus catalog from American Design Components
recently. They had a 3 slot passive PC backplane with a PC-on-a-card and
power supply for about 70 bucks. I wonder if that backplane could be used
to extend the 3000's PC slots with a little 🙂 hardware hacking.
-Jim
Hmmmm, it just might at that. I belive there would be a market for somone
who could slove the lack of slots/drive bays on the A3000. Not a huge one
mind you, but still an ever growing one, esp in light of the huge success
of the power-up deal, and assuming CBM does come out with a 386 BB sometime
in the near future.
Tim
A small but fervent market, eh? I wonder how much cabling the PC buss can
stand? To hook up that passive backplane would mean a ribbon cable
connecting one of the slots in the 3000 to the backplane. I would probably
want to put the new backplane just above the existing one and keep the
cable about 2 inches long. That would mean either a new case or a cutout in
the existing one…. Hmmm, maybe make it hold a drive too… I spoke to a
3000 owner today about the bridgeboard. She said Commodore told her there
was a 3000-specific bridge comming this summer. But they didn't say what
that meant- something new or just unbundling it from the drive.
Jim
Sounds like the old 286 BB with a 1.4 meg floppie drive. Prehaps it will
have a new version of Janus with it, but that will probably be it.
On the other hand it might be a 386 BB!!!!!!……..naw!
Yes, small but fervent market indeed! I belive that is they way those thin
s did work. They were just a card that went into an 8 bit slot and then
ran a ribbon out the back of the case, that lead to an external box with 3
or 4 more slots and a couple of drive bays. I dont think the manufacturing
cost would be very high at all. But the amount changed for such a beast
was always ALOT! They also included their own power supply.
Tim
Heh Heh… who knows. I'll just wait till (if) it shows up. It doesn't seem
like a difficult task to pop in a 386 – the hard work must have already
been done with the BB itself.
I see passive backplanes in catalogs from time to time. It seems like it
would be possible to use one with a 3000. Still, the heavy job is the
packaging.
-Jim
Tim:
I have heard quite a bit about the hack to speed up the Janus virtual drive
read/write, but have yet to see _specific_ and clear instructions on how to
do it.
Is there a file anywhere on CIS explaining this, or could you provide that
information?
?|^] Ray Lewis
Ray,
Download DISP.ARC in LIB 4 here. I devoted almost a whole article
on how to speed up DJMOUNT drive access. I forget exactly which
article…but there was one with a mistake in it…and the next month's
article had a tested method that worked.
Don