Julian Richardson skrev:
>a few A1200 Amiga questions (do they hit the 10 year limit? I know I got my
>A500 in the early 90's, and I think A3000's were around then, right??)...
The A1200 was released around christmas '92, so it's OT. The A3000 is 1990
vintage, though.
>Anyway, here goes:
>Do all 1200's come with built in IDE hard drive controllers - or did
>commodore do things on the cheap and only add controllers for machines
>shipped with drives (I'm assuming the controller lives on the main board
>itself)?
Nope, all have controllers.
>Will the 1200 accept any size (capacity) drive? Or wasn't the OS / ROM code
>hard-drive aware and cheated by making the drive look like a big floppy (I'm
>sure there were systems which did this, but I can't remember if the amiga
>was one of them)?
Definitely no such trickery. The only odd thing is that the IDE interface is
masquerading as scsi.device. The OS will be most content with drives below
four GB. This has been remedied in versions 3.5 and onwards, but you're most
likely running OS 3.0. This may be patched nevertheless, I'm running a 20GB
drive on a 3.0 system myself.
>Presumably 2.5 drives are the preferred method - but there's nothing to stop
>3.5" IDE drives being used with a suitable adpator (OK that's actually an
>IDe question - I think it's just the connectors that differ between them
>though, right?)
There is not a lot of space. Try to get as slim a drive as possible if you're
intending to use a 3,5" drive. You may have to cut away a bit of the
shielding, too.
>On the hardware side of things, someone said the 1200's IDE controller is
>basically unbuffered I/O straight to the CPU (which sounds possible
>certainly with IDE) and so it's real easy to toast things - is that true?
AFAIK, it's unbuffered, but how would you go about frying anything?
>What are the options of networking a '1200 (ideally TCP/IP stack on the
>Amiga, using SLIP or something to a Unix box maybe? Are there things around
>that allow this, with NFS mounting of drives for data copying?)
Certainly. You could use SLIP, but the better route would be an NE2000
compatible PCMCIA network card. I use a CNet card in my A1200, and AmiTCP
(bundled with OS 3.9), otherwise available as a demo on Aminet or for online
purchase through vapor.com, which includes an NFS client. I run an NFS server
on my 4000, too, so that my NetBSD machine might easily download things in the
file archive.
>Can PC SVGA multisync monitors be used with the 1200, or won't the monitor
>sync to a low enough frequency for the Amiga (seem to remember that was the
>problem with the 500, not sure if the 1200 has any sort of 'fix' for this on
>the Amiga side though)
Most PC SVGA monitors won't sync low enough (15 KHz) for games, but they will
most probably run if you stick to applications. Just make sure to activate
VGA-friendly modes such as Multiscan, DoubleNTSC, DoublePAL and Euro72.
They're activated by being moved to DEVS:Monitors/ , and are otherwise stored
in Monitors/ on your Storage disk. You may possible have to copy VGAOnly to
DEVS:Monitors, or was it into WBStartup/ ?
>Having seen how cheap 1200's are these days, and having a pile of spare IDE
>drives lying around (both 3.5 and 2.5) I'm quite keen to get a 1200 to put
>Deluxe Paint on - it's still far better than any art package I've seen on
>modern systems despite being ancient by modern software standards! I can't
>be bothered using my old A500 for this though - too slow and too painful
>without a hard disk...
You should try Personal Paint, too. I find it a more than worthy successor to
DPaint, and it's free on Aminet.
--
En ligne avec Thor 2.6a.
optimus_at_dec:foo$ %blow
bash: fg: %blow: no such job
Received on Fri Mar 30 2001 - 10:44:18 BST