Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Having spent several days playing around with many of my newly retrieved from the loft consoles and computers, yesterday it was the turn of my Amiga 1200 tower system.Now there is a story behind this system, and it's quite a long one.
I originally bought the 1200 in 1993, and over the years, gradually expanded it, until its final configuration was was a tower based system with 68060 CPU, 32meg RAM, 5gig HD, CD re-writer, zorro II bus board, IOBlix comms card, Buddha and Catweasle card for HD and PC floppy compatibility.
You couldn't buy a machine like that in the shops, and compared to the Pentium based PCs that were around at the time, it was a real powerhouse.
I used the machine for graphics, music, word processing, games and the internet, on a daily basis, until 2000, when a catastrophic head crash killed the hard drive, and I discovered my OS backup CDs had been corrupted.
Having a pc sitting in the same room, I found I really couldn't be bothered to re-install the entire system from scratch, as with all the expansions involved, and messing around to make the CD drive work... it was just too much hassle. So it's just collected dust in the loft for the best part of 7 years.
So yesterday, I did what I couldn't be bothered to do 7 years ago, and reinstalled the entire Amiga OS 3.1, and grappled for many hours trying to figure out how to make the CD drive work.
The thing is, Amiga's of that time didn't have native CD support. When they were around, CD rom was still a very new technology, and so running one required additional drivers.
Now, finding the CD drivers wasn't the tricky bit.... what was hard was making the OS see the drive itself. The most common method of attaching a CD drive to an Amiga back then was to use a "SCSI Squirrel"... a pcmia card with a scsi interface. The 2nd most common method was to use an IDE interface. Naturally, I had to be flash and use the most powerful, and entirely uncommon method, and use a scsi interface that attached to my ultra expensive 68060 Blizzard accelerator card.
This was all well and good, back in the day, when I had the luxury of an instruction booklet. Do you think I still have the instructions today? I should coco.
After much googling, I didn't find the information I needed to get the job done, but I did see one or two snippets that jogged my memory.
What it came down to was installing the AmiCDFS CD file system... manually. The installer puts it onto your drive, but doesn't put the files in the places required. Thank god for readme's. Then I had to edit the CD mountfile. By default it thinks the CD drive is connected to "scsi.device"... in the case of my machine, I had to edit this to read "1230scsi.device".
Fingers crossed, one reboot, and it worked. Yay!
On the downside, it isn't just the scsi interface instructions that I'm missing. Turns out I no longer have the instructions to many of my games either. Now while that may not be catastrophic in terms of finding the game controls... it's a disaster when you consider that these instructions also contain the passwords used as copy protection by many of the games.
Bollocks!.
I guess when I get my finances sorted, I'll just buy the good ones again on ebay.
Fortunately though, I do have the manuals for two of my three absolute faves... Geoff Crammond's Formula One Grand Prix, and Knights Of The Sky.
Steve 5:27 AM [+]
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