ScuzzBlog: Diaries September 2018 Entry 5th September 2018: Post 01: Amiga 1200 - Max Transfer Amiga 1200 - MaxTransfer I have this Amiga Technologies 1200 that was made during the Escom era, devoid of hard drive and shielding. The base and motherboard were once part of a tower as it has the tell tale slots to the edge by the floppy drive where it was mounted in an EZTower. I should know as I have to detach my base motherboard from my tower on a regular basis. Also the end port has been modified for a scandoubler flicker fixer and there is a ribbon slot cut into the rear of the casing. So the evidence points to the computer being used in a tower. This means that the shielding is missing. It also came with very long power cables off the floppy which suggests it also maybe had an internal or external 3.5" IDE hard drive in its lifetime. Poor thing is pretty dormant these days so I thought I would spring her back to life. Back in the winter days of 1995 I was struggling with drive space. Trust me anything related to the computer in those days cost a lot of money. Storage was costing around £1 a megabyte so a 500MB hard drive cost say £350 to £500. Except you could get a 1GB IDE 3.5" drive for the same price. I decided to take the plunge and with the help of Gordon Harwood bought an internal 3.5" drive for my Amiga 1200. I must have spent all Christmas trying to get it working. Just was so hit and miss. I recall taking a break from work and walking to a phone box in Fareham Hampshire and calling Gordon Harwood and exchanging the 1GB IDE 3.5" for a neat 550 GB internal 2.5" which I still have fitted to my beloved favourite Amiga 1200. I only found out later that I needed a much bigger power supply. The computer then was fitted with a GVP Turbo which new when I bought it cost over £350. You can do the maths yourself but for accelerator with 4MB RAM and a hard drive of 550MB you were shelling out close on £1000 in 1995. The Amiga was in no way a cheap machine to own. Anyhoo... Back in 1996 I bought a Windows 95 machine so I could finally get on the internet. Don't forget that prior to the age of the internet your computer world was a very solitary affair and your only contact with other Amigans was reading the comments in magazines. I live in a small village in the New Forest and trust me there wasn't any user groups. And in truth how was I ever going to find out about them. And so with pressure from work and the need for internet and CD player with a graphics card I took the plunge and bought a Colossus Pentium 120 1GB hard drive tin box that cost well over £2000. Not a bad machine and still have it running. I named her Lara. I had thought my data storage problem days were over until I discovered that with the full system install of Windows 95 I needed 750MB of my 1GB hard drive. So that last quarter of the poor Seagate got hammered. Eventually it fell over. So when I was sifting through my small cupboard of busted and removed hard drives, of which I have a lot, I found poor old Lara that original drive, plus another of the exact same type. So I hot footed to the bench and set up the Amiga Technologies machine and decided to see if I could bring the drive back to life. Here goes.... and this again turned out to be a long couple of days. Meet Jermaine Amiga 1200 MaxTransfer OK meet Jermaine She has an external 3.5" Seagate IDE. The hard drive was originally in my Colossus Windows95 Pentium 120 from 1995. The ribbon feeds out from the Amiga's internal pin connector and out through a small slot cut into the casing. Power is provided from the floppy drive port. The PSU is the A500 heavy brick. A standard A1200 PSU wont generally work. The ribbon has to be modified to work with the different number of pins between the IDE and the Amiga pins. I have another one of these 1GB drives. And various cables of differing lengths. Note that the last four pins are vacant. Difficult to fit the shielding so it is missing from this computer. And so she is ready to rock and roll. The hard drive simply sits out the back. I do have a Power Computing external casing but seems hardly worth the effort. All was working fine until I tried to to use software copied from a whole disk. DOpus just wouldn't work from an ASSIGN. I decided to check with the other drive. This time mounted inside. Clean installation and yet same problem. I could run DOpus from the floppy. And also if I copied the files over one at a time. But not if I simply copied the whole disk. Also the ART 1 and ART 2 pictures from DPAINT plus DPAINT itself refused to work when I copied the whole disk. Yet when I copied the files over one at a time they worked without fault. This all pointed to an issue with MaxTransfer. Problem was that I couldn't get HDToolBox to enter in either a rate of 0x1FE00 or 0xFE00 until someone pointed out you have to press the RETURN key after entering the number and not just hitting the OK button. Note that you get to MaxTransfer from clicking CHANGE when you call up the Advanced Options when formatting. You can change the MaxTransfer at any time. It does not affect the data on the drive. I decided to download HDInstTools from Aminet to better check those MaxTransfer settings. Some don't like the tool. I had no problem. And there we go. Worked like a charm and I was able to access DOpus and DPiant from a copied disk. And the drive worked just like she should. So I set IDE MaxTransfer to 0x1FE00. As you do ! [ Update 4th September 2018 ] I have been using this computer to create a series of animations using VidiAmiga. I have a SONY DVD player connected to the VidiAmiga digitiser and a Toshiba TV and also a Parnet connection to my wonderful A1200 in the 2000 case for back up. I have to swap out the Parnet cus the Vidi use the same Parallel port. I have a 4MB PCMCIA card cus in truth that's enough to support the necessary file sizes. I keep animations to around 2MB in size. They tend to grow when I save in Anim8 on MainActor. The VidiAmiga saves in Anim5 but the frame rate is very slow. MainActor cures all that. I also have the key for MainActor so I don't get the annoying pop-up. Sadly I hit a snag with the 3.1 ROM as it refused to show the LowRes interface in DPaint and also point blank refused to show part files from edited animations in VidiAmiga. Added to the fact it wouldn't run Arcade Snooker from a copied disk. How do I know its the 3.1 ROM well in the end I pulled the 3.1 ROM and replaced with 3.0 and then installed 3.0 over the top of the 3.1 Workbench and it solved all my problems. So I'm good Jermaine works just fine. And I have been able to make use of busted drives from 1995. Just needed the 3.0 ROM, WB 3.0 and MaxTransfer set in HDToolBox to 0x1FE00... Not hard, or is it. That's retro for you

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Last updated 5th September 2018

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