My goodness. Somehow this has turned into an anti- Elbox debate. Personally I am grateful for Elbox's achievements such as their Mediator series, Fast ATA controllers, and yes, their Spider USB drivers. Without these great pieces of hardware my Amiga 1200 T would be a shadow of it's current self.

My 1200T consists of the Mediator LT4, FastATA MK III, Spider USB, Voodoo 3, Sound Blaster16, and a Realtek 8139 Ethernet card. All of this is powered by a Blizzard PPC 060 with 256 MB of Ram running OS 3.9.

I am aware of Elbox's indiscretions in the past and their questionable customer support but I can easily overlook these short comings due to the great hardware and continued software support they provide the Amiga community to this very day.

My system runs flawlessly. In my opinion there isn't any other choice in expanding the A1200 classic using anything less than Elbox products.

Drewlio77

Last edited by Drewlio77 on 17-Sep-2011 at 05:05 AM.

Elbox is on the way out of Amiga market...Elbox

Last edited by Comi on 20-Sep-2011 at 09:21 PM.

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@Drewlio77

I agree the hardware is very useful but the driver support needs more work. I don't have a Mediator myself but have helped friends set one up on their systems and from that experience the software isn't up to par.

From other accounts it looks like the Mediator installer has improved as when I helped a friend do it the installer did part of the work then told you how you had to hack a CyberVision monitor driver (I think it was) into the tooltypes. Even if that was needed the present installer script should have done the job.

The Spider was perhaps worse even if a simpler setup. It depends on software they don't include in the package and even worse on software you had to pay seperately for. Given that Elbox were really cashing in on USB by customising a standard PC USB card I think it's shocking they didn't provide a complete package for the price! The Mediaitor was about plugging in cheap PC cards into an expensive Amiga accelerator, anyway you look at it, which is fine for the market. They supported a lot out of the box but I think they failed with USB because it didn't work out of the box with included software. All they did on a Spider I examined was give you a mini-disc with a driver and telling you where to put all the files and how you must fiddle with some GUI they expect you to already have. Well all that should have been in a script! It was also a bit fiddly and too much to expect from an average user. They should be selling it to Amiga users, not Amiga techheads! I think their target market is misplaced. It's like they expect all Amiga people to be computer programmers because they are using an Amiga; well they are NOT! As demonstrated by their updated driver. My friend couldn't get it to work and neither could I!

So I don't mean this as an attack on Elbox but it's my experience with the Elbox software so far. And what's more frustrating is people who install their software and it just works. But a fully fresh install is bound to work better than an update if an installer does all the needed work.

@Comi

What kind of URL is that?

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@Hypex

Elbox need to update their web pages, not just the documentation.

Lots of links go nowhere.

For example clicking on “PCC G3/G4 Accelerators” link on the product page takes you to a page that does not exist anymore.

http://www.elbox.com/products.html

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 25-Sep-2011 at 07:32 PM.

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@NutsAboutAmiga

The only need of Elbox is to sell last cople of mediators and go out in new market... in the link above..

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@Comi

Does not look like the official web page, wrong url I think.

But yes the classic market most is most likely shrinking, whit the FPGA Amiga
clones there is no need for upgrades anymore, mediator boards are where the road ends.

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@Hypex

Quote:

There's no point me trying to set those vars. Because I don't know know what they contain!

As I have explained you in my previous post you can set Mediator/Spiderbuff to 33 and Mediator/VoodooMem to 13 (that will give it 2MB more than it had... If you have a Radeon do the same with RadeonMem and give it 2MB more)


Quote:

If they are needed why doesn't Elbox tell you and if so why don't they include a script to generate them!

The vars were already in previous versions archive (e.g. 3.16 version already had both vars).

Last edited by Crumb on 25-Sep-2011 at 10:52 PM.

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@NutsAboutAmiga
Yes I think that this is end of new hardware they will just do polishing of drivers to sell rest of hardware... but one thing that bother me is false marketing with Dragon board and Shark PPC card still on site..
Also they sad that new drivers for Spider will be for Sirion stack ....couple years ago...
Sirion...

Last edited by Comi on 25-Sep-2011 at 11:45 PM.

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@Crumb

Quote:

As I have explained you in my previous post

Yes you have thanks and I won't repeat myself again. I did try to set some variables but it made no change. But would that MedConfig be able to set them? I'm hoping so.

Quote:

The vars were already in previous versions archive

Well one is specific to the USB but it is not mentioned that I recall on the driver disc. But I am hoping that the MMUP archive can help here. It looks like it has all updated files and should be able to put eveything in place without groping in the dark.

@Hypex

I hope MMU drivers help, let us know if you make it work!

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