Hi All,

Is it possible to use any PCMCIA Cd-rom drive with an A1200? Are there limitions on the model that can be used?

Cheers.

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@Gaeokerena

Never used one myself as they were never very popular on the Amiga or widely available, apart from a lack of drivers for them, being on the PCMCIA would mean they will most likely be pretty slow and you could run into a lot of problems (even if you find a driver) with software that tries to use them...

I only use IDE/ ATAPI CD & DVD Burners on my A1200s which work perfectly as long as you have a n IDE buffered interface board like the Elbox 4xEIDE or FastATA boards...

To be honest if I were you I'd avoid trying to use a PCMCIA CD drive on an A1200 and use an IDE/ ATAPI drive instead...

(You may find a PCMCIA driver on this site if I recall correctly, at least that would give you an idea of which drive to get if you can find one)...

http://www.l8r.net/install/index.html

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@Franko

I don't see why PCMCIA should be slow for CD. I used to run a squirrelscsi setup, got at least as good performance from that as you get from an internal HD.

Hmm, reminds me I miss my 1200 setup. Should really try to get a working accelerator setup and get back in the game. Used to run an Access (Mick Tinker clone) for those AGA moments, but it up and died on me a couple of years ago.

EDIT: To explain why I fail to see why PCMCIA would be slow:
PCMCIA is a portable plugin-card solution for ISA bus (cardbus uses same physical interface in a more PCI-like fashion). AT-IDE is a cable solution for ISA bus.

See? They are both ISA busses. ATA is usually clocked much faster than IDE, but in this case they are hanging off of the same internal bus, so it would really be impressive if the PCMCIA interface could be a whole lot slower than the awfully slow ATA interface.

Last edited by olegil on 12-Jun-2012 at 06:15 PM.

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@Gaeokerena

I used this one: http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=1201
Never had any problems with it.

@olegil

The difference is the Squirrel used SCSI drives not PCMCIA ones, that's how it managed to squeeze decent speed out of a drive connected to it...

Back in the day most incompatibility problems came form accelerators and ram boards causing the PCMCIA slot to be of no use but it all depends on which type of board/ configuration you have...

Like I have said there are very few drivers written for the Amiga to allow you to use PCMCIA drives, so unless you find and buy a Squirrel and a SCSI CD ROM you aint gonna have much luck just trying to hook up a PCMCIA CD drive...

You would probably be able to find an old second hand PCMCIA CD Drive and a driver for it somewhere on the net but to me personally it's simpler and easier to use a buffered IDE interface and that way you can use CD/ DVD burners too on you Amiga rather than just a CD ROM drive...

Last edited by Franko on 12-Jun-2012 at 07:04 PM.

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@Franko

The squirrel driver (not sure if this was fixed later, I'm going back 15 years or something here) used to make a lot of use of the movep instruction, which was an emulation headache for 68060. I knew a guy back in the day that patched it and basically doubled the throughput.

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@Karlos

Quote:

Karlos wrote: @Franko The squirrel driver (not sure if this was fixed later, I'm going back 15 years or something here) used to make a lot of use of the movep instruction, which was an emulation headache for 68060. I knew a guy back in the day that patched it and basically doubled the throughput.

The Squirrel was/ is a good and relatively fast device but the original posters question was about using PCMCIA drives not SCSI ones...

Movep isn't going to help out much on an 030 board which the original poster is using I believe...

(The FastATA drivers use the Movep & other 060 commands which makes a big difference on it's performance on an A1200 with 060, especially for burning CDs & DVDs but that doesn't help the original poster here)...

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@Franko

The squirrel SCSI controller attached via the PCMCIA port, which is where the bottleneck was. I remember a friend disassembling the driver, discovering the heavy use of movep to transfer data. As this is an unimplemented instruction on 68060, for every movep transfer, there is trap and emulate overhead. He simply replaced the movep instruction with a bsr to a bit of code that did the job using regular moves and return. The resulting difference in IO throughput was substantial.

Quote:

The FastATA drivers use the Movep & other 060 commands which makes a big difference on it's performance on an A1200 with 060

MoveP is not a 68060 instruction, that's the point. Unless you patch it out (which if you are using CyberPatcher or OxyPatcher will happen after the first encounter), it will hurt 060 performance.

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@Karlos

Quote:

Karlos wrote: @Franko MoveP is not a 68060 instruction, that's the point. Unless you patch it out (which if you are using CyberPatcher or OxyPatcher will happen after the first encounter), it will hurt 060 performance.

True, for some reason I was thinking about the Move16 and other 040/ 060 specific instructions...

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@Franko

Never very popular? The CD1200 (Archos CD-ROM) was very popular amongst Amiga users.

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Nissan GTR '08

I had a PCMCIA attached CD Rom for a while (telmexatapi.device). It worked reasonably well with CacheCDFS but it wasn't the fastest or most reliable ever.

IMO, the the most useful thing you can put in your PCMCIA port is a network card. I don't miss losing the CD for that. You can always access removable media on a different machine if you really need to.

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@Rudei

Quote:

Rudei wrote: @Franko Never very popular? The CD1200 (Archos CD-ROM) was very popular amongst Amiga users.

Not round these part they weren't....

Can't recall anyone ever having a PCMCIA CD drive attached to their miggies...

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@Franko

Fair enoug. In the circles I mixed in everyone had one.

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Nissan GTR '08

@Karlos

Now this I support. PCMCIA network worked like a charm for me after I moved to an Apollo 1240 with SCSI. My next upgrade was to install a mediator and this is truly where poo hit the fanboy.

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What about that Sony Vaio External PCMCIA CDROM Drives.

will work for Amiga? (A1200 obviously)

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@Rudei

Quote:

Rudei wrote: @Franko Never very popular? The CD1200 (Archos CD-ROM) was very popular amongst Amiga users.

i don't know of a single Amiga classic user with an accelerator who did not have a PCMCIA driven cdrom ..

Must have been like 50+ around here back in 95-96.

@karlos

i thought the bottleneck was that a1200's and a600's had a very limited PCmica version so most hardware didn't work as they should or that they didnt work at all.

Will never forget the day my Zip drive arrived along with squirrel scsi, a year later i went for the JAZ drive.
HMM now that i think of it, where the hell did this equipment go?, i am pretty sure i didnt sell it...


As for oxypatcher and cyberpatcher, they did fix a lot of stuff indeed and was a must have for all 060 owners, btw, wasn't this eventually implemented into setpatch or something?

Last edited by Toaks on 13-Jun-2012 at 08:41 AM.

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@Drummerboy

Nope

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=21722

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@Gaeokerena

There used to be one called the Zappo but don't know of its availability now.

@Toaks

The issue I was describing was a problem for the Squirrel only. The driver it came with used the movep instruction to transfer data to/from the PCMCIA port. Without a patcher, that means you get an emulated instruction trap on every transfer on the 060. The overhead from this was a greater factor than the performance of the port itself.

I assume it was probably fixed some time later, but I recall chatting to the guy that found and patched it and we were both surprised that this instruction had been used - it had to have been in some assembler code since no compiler would have generated it.

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@Rudei

I remember them being very popular too, at least until broadband when they all got ditched for ethernet!

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