24 years after I put my A1200 and disks into storage I finally found the time and motivation to get it back out and play with it. Over those 24 years I continued to collect bits and pieces of hardware and software for it. Before I put the A1200 into storage I had upgraded it to a Microbotics M1230XA running at 50Mhz and a 68882 fpu, and a whopping 1MB of RAM added along with a XDS Dataflyer external 120MB hard drive. RAM and most other hardware was damned expensive back in those days so over those 24 years I continued to collect an assortment of hardware as my budget would allow. These bits included a 4xEIDE '99 from Elbox, a 32 MB stick of RAM, a prism2 wireless card, an OS3.9 CD and a CDROM drive, TurboCalc 5 and AmigaWriter. Also scored a flat panel monitor this week from Goodwill for $10.

I was amazed that the A1200 even ran after so many years of being stored in garages and barns without temperature or humidity control. Even more surprising was that most of my floppies were still readable too.

Anyway, my last purchase for the A1200 resurrection came just this week in the form of an Indivision MK2cr. This was my second purchase of a product from Individual Computers, the first being a Catweasel MK4 Plus back in 2008. The Catweasel was intended to go into a PegII that I owned but I quckly grew tired of OS4 and sold the PegII in 2011. I wish now that I had waited and bought a Gotek floppy emulator instead of the Catweasel, but hindsight is 20/20.

Both products from Individual Computers are outstanding pieces of hardware but the lack of documentation and software for the MK2cr had me cursing quite a bit. After the painful and tedious upgrade from OS3.1 to 3.9 and Boing Bags 1 and 2, I set about installing the MK2cr and I was in no mood to fight with the MK2cr. The software has to be downloaded from Individual's web site and there are NO instructions on usage, and the installation instructions are practically non-existent. Getting the NTSC modes set correctly was a real PITA. I couldn't figure out at first how to get NTSC screens centered and a large portion of the left side of all NTSC screens was cut off. I finally figured out how to override the horizontal screen limits using Jen's CONFIG Tool and got it all worked out but it took me about 8 hours....which is about 7 hours too long in my opinion.

One thing that did happen to fail before I put the A1200 into storage was the internal floppy drive. Sometime in the early 90's I had also purchased a Samsung SFD-321B and set it aside for the resurrection. It appeared to be the easiest drive to mod for use in Amigas and the modding went well with one exception. The drive works great. It clicks, it reads, writes and formats just fine. But the disks are only usable in that drive and won't work in any other drive such as my external A1010 drive. And vice versa, any disks created in the A1010 aren't readable in the Samsung. The problem lies in the Samsung as commercial Amiga disks and games work just fine in the A1010. Has anyone else encountered the same in issue with the Samsung floppy drive?

On the software side, I was really impressed with TurboCalc 5. I got it from an eBay sale back in 2010 for $4! What a bargain. And I got a copy of Amiga Writer from Haage at the same time for $15. Anyone who is familiar with MS Office or Open Office will feel right at home with these two.

Anyway, I'd like to hear from anyone who has attempted the floppy mod on the Samsung SFD-321B to see what kind of results you got. I'd really like to get it working but I do have the A1010 to fall back on in a pinch.

Last edited by ferrels on 08-Apr-2017 at 05:53 PM.

@ferrels

congrats now do yourself a BIG favour and before you turn the 1200 on again CHANGE THE CAPS!

& ya floppy disks from 70's and 80's were way better quality than anything from 90's, early 2000's...have fun !

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@ferrels

Upgrading to OS3.9 shouldn't have been hard. Think I did it myself. And also from scratch. But I recall the boing bags weren't as clean to update. And there was all that stuff for IDE and SCSI. And you needed a working CDROM. There were SCSI DVDROMS I found out and these days if you use IDE you can hook up a DVD. Well if you have a IDE DVD lying around now that IDE is made obsolete by SATA.

Regarding the Pegasos, if OS4 was not to your liking, what about MorphOS?

Anyway, about your floppy, I'm not experienced with that model, but I suspect it needs to be calibrated and the heads aligned. Either from a person in the know or an online guide if there is one. You may also try a floppy cleaning disk.

There is a converter circuit around for years to connect a generic PC floppy drive. I have a DIY PCB I was given years ago with it. Looks like this guy has made some up to order.

http://www.ianstedman.co.uk/test/Sales/sales.html

@Hypex

The upgrade to OS 3.9 didn't go well because of SETPATCH. The original entry was simply SETPATCH QUIET. After the upgrade was completed the A1200 just went into a a boot loop. After commenting out the SETPATCH QUIET command in my startup-sequence, It would at least boot and load Workbench but nothing in the Prefs folder would run and the error that cropped up from trying to run anything there was "can't load workbench.library version 45" and some complaints about scsi.device. After a few hours of troubleshooting I finally resorted to Google and found a very old and obscure solution which was to re-enable setpatch with the following: SETPATCH NOROMUPDATES "scsi.device"

MorphOS was fantastic and I had my PegII set up to dual boot MorphOS and OS4. But with the lack of software on both MorphOS and OS4 and a 1Ghz CPU I found I was still having to use my Windows system so the PegII got used less and less until I put it into storage and then finally sold it.

I cleaned the drive heads with a Q-Tip and alcohol without any improvement. I've ordered another SFD-321B and will do the mod on that drive as well. The original SFD-321B probably IS out of alignment after being stored loosely in boxes and hauled all over the United States for 20+ years. I hope the problem is just a matter of head alignment with the first drive and not because of my soldering skills or lack thereof!

Thanks for the hint about the Mark II Floppy adapter. If the new floppy mod is also unsuccessful I will buy one of the adapters. The price is reasonable enough!

Last edited by ferrels on 08-Apr-2017 at 05:57 PM.
Last edited by ferrels on 08-Apr-2017 at 05:49 PM.

@ferrels

Why not just buy a 1200 replacement drive from AmigaKit.
I did. Works great.

@SACC-dude


Well, as I said in my first post, I already owned the Samsung drive and at the time the original drive went bad (1993), a true Amiga replacement drive was outside of my budget. I had access to all the free PC floppy drives I wanted from work, so when I found that a Samsung SFD-321B could be modified to run on an Amiga, I grabbed it and threw it into my box of bits for later use. I also still had the spare A1010 external drive that I mentioned earlier. I still have several PC floppy drives laying around and if this next mod doesn't succeed, I will most likely buy the Mark II adapter because real Amiga drives will only increase in scarcity and price. PC drives are very cheap.

UPDATE: The new Samsung SFD-321B I got from eBay for $8 just arrived and I've done the mod on it. It works without issue so the old drive definitely had a head alignment problem. I highly recommend this mod to anyone who needs to replace an Amiga drive. It literally takes less than 5 minutes with a soldering iron.

Last edited by ferrels on 09-Apr-2017 at 12:39 AM.

@ferrels

Quote:

ferrels wrote: @Hypex The upgrade to OS 3.9 didn't go well because of SETPATCH. The original entry was simply SETPATCH QUIET. After the upgrade was completed the A1200 just went into a a boot loop. After commenting out the SETPATCH QUIET command in my startup-sequence, It would at least boot and load Workbench but nothing in the Prefs folder would run and the error that cropped up from trying to run anything there was "can't load workbench.library version 45" and some complaints about scsi.device. After a few hours of troubleshooting I finally resorted to Google and found a very old and obscure solution which was to re-enable setpatch with the following: SETPATCH NOROMUPDATES "scsi.device"

That can happen with non-standard setups, so I guess it was because of your EIDE'99 IDE splitter. The startup-sequence has a mechanism for taking patches like that into account automatically under normal circumstances, but it doesn't recognise the EIDE'99 software. Creating a file under the name SYS:Prefs/Env-Archive/NOSCSIUPDATE will tell the startup-sequence to skip the SCSI update but install all other patches, rather than modifying the script itself.

SetPatch is required to update the 3.1 ROM to 3.9, which is why skipping it didn't work - components that require 3.9 were essentially trying to work on 3.1. In fact, it's an essential part of any Workbench setup of any version. But using the NOROMUPDATE will cause it to skip other updates as well, so if you still wish to use that method, I would suggest using:

SetPatch SKIPROMUPDATES "scsi.device" QUIET

instead, like the original script does. That should give you all the updates except scsi.device, which is patched separately by your EIDE'99 software (which you may need to install again).

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@ferrels

Modern LED-LCD TV have in their setting page an option for Autosync-ing NTSC/PAL and VGA signals.

Once I had problems connecting MacMini MorphOS thru DVI->VGA cable. It shown display screen shifted out of more than 200 pixels on the right.

I almost renounced connecting MacMini to my TV. No any settings of Preferences Screenmodes neither changing pixel frequency Hertz & resoluton could help me until I found this truly useful option hidden in TV settings page.

So in the end I managed using MacMini with TV and enjoyed MorphOS on a 26" LCD TV sure more bigger than previous Sony CRT 19" monitor I used.

(Actually I use CRT again for MorphOS, as I connected my Core2 Duo Linux machine to TV VGA port, and TV HDMI port is dedicated occasionally to connect Smartphone or Tablet, thru MHL cable. And sure CRT colors are more natural than on LCD TV).

Last edited by Raffaele on 09-Apr-2017 at 02:02 PM.

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"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (J.L. Gassée, former CEO of Apple France and chief of devs of Mac II-fx, interviewed by Amazing Computing, Nov 1996).