Amiga Stuff

Drivers for Sony's FA-P1 floppy drive are now available from Aminet at  PcmciaFD . The pcmciafd.device should be copied to DEVS: and the archive includes 2 example DOS drivers. FD0 runs FAT filesystem and FD1 runs FFS.   An option to support 720kb PC floppy disks is included and needs setting in the FD0 mount file. It has problems formatting, and the drive reports 300mb/sec instead of 250kb, which may be the problem. I attempted a format with several disks without success. This was on HD disks and my need DD to work. Windows XP no longer has the option in the GUI to format 720 and this may be a Windows 95 feature that got removed. I assume the drive may read 720mb but cannot easily format. No doubt command line options or Linux can create the 720kb format and these work on the drive.  This initial release will likely have some further revisions for bug fixes and more features. Possibly the 1.2Mb format used in Japan can be added, although the challenge is testing thi...

The Sony FA-P1 is an external PCMCIA drive for old PC laptops and actually developed by YE Data for Toshiba and Sony. This device is now coming to Amiga 1200 and 600 machines with a new driver. These 2 photos show the work in progress with the drive able to read and write 1.44Mb floppy disks to and from the Amiga OS.  Work on this has been in the background until I finally got the main pseudo DMA working. All code has been previously built for Linux, but without the official YE Data documentation it was hard to really understand how data transfers should work.  Full testing still required and some additional code needed to format disks and switch between 720Kb and 1.44Mb. This drive also supports mode 3 1.2Mb formats, although I doubt there's much use for that format outside of Japan. This isn't too revolutionary with the existing support for USB drives. The main objective is to extend devices that can use the PCMCIA port on the Amiga and think how this could have worked 25 ye...

PCBWay have quite a simple and useful project to covert your old tank mouse into a laser mouse. I'm not a great fan of the mouse ball and no nostalgia for them, so I picked up 5 boards to have a go at a conversion. PCBs can be found at https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/Amiga_Laser_Mouse.html . There's a simple BOM list, but there could be a bit more information to explain the build. There's also no firmware supplied, which is quite odd when the board has been released for people to also build their own project. The good news is that other people have created versions of this to flash so not all bad news. The source can be obtained, along with pre-built hex files at https://github.com/gps79/Amiga-Laser-Mouse-ADNS-9800 . I had issues trying to use this firmware with the V1.2 boards from PCBWay and I suspect that some pins may have been rearranged. I've forked and rebuilt the code to work with the V1.2 and you can get a built version from my github at  https://gi...

Bluetooth came in around 1996 with Intel, Ericsson and Nokia developing a plan to standardize short range radio technology. The A1200 and A600 were built with a PCMCIA 16 bit card slot and capable of supporting newer technology targeting laptops of the period before 32bit Cardbus tech was introduced.  These Amiga models are capable of using these cards for exactly the same purpose, but no one wrote (at least survivable code) drivers to support. One of the reasons would likely be due to his period being the bankruptcy of Escom in 1996 just as Bluetooth was emerging. The other challenge would have been the task of building a suitable software stack when vendors were now targeting PCs x86.  Out of curiosity, I wondered if this would be possible in 2024. What happens if a driver is built and a software stack is in place? Will the Amiga be able to match the capabilities of 1996-2000 laptop radio communication?  Suitable Hardware Many PCMCIA cards are now hard to find as users ...

I have a couple of PCGA-CD51 external PCMCIA drives that don't work. The drives are over 20 years old and over this time the lasers and mechanisms can fail. The PCGA-CD51 external drives house standard laptop style CD units so I was wondering if these external drives could be fixed with cheap ATAPI laptop drives.  A quick search of eBay showed that Teac drives are fairly common and the Toshiba models were rare. Getting a direct model replacement seemed impossible, but the theory being that any with the same ATAPI connector would work. I initially ordered a Toshiba XM-1802D, but this was either faulty or incompatible. My next order was for the Teac CD-224E, which was much more common and I was able to get 3 for about £10 inc shipping.  Opening up the PCGA-CD51 is easy, and can be achieved by removing 2 screws from underneath the drive. All of the wires from the PCMCIA card hook up to an adaptor board, which connects to the drive and bridges all the PCMCIA functionality. Simply ...

Sony Vaio on the Amiga Driver development Since late 2022 I've been working on a new Amiga 1200/600 PCMCIA CD-ROM driver using the Sony Vaio PCGA-CD51. The driver can be found on Aminet as the PcmciaCD package. At the time of writing this the current version is 1.2 and also supports some variations of the Sony CD-ROM drives such as the CRX75A and PCGA-DVD51.  The PCMCIA on the Amiga 1200 and 600 isn't capable of DMA modes so the transfers are slower than the IDE connected drives. The advantage of PCMCIA is the tidy solution using an external connector built for the machine instead of wires hanging out the sides or the need to cut the case to install a drive. The PCGA-CD51 is also powered directly from the PCMCIA port and doesn't require another external PSU. Note that this draws from the overall supply to the Amiga so the old power bricks may need upgrading.  If you can get your hands on one of these drives then install this driver and give it a go! About PCGA-CD51 d...

What is going on? Another expansion in the form of 2 USB ports for the A1200 is shown in this post. The iComp Rapidroad card plugs into the clock port and takes power from the floppy drive connector. My ACA1233n has a faster clock port for the job. Without this accelerator the standard clock port is a bit slow for good USB performance, although iComp state that it works perfectly well. The iComp instructions are a bit older than the 1233n and don't give clear instruction on how to install into the case properly. I'm hoping this post helps anyone else trying the same thing. So why USB for such an old computer? Well, I thought it would be better for networking and tidier for storage devices. Installation First thing to setup was the real time clock from the accelerator card. The clock port on my A1200 has all the pins (not all do) and this was a bit confusing at the start, but then it was clear that the RTC would only fit one way.  RTC install to motherboard ...