Crafting The Workbench

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 ...

Rotek 26 pin external drive I bought a cheap external housing with no drive to house a Gotek drive. External drives on E-Bay go for way too much and I didn't really want the drive itself so this seemed ideal.  Rotek and Gotek I obviously knew nothing and quickly found out why this is so cheap. The drive is too slim for a standard drive and the interface is a 26 pin whereas the Gotek is 34 pin.  Not to be put off the next steps were to research the conversion. Some searches online resulted in a couple of Shugart configurations, which was confusing. Check the orientation of pin 1 from the 26 pin source as it should be +5V.  Testing ground and 5V pin orientation The following connections are required to hook up 26 to 34 pin.  26-pin  34-pin         Signal             Description cable    interface     Name          ...

Connectivity on the Pi Pi 3 with USB-serial (e-ink display unimportant) I'm sure everyone has a Raspberry Pi or 2 knocking around and connected up to the internet. I tend to have mine connected 24/7 running various servers. It's the perfect host for the Amiga to get online. Now there are many solutions for the Amiga and some are better for performance. Hooking up an Amiga via serial to another machine will only get you a low baud transfer. If you seriously want to get full browsing the you will need to spend money on add-on cards or an Easynet PCMCIA card for A600/1200 . An accelerator will also help make the most out of browsing.  This post is all about getting online using a serial connection to another machine which will gateway the internet connection. I found the setup to be quite a challenge using Windows 10. I don't think it really works anymore with a Windows host. Instructions online for connecting do gloss over the Amiga setup as well which I hope...

The Nicotine Amiga Following the A1200 upgrades and recapping I've turned my attention to the old A500. Digging this old beast out as old games don't really play too well, or at all, on the A1200. Hunter is one example, which is still one of my original boxed games that I'd like to play and doesn't work on Whdload.  This was my first Amiga although I didn't get this new. Instead it was from someone who had already modified this computer with additional Zorro cards in a custom baseboard. The external floppy drive still exists, but I got rid of the base board years ago (somewhat regretting that now).  Once I had my A1200 there was little to bring me back to the A500 back in the 90's as all I really wanted to do was play the new AGA games. This meant the A500 becoming boxed up and rarely taken out again. Something did stop me selling this on, which could have been the memories of upgrading from my old Speccy and seeing what I'd been missing all...