Friday, October 16, 2009

Amiga 1200 - Day 1

Got my new 1200 from AmigaKit.com yesterday!

Here's the slide show to prove it!



First day experience:


After taking photos and setting things up, the first thing I wanted to do was get a baseline benchmark for the original system (which is still several times faster than my original 7mhz A500). This meant that I needed to copy files between my new system and my old. There are several ways to copy files between the two, including:

* via 3.5" Disk via CrossDos which allows the Amiga to read 720kb DOS disks.
* via CF Card - I have have a PCMCIA/CF Card reader that allows the Amiga to r/w to them.
* via Ethernet - The Amiga has a PCMCIA 802.11b adapter.

I decided to go the CF Card route since I have a few 512mb and 1GB cards around that my Canon camera uses. Easy, right? Wrong! Well, the Amiga side was easy. I installed the drive disk everything was up and running fairly quickly. The Mac/PC side literally chewed up HOURS of my day. You see, I usually just use the Camera's build in USB to transfer photos to the Mac/PC. The problem is that I needed to copy files. The camera itself does not show up as a mass storage device or a mounted drive. The next solution was to use my printer's built-in CF card reader. That took about 30 minutes just to access the SMB share over the network and another hour or so trying to get proper permissions setup on the printer to write to the card. Argh! In the end, no matter how much finagling I did, I was only able to read files off and not write them. Finally I tried some old junkie USB CF-Card reader that was hanging around the house. But that didn't work because of missing drivers which were no-where to be found/incompatible with all my systems. Here is one instance where the Amiga was actually easier to get going than the modern stuff! I had to make a late night run over to best buy to get a reader. BTW, best buy staff is totally useless when it comes to finding products in their own store! Useless! How is this place still in business?

CF Card is now working on the Mac/PC but that left very little time left in the day and I was pretty tired of technology by then which was completely no fault of the Amiga.


No comments:

Post a Comment