InfiniteMac OSx86 - View Single Post - Amiga Users & other classic computers stuff

naquaada · 06-28-2008, 12:59 PM

I tried getting MorphOS to work on my A1200PPC, but it never worked. I'm selling my BlizzardPPC actually on ebay. I only use Workbench 3.1, I don't like the newer stuff.

Here's my C128 stuff from the OKI thread:

My C128 configuration: 2x 1571, 1x 1581, CMD SCSI HD using a 640MB magneto-optical drive. JiffyDOS and KeyDOS in the computer. I also have a Commodore 1750 REU, but only 512K, not upgraded.
For my C64 I have a Flash8 8 MHz accelerator card (= 800% faster) with 1MB RAM and a 2 MB BBGRAM accu-buffered RAM expansion. I can combine them, so I have 3 MB RAM for GEOS (And this is a lot on the C64!).

I still have 6 1541 drives, 7 different C64, some C128 and VC-20, the whole C16 and plus/4 series including the very rare 1551 drive and a lot of other Commodore 8-bit stuff. One of the coolest drives I have is the SFD-1001 (Single Floppy Drive, nickname was Super Fast Drive) which uses the IEEE-488 bus and could write 4133 blocks = 1.033 MB on a standard 5,25" DD disk. As I remember this thing has a 100 tpi-drive, not 48 or 96 as common.

If you ever want to hear a cool sound, check the 3,5" floppy 1581 on a C128 in burst mode. The is a picture demo which uses this mode and the floppy makes noises, great. The 1581 is an obscure drive. It has an oversized ROM with contains parallel routines which can't be used because the drive is connected serial. There are a lot of free spaces and the programmer added some undocumented commands which have no use :-P And he left a message in the ROM 'Dedicated to my wife Lisa' :-D I presume this floppy is the only one one which can be partitioned. You have no subdirectories, but you can partition the drive like a harddisk. But in a rather complicated way. Another crazy thing is the block handling. The drive itself is a standard shugart-controller with an Amiga drive. So it has two sides 0 and 1 with 40 tracks and a sector size of 512 bytes. The Commodore 5,25" drives always had a sector size of 256 bytes. To enhance the compatibility, they rearranged the drive geometry virtually to 1 side with 80 tracks and 256 bytes per sector. To do this a whole track must be read fully in the floppy RAM. That's why this thing is rather fast, especcially on the C128.

For the people who don't know it: Commodore floppy drives are fully own computers, with own CPU, RAM and I/O. That's why they are very flexible, you could always write your own routines for the floppy for faster access, copy protection and more. There were programs that used the floppy as co-processor! The 5,25" floppies had 2K RAM, the 1581 3,5" floppy 16K. And it's possible to program effectively in this bit of memory! The serial bus Commmodore used on their home computers is very similar to Firewire. The components are connected in a daisy chain type, so one input connector and one output connector. You can connect printers, floppies, SD-card interfaces and even harddisks to this bus. But at these times you have to give the device maually an adress number, it doesn't do this automatically. So it can happen that there are bus collisions if two devices had the same adress.