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Three_Amigas
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1992-08-01
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Three_Amigas
From A1000 through A2000 to A3000
by Christopher Brittain
Ed: Check the two graphs that Chris has put together to illustrate the
speed differences between his Quantum, floptical, and floppy drives. See
his figures at the bottom of this file.
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Brief Bio Pic:
I'm a 25 year old Computer Systems programmer for a large government
department that forces me to use Messy-DOS machines as well as IBM
mainframe jibberish. I used VAXs, Pyramids & SUNs at Uni and was
converted to UNIX, but I have yet to convince my employers of the
wonders of Open Systems and UNIX. My first computer was a Dick Smith
System-80 (TRS-80 clone), since then I've owned and used a Commodore
64, Commodore 128, Amiga 1000, Amiga 2000 & now an Amiga 3000.
Amiga the First:
My first Amiga was an Amiga 1000 with 256K on board and 256K memory
expander for a grand total of 512K total memory (all chip :-) I had a
Commodore 1081 monitor (mono speaker) and a Commodore 1010 external
disk drive. A fairly modest set up by today's standards but it seemed
like absolute luxury back in 1987, having just upgraded from a 128K
Commodore 128 with a single 5.25" floppy drive. One of my main uses
for the A1000 was logging onto the Uni computer using a 300 bps modem
and a public domain VT100 emulator. 300 BPS was pretty slow even
back in '87 but it made it possible to upload assignments that I had
written using my trusty old TDI Modula-2 compiler.
Amiga the Second:
When I started work in 1989 I heard a nasty rumour early in the year
that Commodore Australia in their wisdom (?) were about to double the
price of Amiga 2000s from around $2000 to around $4000 Arrgghhh!
:-( I had planned to buy an Amiga 2000, however I had just started
work and so had very little money. So I decided to borrow $2000 off
my mum and buy an Amiga 2000 at $2000 just in case they did go up in
price. Commodore did almost double the price of the A2000, however I
don't think it stayed at that price for more than a few months.
Anyhow my A2000 was great and mum wasn't charging me any interest so
I was happy :-) By the end of the year I had paid mum back and had
enough saved to buy a NX-1000 colour printer and a Boing! optical
mouse.
In 1990 I upgraded my modem to a Maestro 2400XR, and my A2000's 1 Meg
of memory was wearing a bit thin so I bought a Microbotics 8 Meg
memory board with 2 Meg of memory installed. At around the same
time I bought an el cheapo Sherwood amplifier and two reasonable Teac
speakers and brought the joys of stereo to my A2000.
Having 3 Meg of memory was very nice however it was quite clear that
only having two floppy drives was the real limiting factor of my
A2000 setup. One of my housemates (Hi DAC :-) had an A1000 with an
external hard drive and it was painfully obvious that despite the
fact that his A1000 was obviously inferior to my wonderful A2000 :-)
He was getting better use out of his system just because he had a
hard drive and I didn't :-( So I searched around for the cheapest
hard drive I could find, and settled on the Fireball from M.A.S.T.
(Memory And Storage Technology). It came with a 90 Meg Fujitsu drive
(which was very nice) however it would not function with my
Microbotics memory card, Arrgghhh! :-( Both would function fine
independently, but put them both in the machine at the same time and
as soon as the drive was accessed, GURU! The problem was probably
something to do with the way the Fireball did DMA (Direct Memory
Access). Anyhow after much pain and ainguish it was admitted by both
the Memory board suppliers and by M.A.S.T. that the two products were
not ever going to work together :-( Since the fireball had never
really worked satisfactorily with my system M.A.S.T. offered me a
full refund, which I gratefully accepted and the memory board
supplier offered to trade the Microbotics board in on a GVP Impact
combined 8 Meg Memory board and SCSI (Small Computer Systems
Interface) hard drive controller. I purchased an 80 Meg Quantum
drive with it and two Meg of SIMMs (Single In-line Memory Module).
The day after I got the GVP I ordered 2 more Meg of SIMMs for a grand
total of 5 Meg of memory, 1 Meg Chip and 4 Meg Fast.
Amiga the Third:
Over the past couple of years I've watched one friend buy an Amiga
2500, then upgrade it to a GVP A3001. Then another friend went
completely berserk (with some prompting from me, hi Nexus :-) and
upgraded from a Commodore 128 to an Amiga 3000. It's 1992 and the
trusty old Motorola 68000 is showing its age, my A2000 gets left in
the dust next to A3001 accelerated Amigas, and pales in comparison to
the fast and flicker free Amiga 3000. Yes there are rumours of the
Amiga 4000, and the new AA chip set with Alice and co. but there are
always new and better computers or chip sets just around the corner,
you either decide to take a stand and upgrade or you wait forever.
In May '92 those nice cheap (relatively :-) Amiga 3000 advertisements
ended up being too tempting for me and I lashed out and bought an
Amiga 3000, with 6 Meg of memory (2 Meg Chip, 4 meg Fast), a NEC
MultiSync 4FG with a 15" screen, a 100 Meg Quantum and 240 Meg LPS
Quantum, and a 20 Meg Floptical drive (a SCSI device that uses
special 3.5" disks that can hold 20 Meg of data). I ordered my new
machine from an interstate mail order company, and I flexed off the
day that it arrived to set it up.
One of the first things I noticed was that I was unable to get the
Kickstart menu, which I'd seen a friend with an A3000 get by holding
down the left and right mouse buttons whilst cold booting. This was
back in May, and at that stage I hadn't heard any rumours of
Commodore shipping A3000s with Kickstart 2.04 ROMs, never the less,
my machine wasn't acting the way I knew my friend's machine did, so I
tired an experiment. I unplugged my SCSI cable and then turned my
machine on - it still wouldn't give me a Kickstart menu, but it did
ask for a workbench disk, which I gave it and it booted quite
happily. I rang the guy at the mail order company that had put my
machine together and told him how my machine was behaving, and he
pointed out that there were two blank ROM sockets labeled ROM 0 and
ROM 1 on the mother board, so he had assumed that my machine didn't
have Kickstart in ROM, he also said that although there were rumours
that Commodore would be shipping A3000s with high density floppy
drives, mine didn't have one. "Oh, well" I thought, "at least I've
got Kickstart in ROM".
A friend of mine wanted to try out his Tiny Tiger hard drive on my
A3000, and so he brought it over one day, with a boot diskette, that
just happened to be a high density diskette, that he had formatted it
on his A500 to 880K. My A3000 insisted that it was a bad diskette,
until my friend covered over the high density hole in the diskette.
When he did that it was perfectly happy with the disk. "Ahha!" my
friend said, "you have high density drive, you lucky sod!". This
seemed a little strange, as I had been assured by my supplier that I
didn't have a high density drive. Anyhow, I tried formatting a high
density diskette, and using Fast File system, it formatted to 1.7 Meg
(a bit better than the 1.4 Meg you get under MS-DOS :-) I had a bit
of trouble actually writing to the high density disk until I added a
mountlist for it with twice the number of blocks per track as a
normal disk. The mountlist I use is as follows:
HD0: Device = trackdisk.device
Unit = 0
Flags = 1
Surfaces = 2
BlocksPerTrack = 22 /* 880K drive uses 11 BlocksPerTrack */
Reserved = 2
Interleave = 0
LowCyl = 0 ; HighCyl = 79
Buffers = 20
BufMemType = 3
DosType = 0x444F5301
#
The guy from the mail order company who had set my machine up told me
over the phone that he'd been unable to get the floptical drive to
read the supplied demo disk, and he couldn't format the supplied
blank disk to the size specified in the manual, however he was sure
it was just a minor software problem that I could sort out with the
supplier of the floptical.
After playing around with the floptical drive for a bit, a friend & I
discovered that the eject button was rubbing against the inside edge
of the A3000 case, and was sometimes stopping the floptical disks
from getting seated properly. After the button was bent slightly to
avoid the problem I had no problems reading the supplied demo
diskette. For a while I had the same problem with formatting the
supplied blank disk as the guy who set my machine up did. The
floptical would low level format just as described in the manual, but
when I attempted to format it under AmigaDOS it just gave up and said
the disk was bad. After a couple of failed attempts at formatting
the floptical I tried doing a QUICK format from AmigaDOS, which
worked without any problems. I then used Quarterback Tools to locate
bad blocks and map them to a file to stop AmigaDOS using them. It
turned out that there were some bad blocks, which had upset AmigaDOS
when it had tried to do a standard format. I rang the supplier of
the Floptical drive and they said that as with any magnetic media,
sometimes the floptical disks have a few bad blocks, and so the
method I had used of doing a quick format and then mapping out the
bad blocks with Quarterback, was the best approach to take currently.
They also said that they were trying to convince their American
supplier to provide a format utility that would automatically format
a floptical and take care of bad blocks, as it's a bit of a problem
for people without Quarterback tools.
I've found that so long as floptical disks are formatted to the same
size they can be treated just like floppy disks, and AmigaDOS
recognizes when they are inserted and ejected. However if they are
formatted to a different size, it takes a warm re-boot before
AmigaDOS will recognize that you've inserted another valid disk. I
found this out when I partitioned a floptical to have a 10 Meg
partition for AmigaDOS and a 10 Meg partition for AMAX. AMAX was
quite happy with the floptical, and treated it as a 10 Meg hard
drive, and AmigaDOS was happy with it as a 10 Meg floptical, but if I
inserted a 20 Meg floptical disk, AmigaDOS wouldn't recognize it
until I did a warm re-boot.
I can highly recommend the NEC MultiSync 4FG, the 15" flattened
screen is a joy to use after a Commodore 1081. It is amazing how much
better a flicker free, over scanned, interlaced Workbench 2.04 screen
on the 4FG is compared to the old 1.3 workbench screen on the
Commodore 1081 monitor (now if only FullView was like MuchMore and
took some notice of the fact that workbench was running overscanned
and used the same style of screen as workbench instead of sticking to
its own hi-res custom screen).
I bought a 240 Meg Quantum LPS SCSI hard drive from a local computer
store just before I got my A3000, and I replaced the 100 Meg Quantum
drive that came with my A3000 with the 240 LPS almost immediately.
Since I've got my floptical drive installed internally I don't have
any free drive bays to mount the original 100 Meg Quantum in, so I've
got a friend of mine to mount the 100 Meg Quantum on a piece of
perspex and install it in a free expansion slot, so that I don't need
to mount it in an external box. I also got him to add two extra LEDs
so that I can tell which drive is being accessed, because the Hard
Disk light provided standard just indicates when the SCSI bus is
being accessed.
Floptical v. Floppy Speeds
In case people are wondering what the speed of the floptical drive is
like, I've included some statistics from DPerf2, and some graphs I
made from them.
Standard 3.5" Floppy disk:
DiskPerf2. Testing Floppy:
Create Files: 1 files/sec. Directory Scan: 153 entries/sec.
Delete Files: 35 files/sec. Seek/Read Test: 29 seek/sec.
Read/Write Speed Test: (bytes/sec.)
Buffer: 512 Read: 12,381 Write: 8,138
Buffer: 4k Read: 16,711 Write: 11,235
Buffer: 8k Read: 17,157 Write: 11,287
Buffer: 32k Read: 17,156 Write: 11,319
Buffer: 64k Read: 18,349 Write: 11,348
Buffer: 256k Read: 21,324 Write: 11,329
Floptical Drive:
DiskPerf2. Testing Floptical:
Create Files: 9 files/sec. Directory Scan: 329 entries/sec.
Delete Files: 16 files/sec. Seek/Read Test: 18 seek/sec.
Read/Write Speed Test: (bytes/sec.)
Buffer: 512 Read: 4,363 Write: 4,330
Buffer: 4k Read: 28,599 Write: 30,678
Buffer: 8k Read: 39,839 Write: 48,437
Buffer: 32k Read: 53,357 Write: 61,177
Buffer: 64k Read: 59,041 Write: 86,831
Buffer: 256k Read: 67,337 Write: 107,789
Quantum 240LPS:
DiskPerf2. Testing Work:
Create Files: 38 files/sec. Directory Scan: 115 entries/sec.
Delete Files: 84 files/sec. Seek/Read Test: 125 seek/sec.
Read/Write Speed Test: (bytes/sec.)
Buffer: 512 Read: 50,161 Write: 37,524
Buffer: 4k Read: 244,309 Write: 181,414
Buffer: 8k Read: 322,440 Write: 339,564
Buffer: 32k Read: 374,491 Write: 419,430
Buffer: 64k Read: 397,790 Write: 448,109
Buffer: 256k Read: 442,064 Write: 492,751
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