Post by ChikaHmm... I don't have a "Programs" directory in ADFS::4.$. Sounds like
you may have (or had) a few extra cards knocking about. Miyuki
(RO4.02) never had any more or less than the standard IDE i/f for
which !Hform did the trick, and Madoka (RO3.70) has an Eesox SCSI,
with the formatter being part of a single !Director application.
I picked up !SCSIForm to lowlevel format some PD (Plasmon data)
cartridges, The SCSI card is one of the Castle Storm16 podules, it
normally uses !Setup, but it doesn't support lowlevel formatting,
except for a very complex command line sequence ;-\
Sounds about right for Castle. To be honest, before buying Miyuki (a
Castle built RPC), I never really had a lot of connection with them at
all. The Eesox SCSI card proved to be pretty good for most things,
especially the CD-R burner that I slung in to replace the old CD-ROM drive
that crapped out on me some years ago.
I also hadn't had too much contact with Castle before I got the SCSI card,
they had the best deal at the time for the card, Scanner, PD drive, and a
1.2GB HDD, since then I've bought 3 lots of 2MB VRAM, (2 for me one for my
sister), 128MB of EDO, and of course Oregano 1 and 2 from them.
My main machine I bought new from Desktop projects back in 1997, the other
RPC was 2nd hand from a school, and then I have the 2 A310s, the first of
which was given to me by a friend way back in 1987, the second I acquired
from someone on the CSA groups, think I paid a tenner for it :-)).
Post by ChikaI do have a few podules, APDL IDEa card, Castle Storm16, Viewfinder,
HCCS Vision24, and a couple of others that are A310 specific, like the
original Acorn ST506 card, and a very old monochrome frame grabber
come analogue/userport card.
I never really bothered with the extra IDE cards, but then my first Arch's
were an A3000, which I never really needed a hard drive for and an A5000
which had an IDE port already, so all I needed to do was to stick a drive
and a cable in. Before that, it was 8 bit all the way!
Still got my BBC B tucked away in the corner, it's looking a bit forlorn
at the mo, the tape player gave up the ghost about 5 years ago, the 3.5"
drive died 2 years back, so it's now just got a cumana 5.25" drive hooked
up to it, along with the 6502 co-pro.
I did have a 16 slot RAM/ROM card in it, but it got severely damaged when
I was cleaning the machine a few years ago, bent a whole row of pins when I
dropped the card, 4 of which promptly snapped off when I tried easing them
back into position, I probably could fix it, but would it really be worth
it for the amount of use it gets.
It now only has OS 1.2, BASIC 2, GXR 1.2, DFS 2.26 and ADFS 1.6, which with
only 32KB in it doesn't leave much RAM for other stuff, the 6502 Co-Pro
helps a lot though ;))
Post by ChikaI have been toying with the idea of sticking a Unipod in Miyuki for
networking and USB support (I've a PC running W2K A/S sitting beside me
which I may use as a proxy server in a future configuration), but I've
been hearing some unpleasant rumblings from some folk about its
reliability, so I'm not sold on it yet. As I mentioned before; leave it a
while before taking the plunge (let some other poor schmuck have all the
problems... er... hope Bill doesn't get to see this!)
Yeah, I was thinking about getting a Unipod, USB, IDE and Ethernet on one
card would be nice, better than having 3 separate cards, the problem with
USB in an RPC is the bus power loading, USB is way above what the RPC bus
can 'officially' handle.
Though from what I understand the Unipod is buy one version then add the
others if you want them, so I guess if you didn't need USB ...
I've had to give in to the dark side too, originally had an AMD XP2200+
machine, but had a number of stability problems with it, so I've now got
an Intel P4-3.0GHz Prescott machine, had some problems a few days ago,
but generally much more stable than the AMD machine.