Re: Amiga Sidecar with XT-IDE?

Den Thu, 1 Aug 2019 22:43:21 +0300 skrev Ville Laustela
<ville.laustela_at_gmail.com>:
> Hi.
> 
> Has anyone managed to get an XT-IDE adapter working in an Amiga
> Sidecar A1060? I have a Rev.3 board with an XT ROM but it doesn't
> work in Sidecar: it does not show up in boot. The same BIN file works
> in WinUAE (the boot-up copyright banner shows) when I set it to boot
> ROM address EC000h, but my physical board only has jumpers for C800h
> or D800h. As far as understand this ”conflict” has to do with the
> custom memory mappings that the Janus bridge software uses to
> communicate between the PC and the Amiga. Would it be possible to
> modify the addressing scheme in hardware to set it to another
> location (ie. at EC000h as that appears to work in emulation)?

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=95985

According to the linked thread, you can use PCPrefs to select which 64k
PC memory area to be used by the Janus PC-Amiga bridge, and the
selection seems to be Axxxx, Dxxxx and Exxxx.

Does this differ between the A2088 and the 1060 sidecar? My impression
were that they were the same.

If this isn't switchable, are you sure that the 1060 really uses the
whole C0000-DFFFF area?
 
> If it doesn’t work; has anyone tried it with an A2386SX bridgeboard?
> I have one in my A3000T and while it already works (using a
> hard-image to boot from, and the possibillity to AREAD and AWRITE
> files from/to the Amiga) a separate IDE->CompactFlash with externally
> accessible slot would ease transfering files. A hard disk would be
> much more needed upgrade to the Sidecar (especially as the manual
> describes that it could be used with the ADISK utility to create an
> Amiga partition on the same disk) though.

If I were you I'd get an ISA network card instead. With the A2386 (or
A2286) I'd go for a 3Com 3C509 (if you have the option, choose the
newer with a larger IC with the word "parallell tasking" written on
it). (For the sidecar and the A2088 I'd recommend a WD/SMC 8003 which
seems to be the best 8-bit ISA network card. Add a TP transciever and
configure it to use the AUI port rather than the BNC port, that way you
get a normal TP interface).

There is software on Aminet that makes it possible to use a
bridgeboard/sidecar + ISA network adapter as if it were a network
adapter on the Amiga side. It's not that fast, with my A2088 in my
A2000 i get about 100kbytes/sec using FTP, which is about 30% of what
the hardware could in theory handle, but it's still far more convenient
to use than having the hassle of moving physical cards and having to
reboot / power cycle.

> I have heard from two people that a Seagate ST02 SCSI Controller is
> known to work in a Sidecar, but I haven’t been able to find one yet.
> I am open to offers if somebody here has one for sale :) One of those
> and a SCSI2SD might be a way to go.

I'd give the XTIDE route another try if I were you.

Btw, not sure if it will work but if it's possible to load XTIDE from
disk you might be able to have the bios on a 5.25" diskette together
with DOS.

Btw if you go for my suggestion of using a network card, you might be
able to fit the XTIDE-BIOS in the boot rom socket on the network card.
That might lead to problems though as my impression is that the XTIDE
stores it's settings in the BIOS and assumes that the BIOS is an
EEPROM. Writing to EEPROMs is surely not supported on a network card.

Btw, if you get XTIDE-BIOS to work using the boot rom socket on a
network card, you won't need the XTIDE card as XTIDE BIOS can use a
16-BIT ISA card in an 8-bit ISA slot and give you full functionality
using CF cards and 50% capacity of physical disks. With todays
relative large sizes of disks that's more or less free, it won't matter
much if you can only access say 5GB of a 10GB disk...

P.S. what other hardware does your A1000/A1060 setup have? Most other
solutions is probably faster than using the A1060 + PC hard disk as an
Amiga hard disk.

-- 
(\_/) Copy the bunny to your mails to help
(O.o) him achieve world domination.
(> <) Come join the dark side.
/_|_\ We have cookies.