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[spirantho]

All this talk of bridgeboards got me to playing about with
my V30-powered A500 again. I'm still trying to work out how
to read and write to the hard disk (actually a ZIP disk)..

I've found out why it doesn't work...

The stoopid hard disk drivers use 16-bit words to read and
write data! That means that the entire hard disk is
endian-munged! GArgh!!]

So, advice to people wanting to read/write partitions made
on a KCS PowerPC board:

Don't Bother!

D'oh. Looks like I'm stuck to use 720KB DD disks for transfers!

[InTheSand]

I have one of these boards too - bought very cheaply last year. Needless to say, I've never really done anything with it other than stuck it in an A500 as a RAM expansion!

Do you know if it works OK without a hard drive? E.g. for use as a simple floppy-only PC emulator?

I've downloaded what appears to be a driver disk for it, but this only seems to contain utilities for using the board from the Amiga side of things, e.g. using the "spare" 512Kb of RAM as an Amiga RAM disk...

- Ali

[spirantho]

Oh yes, it works fine. I'm just talking about reading the hard disk in AmigaDOS - you can't do it.

Reading/writing the 'hard disk' (really a Zip disk) works fine from within the emulator of course - mine has DOS 5.0 on it, as well as stuff like Jumpman and Dungeon Master (though the latter is a bit slow unless in CGA or mono VGA!)

[InTheSand]

I guess you could use Linux and something like "dd" to read the Zip disk's contents, then write a quick byte-munger to sort out the endian-ness, and then mount the disk image that way... But the time required and the steps to get the image back on the Zip disk in the right format would probably be greater than the hassle of using 720Kb disks!

What was your KCS board supplied with in terms of disks? I just got the board itself and managed to find what I thought was the appropriate driver ADF online (but I can't remember the download location).

If you still have the original disk/disks that came with your board, would it be possible to turn them into ADFs?

- Ali

[spirantho]

I've got:
Amiga V2.0
MS-DOS (V? original, has MS-DOS4.01 booter)
Amiga V4.5 which someone's scrawled "latest disk" on. o idea what the differences are.

I'm currently trying to work out how to use more memory... the Big Book of Amiga Hardware says it can use Amiga RAM, of which I have 5MB - even the BIOS recognises it, but not for the PC side. I'm not sure it's possible though....

I can image the disks foryou like....

Edit: Ah, the V4.5 disk has a PC install disk compressed on it.
I've just run it and my PC now has 640K Base RAM, 192 XMS and nearly 2MB EMS, as well as a 1.5MB RAM drive.

How cool is that for an 8088 class machine? All on an A500....

[InTheSand]

Max out that NEC V30! :-)

spirantho wrote:
I can image the disks for you like....

Yes please! I'll PM you my email address. I'd like to get the old card up and running!

- Ali