16 Jun
2010
16 Jun
'10
3:07 p.m.
On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 5:15 PM, Al Hartman <alhartman at yahoo.com> wrote:
Anyone have advice on which version of Kickstart ROMS
and OS is the best/most useful on an A500?
If you want to run older software and don't have an autobooting hard
drive, Kickstart 1.2 is fine, but you might want AmigaDOS 1.3 instead
of 1.2 (there are some other minor improvements). If you have an
Autobooting hard drive (Commodore A590, for example), you'll need
Kickstart 1.3. I have an old Stardrive on a Starboard memory
expansion for my A1000 - it does _not_ autoboot - I have to boot from
a special floppy that has the Stardrive driver and other important
files (mountlists, for example) that repoints all the important system
logicals to directories on the hard disk after all the setup stuff is
done. For that, either Kickstart 1.2 or 1.3 works.
If you don't care to run really old games and such and don't have a
fondness for the old black/white/blue/orange Workbench color scheme,
Kickstart 2.04 and some newer flavor of AmigaDOS is nice (and still
should let you run most older programs, too, unless they are heavily
copy-protected direct-floppy-boot games that depend on specific ROM
contents).
Is there a driver to use a ZIP Drive as mass storage?
A SCSI ZIP drive should just work as well as any other SCSI disk -
it's dependent on what adapter you have as to what you have to do
Or use an old Adaptec Parallel Port SCSI adapter to
run a Disk Drive?
PC parallel ports are very different from Amiga parallel ports (for a
variety of technical reasons).
I did google this: http://aminet.net/package/docs/hard/ppazip - but
that's for a parallel-port ZIP drive, not an Adaptec SCSI adapter.
There are likely to be very few parallel port device drivers for PC
hardware on an Amiga. I tried long ago to get official information on
how the Xircom "pocket adapter" NICs talk to the PC parallel port and
Xircom declined to provide details because they "didn't want to get
into that market".
For the A500, there are SCSI and IDE interfaces, internal (in the
68000 socket) and external (SOTS), but finding one these days is
likely to be challenging. I think the majority of A500s were bought
with floppies-only and stayed floppies-only their entire lives (though
it was ordinary to have an external floppy drive if you didn't have a
hard disk - it's difficult to use an Amiga with only one drive).
-ethan