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Loading ...The Amiga Project and it’s importance to the new-build
Ian
A quick update on the aforementioned sideproject.
I’ve just returned from France; along with the disks I mentioned which were left there in my parents house. I’ve only got six boxes full of floppies…
The Amiga 500 I had no longer works; the replacement I had is also unreliable and doesn’t run most of the disks. I was expecting to have to buy a new unit, as the one method of converting the disks I’d considered was to connect an Amiga to the serial port on my motherboard. Which could have caused problems with my new-build if I hadn’t had the chance to convert all of the disks before I go back to university…
However I’d found a better solution; it’s called the CatWeasel and is nothing more than a pci card that provides hardware support for the disks and Amiga Mice/Joysticks. Somehow it allows the standard floppy drive in my PC to read Amiga formatted floppies; something I didn’t think was possible (it was always the case that PC floppies could be formatted to Amiga formatted disks and read by Amigas, but not the other way round. I now have the perfect solution, albeit at a cost of £66 but it’s better than paying to have them converted using Cloanto’s data conversion service. the only company I’ve found that do this, charge $5 per disk; as I’ve got over 400, I’m looking at £500+ if I asked them to convert all of my disks!
But this will still affect my choice of motherboard. I’m not going for dual graphics just yet (and in any case I prefer the look of P35 over 680i but will certainly get the 8800GTS 320MB unless Ati release a 3000 series card anytime soon! Which of course rules out SLI). But I do need a motherboard that has a minimum of 2 standard pci slots; one to take the catweasel, the other to take my TV tuner. And ideally I’d prefer a 3rd normal pci slot rather than a 3rd PCI-E x1 as there’s so little that uses those slots at the moment. Which would allow me to use the wireless card I have (though I’m quite happy to ditch it if necessary as my USB card is far more effective and both are 802.11g). But this does cause a problem, as I need the PCI-E 16 slot to not block and pci slots (especially if only 2 are available), otherwise I won’t be able to get everything in…
Having said that, I may be able to avoid any issues… the add-in cards I’ve considered are RAID, Sound and wireless to complement my TV card. On-board RAID and sound are more than good enough for my needs, as is wireless. And considering that Creative now have an X-Fi that uses PCI-E I shouldn’t have many problems if I want better sound (and for my needs, 2nd sound card which would allow me to do radio broadcasts using a single PC). As for wireless… no doubt that will also go PCI-E soon and especially when the 802.11n standard is ratified (which is my preference). But it’s still a major consideration now that I’ve got 2 PCI cards that are essential… and it may limit my options.
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