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oldbull

Posted Wed Mar 20, 2019 6:09 pm

Arrived today. Have not plugged anything in because I don't have the CF cards yet.

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Dynamic_Computing

Posted Thu Mar 21, 2019 12:20 am

I use the SanDisk 16 MB cards rated at 50 MBs and have zero problems in my ACA500. Keep the aux card at 4 Gigs or under to be safe. It might work with more, bit I would not push it

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oldbull

Posted Thu Mar 21, 2019 7:02 pm

Thank you. Also, that's a bummer because I can't find anything less than 16GB (like you booted from in the video) locally. I guess I can get just the one card and dick around with 3.1.4 to get familiar with it. The 4GB card will have to wait until my next order from an Amiga e-vendor.

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Thu Mar 21, 2019 8:36 pm

This would be good to go as far as I can tell.

Last time I bought a Compact Flash I actually got a Transcend Industrial, which is industrial strength. I did this because they are rated at far higher speeds and considered by some sources as being more reliable long-term.

That being said, I actually got a far smaller capacity on purpose (e.g. 256 or 512MB) - which actually costs more. I ddi that because the power-on boot-up times are far faster the smaller the capacity. And to be honest, filling up 512MB on an Amiga will take most folks a very long time indeed. I mean think about it. Back in 1990 if you had a 500MB hard drive, you were hot s... well, stuff.

I know I'm the odd ball here when it comes to storage, though. Most seem to try and max everything out (across the board). I try and make things bad assed in terms of historical norms in terms of size/speed and go from there.

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oldbull

Posted Fri Mar 22, 2019 12:50 pm

I wasn't trying to max out the capacity. I just want something that works. While at university I shared my parents' 386 which had an 80MB HDD until 1996 when they bought a Pentium 1 with a 1GB drive. So yea, 16GB seems silly on an Amiga.

I appreciate the links. I'm guessing 4GB is the limit because of FAT32 on the AUX card.

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sat Mar 23, 2019 8:29 am

Others can speak more fluently around this, but as I understand it your new 3.1.4 won't care about the size of the drive anymore. It should be stable regardless.

But my point still holds that the larger the drive, the longer the boot-up - if that matters to you at all.

My A1000 with 100MB drive is pretty quick. My A2000 with ... geez, what is it? I think I put a 2gb SD card in there and broke it into two partitions. It's either 2gb or 4gb. Now I have to go check. But it has a 40MB mechanical boot drive and then the SCSI2SD for most of my working files (games, photo editing, terminal programs, etc.). And it takes over 10 seconds of staring at a white screen while the larger drive is sized up by the computer.

Back in the late 90s when I was at my first art school stint I was running Win95 boxes. I had to render 3D animation on those things and it was absolutely brutal (3D Studio r4). One frame could take minutes to render, and 30 frames rendered = 1 second of animation. Each frame could be around 1MB, too. So a 100MB Zip Disk could safely hold only about 3 seconds of animation. Hah! I was walking around with Jenga stacks of disks back then. They would be labeled something like 0030-0120 and I would eventually have to transfer them all to SVHS.

I remember when I moved that machine to something like 16MB of RAM and eventually 32MB, it was a big freaking deal. And it was not cheap for my broke butt back then, either. My hard drives, if I remember correctly, were only a couple of hundreds of MB. Hence my dependence on external disk solutions.

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SNR1

Posted Sat Mar 23, 2019 3:06 pm

Hello all,

My ACA500+ arrived but I am waiting on my Indivision ESC V2 and my ACE2 to arrive before I install anything. The composite video setup I currently have is really just unusable. I have owned my AMIGA 500 since 1988 and I am really excited to get it up and running better than ever before. This is exciting stuff. Hard to believe that a computer more than 30 years old still have folks developing software and exciting hardware.

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oldbull

Posted Sat Mar 23, 2019 8:12 pm

Thanks for the extra info regarding boot times using SCSI2SD. it makes sense the old controller needs to a bit of time to process whatever translation is needed to talk to the memory card. I've never seen any of the ACA500+ reviews mention a boot delay with large CF cards. Not even our own Dynamic_Computing said anything during his video review. I'm wondering if the "drive controller" in the ACA500+ maybe does not have a boot delay because it was designed for CF cards?

Since it was mentioned, the reason I spent the money for 3.1.4 was because CF cards under 4GB are not as easy to come by as they once were. I know the ACA comes with 3.1 but if it's easier to find CF cards compatible with 3.1.4, then it's worth it.

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McTrinsic

Posted Sun Mar 24, 2019 10:02 am

Do the ACAs use the scsi.device from ROM?

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TjLaZer
Tacompton

Posted Sun Mar 24, 2019 10:20 am

McTrinsic wrote:Do the ACAs use the scsi.device from ROM?
No. They use a ROM that is on the card. scsi.device and aux.scsi.device (for PC formatted cards in the AUX slot)





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