exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Hello :)

Is there any specific thing you have to do to use the IDE on the TF1260? the speeds on it look great, and i wanna try it out, although i don't have a scooby about how to set it up, if at all.

ta


:)

Hello Duncan,

You need a way to get the TF1260's ide driver loaded. This is done by using the internal A1200 IDE as basically a boot drive to load the driver into memory. When the machine resets it will notice that there's another bootable device (the TF1260's IDE) and will look for a CF card on that.

Probably the simplest way is doing this:

1) Create a basic Workbench install on a new CF card. Chucky has a link on his site to such an install that fits on a 1GB card, it's perfect for this.
2) Using WinUAE (or if you want to do it on your A1200, a PCMCIA adapter) copy the driver (ehide.device) into DEVS: on the new CF card.
3) Copy LoadModule from Aminet into C: on the new card
4) Modify S:Startup-sequence on the boot card to have this line before setpatch;

C:Loadmodule >NIL: DEVS:ehide.device

5) In HDToolBox set the Boot priority of your main CF card to greater than 0 (not sure if this is entirely necessary but it wont hurt)
6) check the name of the CF boot card in HDToolBox and change it to something that doesnt clash with the name of your main card [SDH0 maybe])
7) move your main CF card over to the TF1260 header (check cable is correct on CF adapter), boot the machine

The machine will boot from the CF card on the internal IDE header. When it executes Startup-sequence it will get to LoadModule and this will load ehide.device into memory and immediately reboot the machine. Once the machine reboots it will notice the TF1260 IDE and boot the CF card attached to that (which now has a higher boot priority than the CF card on the internal header).

The other more involved method is to use RomSplit and Remus (on Aminet) to make a custom kickstart ROM that has the ehide.device in it, alongside the normal scsi.device that controls the internal IDE header.

For this you have to have a way to program your own roms, or some eprom emulators (these are really really handy for this sort of stuff and makes it a doddle).

There's a great guide on amibay on how to do all this by a guy called mfilos. Worth a read it you fancy it. The benefit of this over the cf boot card method is it removes the double boot caused by LoadModule and the necessity to have a boot cf card always attached. the TF1260 IDE header becomes as integral as the internal IDE header, and the machine will boot from either without the mess of startup-sequences and whatnot.

You can also use this script to build an autobootable ROM on Linux:
https://github.com/reinauer/amiga-romy/ ... n/software

reinauer wrote: 15 Sep 2021 23:05 You can also use this script to build an autobootable ROM on Linux:
https://github.com/reinauer/amiga-romy/ ... n/software

This looks excellent, I will give this a try next time :)

reinauer wrote: 15 Sep 2021 23:05 You can also use this script to build an autobootable ROM on Linux:
https://github.com/reinauer/amiga-romy/ ... n/software

That looks really useful. Time to find my RPis (since they what I use for linux) and give that a go.

@trixster thanks very much for taking the time to reply, it's greatly apprectated.

Yeah, i have a handle on what your saying there, and i can see the process in my head. I already use LoadModule to load a new SCSI.device driver so i can use a 32GB card, so it would probably be just to alter that line, and point to the eide.device driver, changing the boot priority should be easy enough to.

thanks again :)

@reinauer thanks for script.
Now this might be obvious, but can you please clarify:

For A1200 you run the script and just burn the files to 2 standard size EPROMS and plug them in.
No extra wires are needed on the Kickstart chips to access/talk to the expanded areas?
Are the files created byte swapped ready for burning?

(As I understand A500 etc also use 27c400, but they are full. The A1200 uses 2 of these sized chips but normally they are both only half full. So this uses the empty space to fit in the extra cool stuff 🙂)

Thanks

Higgy wrote: 16 Sep 2021 08:06 @reinauer thanks for script.
Now this might be obvious, but can you please clarify:

For A1200 you run the script and just burn the files to 2 standard size EPROMS and plug them in.
No extra wires are needed on the Kickstart chips to access/talk to the expanded areas?
Are the files created byte swapped ready for burning?

(As I understand A500 etc also use 27c400, but they are full. The A1200 uses 2 of these sized chips but normally they are both only half full. So this uses the empty space to fit in the extra cool stuff 🙂)

Thanks

Not so obvious, I should update the documentation to clarify, as both the script and the hardware for A3000/A4000 reside in the same repository. (Pull requests with improvements welcome!)

• On the A1200 you can indeed just burn 2 EPROMs without any further hardware modifications. 27C400 are 512KB in size, if you use two of them, you will get a 1MB kickstart. For a 512K ROM you could use 27C200 but those are not readily available, so most people "waste" half of the space with the 27C400s.

• If you use 27C800, you can even get a 2MB kickstart. On the A1200 the mapping gets a bit messier in that case if I remember correctly. On A3000/A4000 with a ROMY you will get the chip linearly mapped to memory if you use the 4MB GAL firmware

• There are several files created, a 1MB file that is not split/swapped can be used for PiStorm, UAE, .... and 2 files HI/LO that are split/byteswapped and ready for burning

So .... CD32 version says talk to you?