Friday, September 29, 2017

Dedicated website to my Amiga projects

Dear my friends, Amiga enthuasists!

I'm proud to present a dedicated website for our beloved machines and accessories. All further information, documents, drivers and news will be available there and not in this blog.

You can find the new website on the following address: irixlabs.com

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

SD Drive Z2

File transfer between the Amiga and PC is a painful question even in 2017. There are various solutions available:
  1. Floppy method - PC formatted 720 kB disk is required, if your PC has a floppy drive. It has small capacity and very slow (20kB /sec). How to transfer e.g. 50-100 MB of data?
  2. Ethernet card - The cheapest interface is 80-100 USD, if You can find it for sale. It requires a TCP stack, lots of RAM, an FTP client or SAMBA. In A1200 it is a working solution with a cheap PCMCIA card, however the Amiga -> Windows transfer is very slow (~100 kB/s) due to problem in SAMBA implementation. Amiga -> Linux and Windows -> Amiga transfer is working much faster.
  3. Removable HDD method - The system should be shut down in order to change the HDD / CF card.  
  4. PCMCIA CF adapter - It is a good solution, but limited to A1200 / A600 with PCMCIA slot.
For the big box Amigas we are proud to present the solution: the SD Drive!

SD Drive external card slot

SD Drive was born to solve all the listed data transfer problems above. No need for a clockport, no need for a SPI bus; SD Drive is a complete plug'n'play solution.

SD Drive is a Zorro 2 card, compatible with all Amiga models equipped with Zorro 2 or 3 bus, including the most popular A2000/A3000/A4000 machines, running AmigaOS 1.2 - 3.9.

SD Drive offers reliable file transfer using cheap SD / SDHC / MMC cards. The data transfer rate is 1.2 - 1.5 MB/sec, which is ideal for copying even large amount of data between your computers.

There is no limitation in card size: SD Drive can utilize any size cards. All cards which are >4 GB will be formatted to 4 GB.
SD Drive Zorro 2 card with a disassembled external card slot
The installation is very simple: Plug the autoconfig compatible card into a free slot, connect the cable to the external card reader and the hardware installation is complete. It takes no more than 5 minutes!

On the software side only 3 files are required: the device driver (DEVS: directory), the mountlist entry (SD0:, copy it into DEVS:DOSDrivers) and the filesystem. The FAT95 filesystem should be available in L: directory. That's all.

No need to run UAE on the PC side to access the files on the SD card written with the Amiga; SD Drive uses a native FAT16/32 filesystem, which is directly accessible by your Windows PC.

SD Drive supports dynamic card sizing  and hot swapping. No need to reboot the Amiga to mount a new SD card. It works exactly like a regular floppy disk, with much more capacity and incredible transfer rate!

Please note, this site is not a webshop. You can order various products from our resellers (Amedia Computer France etc.). For further information please send a private message.

Friday, May 19, 2017

IDE4 Z2 - A 4 unit IDE controller for Amiga 2000

IDE4 Z2 is a Gayle compatible 4 unit IDE controller, designed for Amiga 2000. It supports 4 IDE devices on two ports (primary and secondary). Without any additional driver the primary port is active (Kickstart 2.05+ is required with scsi.device). IDEfix driver is required to enable the second port or to use a CD / DVD device (as the default scsi.device in ROM doesn't support it).

CF master / slave mode is selectable via a jumper. Connector for IDE activity LED is also available. The controller is RDB compatible: HDToolBox and HDInstTools can be used for disk partitioning.



Compatibility list, tested hardware in an Amiga 2000:
  
Accelerator cards
Blizzard 2040 ok
Blizzard 2060 ok
GVP G-Force 030 (Impact A2000-030 Combo Series II) ok
GVP TekMagic 2060 ok
Commodore A2620 ok
Commodore A2630 ok
Apollo 2030 conflict


Graphics cards
Village Tronic Picasso II ok
MNT VA2000 ok


Sound cards
Sunrize Indrusties AD516 sound card ok


HDD controllers
GVP Impact A2000HC SCSI controller ok
Commodore A2090A SCSI controller conflict
BSC Tandem IDE card ok


Network cards
A2065 Ethernet interface ok
X-Surf Ethernet interface ok
X-Surf 100 Ethernet interface
ok

RAM cards
Commodore A2058 2, 4, 8 MB ok


Other cards
BSC / Alfa Data MultiFaceCard 3 parallel port  ok
Commodore A2088T PC emulatorok
RapidRoad USB controllerok

For orders please contact me in private message.

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

ScanPlus AGA

Simple scandoubler with analog VGA output, designed for CRT VGA monitors. Compatible with A1200 and 4000D.


Fits to the Lisa and Alice chips. All screen modes are available on the VGA connector (Multiscan, PAL, NTSC, DoublePAL, DoubleNTSC, Euro36, Euro72, Super72). Smooth 50-60 Hz scroll and 24 bit color depth for a real Amiga feel. It comes with a simple DPMS screensaver utility.

Few assembled units

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

HC508 update

I have obtained the critical components and completed a few cards.


Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Sunday, February 5, 2017

HC 508 update

Good news, some components have arrived today, so I have completed a few 50 MHz boards.