Amigas new facelift (minor hardware probs)

Hello all. I've finally gotten enough money together to upgrade my 1200 into a tower case, due to a rather large tax return. I've gotten a tower case, subway, mediator, etc... from Amigakit.com, and it arrived a few days ago, and I've finally had the time to assemble it. Amigakit again has excellent customer service, and went out of their way to inform me of a mistake I made when I placed the order (wrong PSU adapter), and I'm quite pleased with them. :D Anyway, I've also ordered a pair of wireless sega controllers off E-Bay, and they arrived as promised as well. (when I get the guys merchant info, time permitting, I'm planning on dropping a good review for him) However, the wireless controllers don't work. Regular ones do, however, and I think I've tracked the problem down. according to pinouts.ru, Amigas have a +5 VDC on pin 7, while Sega has +5VDC on pin 5. Thinking the easies fix would be to wire a dbn9 serial cable with pins 5 and 7 swapped out, but wanted to get a more experienced take on this before I try it and end up blowing something to hell. This a good idea?

Been awhile since I've updated this, so I figured I'd do so when I had a few moments. I promise to use the Enter key this time, too.

Got everything slapped together and working, hardware wise, with a couple exceptions.

The 10/100 mbps ethernet isn't working with either fastethernet.device or mediatornet.device. Its not really compatible with the mediator drivers, though I have a right=angle PCMCI adapter with my old 3com card until I find one that works.

Ultra-33 PCI Ide card doesn't work, no drivers. wasn't really holding my breath on this one.

Subway USB stack not working, thinking I'm just missing something fundamental. I had problems earlier with Picasso96 installing, because I had to use my wifes XP machine along with a samba share to do so, messing up the protection bits. I've double checked this with the subway drivers, too. but to no avail. Might just go with a pci card for usb.

Floppy drive shows "bad" icon, doesn't matter if there's a floppy in there or not. I set df0: to not show on the workbench for now.

IDE adapter not fully installed, for want of a longer IDE cable to hook things up. I have the cables I need now, so not a real problem.

2.1GB drive is still in there, I have a 40GB. Prob is, they're both laptop drives, and I only have 1 connector for this. I'll have to do alot of drive-swapping to get the filesystem(s) transferred. (2 SFS partitions, 2 FAT32 partitions, 1 MFS mac partition. I need a way to save and restore non-Amiga RDB's to restore the win95 and win3.11 partitions, the macintosh one I could care less about, as I have a shapeshifter-hardfile backup on the fileserver)

Wireless keyboard not working. This is interesting, I have a pc-key 1200 Amiga-AT adapter, and the only AT keyboard I had was an old ergonomic annoying, bulky, ugly, dirty, piece of $%#!&!!!!. A friend of mine @ Rivcom Computers had a spare ps/2 to at adapter (and the longer IDE cable I needed), and let me use them. However, when the Amiga powers on, the pc-key seems to wait for some kind of input from the keyboard to activate. (I Usually hit the CTRL button, then the led's on the keyboard flash) With the wireless keyboard, it seems to want to wait for the input from the computer before its able to send a keypress, which is an obnoxious cycle. There should be some easy way of breaking this, even if I need to solder some kind of "pulse" component into the ps/2 line. I'll see what google has to offer for this. (Unless someone here has a suggestion?)

The dual-monitor thing. I kinda like having 2 monitors (1 for AGA, 1 for RTG), but would like to have the ability to maintain the AGA display while working on the RTG display. If you notice my Screenshots, Ibrowse takes up most of the screen, which is fine, but I would like to move WookieChat and Jabberwocky over to the AGA screen, which would help immensely in clearing up real-estate on the RTG display. The resolution is already maxed out for the card, and I have to squint on a 20" monitor to read some of the fontsizes I haven't updated yet, so I don't really want to increase the res. at all. This is probably a config thing I'm missing, so I'll do some digging on it. I'm using the Matrix screensaver, which can blank RTG and AGA simultaneously (and looks awesome in a dark room when it does it ), but any other program I run switches AGA to a blank grey screen when I L-Amiga M out of it. (Or L-windows M in my case. which reminds me, has anyone dealt with These guys?



There's some software probs, too. mostly with various patches.

1) Reqattack doesn't like 24-bit textures. Apparently, I need to manually convert them into 24-bit .ra files (The tool to do so is included in the archive), simply putting the taskname in the v 43 datatype prefs causes ugly results.

2) MagicASL locks up. I REALLY like this patch, I think the standard ASL requesters are a bit bland for the system I'm running.

3) PC-Task & Shapeshifter lock. I've set the picasso96 prefs to allow direct access, which should be working, but it isn't... I'll have to look closer at whats going on.

4) Corrupted mouse pointer. When the mouse pointer switches images (Normal to busy, normal to "select link" hand in Ibrowse, NOrmal to Text editing pointer for some MUI classes)the sprite becomes a random, corrupted rectangle on occasion. I could fix this by using soft sprites, but I have a 68060, and would rather save cpu cycles for other things as much as possible.

5) Ugly mouse pointer. According to some documentation I read online somewhere, the SVGA card only supports 3-color sprites, and one of those colors is a transparent one that does some wierd (and ugly) stuff. The recommendation was either a 2 color pointer or use soft-sprites. Neither this or #4 is a really big deal to me right now, though.

Anyway, aside from those probs, its apparent my computer acting more sluggish than a windows machine being used by a nympho on a 20-hour porn browsing marathon was due to C2P and 24bto8b conversions from standard web-browsing. I had the foresight to pre-convert everything I otherwise used (Winamp skins, background/mui patterns, etc...) Ibrowse now works as quicker than firefox on my mother-in-laws winxp PIII, and almost as well as my wifes Athlon. Except for Javascript loaded pages, which I rather expected. However, even those load faster due to the lack of FBLIT and C2P conversions dragging the CPU down.

My MP3's play much nicer using AHI with a soundblaster, though they still hog the CPU a bit. Still tinkering with it to find a happy medium between performance and sound quality.

All my games (mostly whdload installs) work fine, they just go to the AGA monitor. I've noticed various background tasks (eg. limpidclock) still update on RTG while the game is playing, which is handy) However, I'm still toying with the idea of getting a VGA switchbox.