Pyrotechnic sky
Jul. 24th, 2011 10:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoAgain early this morning with the "Donder und Blitzen!" Complete with a severe thunderstorm warning that set off the weather radio and the whole bit. It went south of us, though, we hardly even got any rain. Flash flood warnings continued for much of the morning, but they were for points south and east of us.
I revived the Amiga 3000T this afternoon. It has been dormant for a couple of years, and I pulled out an old KVM switch so it could share the monitor with the Alpha. I knew it would be hard to boot up after the drive sat for so long, but once it sat blinking with the power on for about 15 minutes off it went. Of course the clock was way off and needed to be reset. The 386 bridge board was more difficult. I think the CMOS battery must be dead or nearly so. It had forgotten its configuration and had to be redone manually. Then it finally started up. But I'll bet after it is powered off overnight, it will need help starting again. The bridge board is essential, because without it my Amiga has no ethernet connection. Native Amiga ethernet cards are scarce and expensive as a rule, and I've never had one. Fortunately with a cheap NIC in the PC side, and some clever software hacks, the 386 DOS subsystem acts as an ethernet gateway for the Amiga.
This should allow me to retrieve some valuable software from the A3000 hard disk and get it over to my Linux desktop where it can be used on the Amiga emulator. I had the SAS C development system, HiSoft Pascal, and some other useful tools. Though the original installation floppies for those are still here, I doubt very much that they are readable. The HD copies are still good, though, if I can transfer them out. I was able to establish connection between the two machines, so it will work. I just need to put an ftp server up on the Ubuntu system to do this. That will be easier than installing NFS or Samba on the Amiga. I can just archive the Amiga directories, transfer the archive, and re-expand it on the virtual HD of the emulation. (He says... famous last words, I know.)
I revived the Amiga 3000T this afternoon. It has been dormant for a couple of years, and I pulled out an old KVM switch so it could share the monitor with the Alpha. I knew it would be hard to boot up after the drive sat for so long, but once it sat blinking with the power on for about 15 minutes off it went. Of course the clock was way off and needed to be reset. The 386 bridge board was more difficult. I think the CMOS battery must be dead or nearly so. It had forgotten its configuration and had to be redone manually. Then it finally started up. But I'll bet after it is powered off overnight, it will need help starting again. The bridge board is essential, because without it my Amiga has no ethernet connection. Native Amiga ethernet cards are scarce and expensive as a rule, and I've never had one. Fortunately with a cheap NIC in the PC side, and some clever software hacks, the 386 DOS subsystem acts as an ethernet gateway for the Amiga.
This should allow me to retrieve some valuable software from the A3000 hard disk and get it over to my Linux desktop where it can be used on the Amiga emulator. I had the SAS C development system, HiSoft Pascal, and some other useful tools. Though the original installation floppies for those are still here, I doubt very much that they are readable. The HD copies are still good, though, if I can transfer them out. I was able to establish connection between the two machines, so it will work. I just need to put an ftp server up on the Ubuntu system to do this. That will be easier than installing NFS or Samba on the Amiga. I can just archive the Amiga directories, transfer the archive, and re-expand it on the virtual HD of the emulation. (He says... famous last words, I know.)
