User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Mon Jan 02, 2023 2:54 pm

Oh.... Hm.

I wonder if A-Max 2 is even 100% compatible with Amiga OSes that are higher than 1.3?

User avatar
foggy

Posted Mon Jan 02, 2023 4:03 pm

Thanks - for the comprehensive reply!

Yeah, I think your 2.56 is expecting a cartridge. My 2.50 allows for cartridge-free running but behaves as I've described. I'll give 2.06 a go - I have it somewhere.

I'm mainly doing this for the fun of it (what other reason is there?!) and to help this chap out. I just thought it was fascinating bit of software way back then!

https://crossconnect.tripod.com/AMAXHIST.HTML

This page would suggest A-Max v2 and above supports >KS1.3 among other things.

I'll give Shapeshifter a go too.. that came out after I'd moved on from Amiga... My A1200 has a 68030 & 68882 plus 128Mb so should have enough oomph!

User avatar
dankcomputing

Posted Thu Mar 23, 2023 4:42 pm

intric8 wrote:
Mon Jan 02, 2023 2:33 pm
I have 2.56. (But of course!) Chris Brenner gave it to me.

And here that is.
Link's busted. Is there somewhere else to get it?

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Thu Mar 23, 2023 5:04 pm

fixed


User avatar
dankcomputing

Posted Sat Mar 25, 2023 9:45 pm

Trip report: I have 2.56 (always reports 2.50 on the boot screen) installed and I'm having serious issues. I scrounged up a drive to plug into the dongle and that works. I can boot whatever Mac-formatted 800K disk I want. What I can't do is boot off of a hard drive in any way.

I tried to repartition the Amiga's hard drive with an A-Max compliant Amiga partition. The partition is named AMAX in both HDToolbox and Workbench. Upon booting into A-Max it'll show up as a blank volume - the Finder will ask to initialize it, go through the motions of initializing it, and then the volume will just never appear on the desktop. This happens on every boot.

I also tried attaching a Mac formatted hard drive imaged straight from a working Mac Classic. It will mount the drive but refuse to boot off of it.

The Amiga in question is a 2000 with a GVP Series II hard drive controller and OS 3.1. I made sure that the GVP's firmware is up to date and it has the latest version of it's A-Max driver installed. The hard drive is 2GB and the Mac partition is 255 megs, with the Amiga partition taking up the rest of the space. I've been using MacOS 6.08 exclusively. What is going wrong here?

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Mar 26, 2023 10:53 am

There's a lot to unpack here and honestly I'm hesitant to try and offer suggestions online as I feel like they so often send people down endless rabbit holes.

But here's what I can say based on my personal experience. In order for AMax to work on a hard drive, you have to use the controller card driver. I was lucky because Chris Brenner wrote a StarDrive-specific driver for A-Max which previously never existed. So he got it working for himself, then me, then site member Walldog in Pennsylvania. There may be others out there using it now, too, but at the least there are 3 devices that are running it (I have Chris' StarDrive now, too).

The GVP AMax driver would need to be used, which I'm certain you already know. That being said, I had to manually update my mountlist with AMax-specific information. I would have never figured this part out on my own without Chris' help. He actually called me and over the phone across an hour he told me what to do and type, line by line. The dude was amazing and I still miss him terribly.

Anyway, I also had to update my startup sequence, too.

When I made the AMax partition, I had to "put it at the very front" of the chain. Let me find my notes to try and be more specific. It will take a moment.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Mar 26, 2023 11:23 am

Here are some of the relevant notes from conversations with Chris I think you'll find important.

Chris:
I discovered that you must put the A-Max partition very close the beginning of the driver, and preferably make it the first partition on the drive.

...

I ran into trouble when I tried putting it up about 500 MB from the beginning of the drive.

It seems that A-Max has a limit of about 300 MB, so that also means that you can't create a huge A-Max partition. I would stick with 200 MB or less.
FWIW I made mine 50MB (update - that changed; see below) if I remember correctly, which would have been more than 2x the size of the HDD I used on a Mac back in the late 80s in school. 50MB was plenty for me. Odd that the documentation doesn't mention anything about it but back then ReadySoft probably didn't expect people to have gigantic hard drives with massive partitions devoted to the Mac side.

More soon...

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Mar 26, 2023 11:32 am

Chris continued:
Right now, I have my A-Max partition sized at 200 MB, and it starts at 40 MB from the beginning of the drive.

...

That's why I was scratching my head when the hard drive
failed to format.

I spent a whole afternoon chasing that problem.
....

I decided to use a 1GB SD card with my StarDrive. The size of the card, and the partition sizes, all have an impact on the numbers/math used in the mountlists. Chris could easily create those numbers for me. He tried to explain to me how he did it but it kind of flew over my head. I wish I could have just sat next to him and had him sketch it out on a piece of paper. I'm a visual learner.

Anyway, here you go even though your numbers will be very different (I HOPE THIS HELPS):

Chris:
I would put the A-Max partition at the start of the drive. Also, I would make the BlocksPerTrack = 128

And to work best with the SD card, you should start the first partition on cylinder 64, and make the partition sizes multiples of 4MB.

4MB works out to exactly 64 cylinders, so perhaps an
easier method is to make your partition sizes a multiple of 64 cylinders.

The best approach is to start by deciding how many partitions you want, and how big to make them. Do you want one or two Amiga partitions?

I personally use a small 20 MB partition for Workbench and system files, and a larger partition for applications and data.

Once you have decided on your partitioning scheme, write it down, and then use HDToolBox to create a RDB partition table on the SD card.

What size SD card have you decided on?

If it's 1GB, then you would define the drive as:

Heads = 1
BlocksPerTrack = 128
BlocksPerCylinder = 128
Total Cylinders = 16384

Once you are done setting up the drive with HDToolBox,
just make a boot floppy, and copy the autoboot program
to it.

With autoboot as the first command in the Startup-Sequence, your computer will automatically boot using the partition information you created with HDToolBox. There's no need to create mount list entries.

Refer to the examples in the HDToolBox section of this post viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1823

Of course those examples are for a 2GB card. For your 1GB card, all the drive settings will be the same except the total number of cylinders. For you that number will be 16384

Also, the example in that post shows the first partition starting at cylinder 32. For you that should be cylinder 64.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Mar 26, 2023 11:50 am

As I got all of the hardware I wanted for my optimal setup, I changed my mind on the partition sizes.

I said I wanted to do A-Max (AMAX1:) to be 250MB, WB (DH0:) to be 50MB, and Work (DH1:) to be the remainder of the 1GB card.

I then spent quite a bit of time simply using AMAX with my new Apple floppy drive as I wanted to fully experience the pure "original" non-HD version of AMAX. I soon learned the types of Mac software it could truly handle and what it couldn't. Basically most productivity software (the reason to be doing all of this in the first place) worked beautifully.



This was the mountlist I used:

Code: Select all

AX0:
Device = StarDrive.device
Flags = 0x7070
Interleave = 0
Buffers = 10
BufMemType = 1
Unit = 0
LowCyl = 64 ; HighCyl = 4095
Surfaces = 1
BlocksPerTrack = 128
PreAlloc = 0
#
DH0:
Device = StarDrive.device
Flags = 0x7070
StackSize = 4096
Interleave = 0
Buffers = 10
BufMemType = 1
Priority = 10
Mount = 1
FileSystem = L:FastFileSystem
DOSType = 0x444f5301
GlobVec = -1
Reserved = 2
Unit = 0
LowCyl = 4096 ; HighCyl = 4927
Surfaces = 1
BlocksPerTrack = 128
PreAlloc = 0
#
DH1:
Device = StarDrive.device
Flags = 0x7070
StackSize = 4096
Interleave = 0
Buffers = 10
BufMemType = 1
Priority = 10
Mount = 1
FileSystem = L:FastFileSystem
DOSType = 0x444f5301
GlobVec = -1
Reserved = 2
Unit = 0
LowCyl = 4928 ; HighCyl = 15357
Surfaces = 1
BlocksPerTrack = 128
PreAlloc = 0
#
And then put

Code: Select all

mount AX0:
in the Startup-Sequence AFTER the LoadWB command.

All of this with the custom driver being in Devs, of course.

P.S. I never used the original A-Max install program.

I will continue through my notes to see if there is anything else I may have forgotten. But I think that's most of the relevant (very specific to my setup) info.





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