[comp.sys.amiga] Flashing Disk Light

me128-aw@kepler.Berkeley.EDU (me128 student) (12/20/88)

I did the Chris Erving memory hack which appeared in Amazing computing quite
some time ago, and now it's giving me problems.  In order to keep the slow
mem from auto-configuring, the board in the hack disables the memory on
reset and doesn't engage it until the light in df0: goes on.  The problem
is; when I boot from rad: it NEVER goes on!

I really don't want to open my machine again to have to fix this, so I
just need a question answered so I can do it in software:

How do I flash the drive light in df0: if there's no disk in there?  Can
somebody give me a 'c' code fragment to do this?

-thanks
-Vincent H. Lee

lee@sed170.HAC.COM (John Lee ) (12/22/88)

In article <27180@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> me128-aw@kepler.Berkeley.EDU (me128 student) writes:
>I did the Chris Erving memory hack which appeared in Amazing computing quite
>some time ago, and now it's giving me problems.  In order to keep the slow
>mem from auto-configuring, the board in the hack disables the memory on
>reset and doesn't engage it until the light in df0: goes on.  The problem
>is; when I boot from rad: it NEVER goes on!
>
>I really don't want to open my machine again to have to fix this, so I
>just need a question answered so I can do it in software:
>
>How do I flash the drive light in df0: if there's no disk in there?  Can
>somebody give me a 'c' code fragment to do this?
>
>-thanks
>-Vincent H. Lee

In order to flash the drive light, you simply need to turn df0:'s motor on
temporarily.  Now as to how to do that, you'll need the small code fragment
posted here a while back to first disable the drive (i.e., make it busy and
take it out of AmigaDOS's hands), then select the drive, toggle the motor
control, deselect the drive (trackdisk device?), and then release the drive.
Another possiblity is to toggle the drive motor by going to hardware directly,
after properly getting the disk resource, of course (since this is a machine-
specific problem, specifically your machine, we won't worry about going to
HW directly, right? :-)

Now, I did the hack for a friend a while ago, but I don't quite recall why
the anti-auto-config hack was needed.  Is it still necessary?  Don't B2000's
come with $80000 slow memory that auto-configs just fine?

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