doc@s.cc.purdue.edu (Craig Norborg) (10/08/87)
Well, I had the pleasure of fooling around on an Amiga 2000 quite a
bit in the past couple of weeks, and I thought I should share some of
my comments on the machines and observations of its quirks, etc.
First off, I should probably explain the system I was working on.
This was an Amiga 2000 with 3 Meg of memory, a 20 meg ST506 hard drive
hooked onto the Amiga side with the new drive controller, and the
Bridge card.
One of the first observations I had of this machine was the
unfortunate occurance of trying to solve a problem. It seems that a
friend had created a 3Meg file on the hard drive (a 3d animation), and
every time they tried to delete it, the machine started to, then
promptly guru'd. After trying everything we could think of, multiple
versions of delete off different disks, programs that had delete built
into them, even copying a file over it, we finally decided that the
only way to get rid of this file was to reformat the hard drive. I
think this is a bug that Commodore should probably look into since
totally different programs died in the exact same manner. Hopefully my
friend will report it through the right channels as I told him to.
Now down to a bit of the nitty gritty. Over-all the machine is
great! The IBM-Amiga interface is quite nice and too easy to get used
to. The Bridge card performs flawlessly, and one feature I loved was
the ability to reboot the IBM without affecting the Amiga!
(Ctrl-Alt-Del) The IBM emulation is very good and only a couple of
packages messed up in the slightest bit, and these were copy-protected
games, so I didn't really expect too many of them to excell. Both in
monochrome and color the IBM does quite well, and you even have some
nice features the IBM doesn't have, like the ability to change the
colors on the screen to suit your preferences. Other people were
commenting how much better Jet looked with colors other than the
default IBM ones. You can also use Amiga cut-and-paste capabilities to
transfer information to the Amiga side from the IBM side. Could turn
out to be quite useful.
I did notice a drawback of the Amiga hard-drive. From all the
information made available to me, it seems that the only way to use
this drive from the IBM side is to create a 'virtual' disk in a file
on the hard drive from the IBM side. I did fool around with this quite
a bit and had VERY bad reliability with it though. The virtual disks
seem to work great on a ram disk, but not on the hard drive. I may
be wrong about this virtual disk approach though, and if I am, could
someone out there please correct me!?!
Also from the information given to me, but I haven't tried it,
it seems possible to partition a hard drive on the IBM side so that
the Amiga can use it with ease. This would make me tend to want to
get hard-drives on the IBM side, but not for the Amiga side just for
the fact that the drives on the IBM side could be partitioned for use
on the Amiga side also. But, a SCSI drive on the Amiga side would
be nice ;-)
One other quirk I found out was that the internally mounted
5.25" disk does not seem to work the same as the 5.25" disk
provided with the Transformer. For example, we could not figure
out a way to use it with disk-to-disk, or any of the utilities
used to transfer files from 5.25" IBM drives to the Amiga drives.
We could also not figure out how to format them as Amiga disks
either. If there is a way, please tell!
Overall, the A2000 seems like a really nice machine, and if some
of the rumors are true (1 Meg chip ram, Unix(R), 286 Bridge card,
etc.), I think it will be the machine of the future, just wish I
had the 1000 to trade mine in.
Later!
Craig Norborg