Acorn intrest area

Hello if you are reading this then you are probably an acorn enthusiast or user like either me (Sion) or Chris my Brother. In this part of the web site you will find a number of downloadable archives that you can de compress using either sparkplug or arc-fs. To be breif at the moment there is not a lot of stuff here just the odd utility that we churned out in the past. In future we hope to upload some demos etc that may even keep the strong arm busy. At present all our work is produced from an A5000, But this sufices for the time being until we can win the lottery.

Labeledit 2 and Desk calendar are available from my Software page

******Now Available***** revised version including output of drawfiles of any year in the future starting from any month in the future.

Coming this autumn calender will create year planners and output as drawfiles.

*****19/3/00**Due soon Calendar 2.0**** (probably May 2000)

Upgrading your A5000

I have upgraded my A5000 with 4 Meg memory, A VTI 16bit SCSI card and a Dual high speed serial port. Problems encountered are primarily with adding devices to the SCSI card. There where very few problems upgrading the memory (apart from fitting the jumper link) or the serial upgrade. The main problem with the SCSI is having the correct driver software for the various devices. For the toshiba quad speed cd drive a copy of the essox driver software was needed. It was found that configuration needed 2 commands thus:- CONFIGURE CDROMDEVICES (sets number of drives) and CONFIGURE CDROMBUFFERS (sets buffer size)

Connecting zip drives... Easy once you know how (but a pain if you havent got the correct software) external zip drives can be set as either scsi device 5 or 6 and have 2 25 way d connectors at the rear one for in one for out. one may have to be terminated if there is only the zip drive in the chain. Once connected you may find that once you have configured a scsi hard drive in your system (risc os 3.11 appears to handle removable devices) You cannot access the zip tools disc. This is common it is because file core can not read the standard format. There are some ways round this. MOFS by Hugo Finnes should access the disk but remember to alter the run file to look at the correct scsi id (Set MO$SCSI "n" where n is the id). The alternative is to use MO-Form by the same author and re-format the disk note, this may take up to 20 muinites.

After all this.... problems with zip discs. It appears that zip discs are nowhere near as reliable as they are made out to be, My Zip Tools disc lasted 6 months before falling over and fatally courrupting the disc map, totally un recoverable! This was probably because I used it as a seccond hard drive and spooled all my volatile data to it. In retrospect it is better to consider them as a high speed backup device as opposed to a hd replacement.

Theese pages are still under development so expect them to be updated in the months to come. For any comments etc. you can E-Mail me at sion@eurodahlia.com