Amiga 1200: Rapid Road USB « modelrail.otenko

1Sep/160

Amiga 1200: Rapid Road USB

After cross-grading from the ACA1220 to the ACA1221, I'd decided that USB would be an easier transfer mechanism over PCMCIA to CF cards. USB would also allow more peripheral options, as opposed to PCMCIA ethernet cards and CDROM drives.

Whilst purchasing the ACA1221, I also purchased the Rapid Road USB interface. This kit comes with all you need to add two USB ports to an Amiga 1200. It's all been sitting in a box for quite a while as I've been distracted by other tasks.

Hardware Installation

The Rapid Road slots on nicely to the ACA1221. As that the ACA1221 is a smaller size, there is ample room and, once on, the whole kit takes up the previous size of standard accelerators. I did find that the unit didn't seem to plug all the way on. It definitely makes contact though. It might be advisable to somehow provide a backing support beam to keep the Rapid Road in place.

You need to connect power from the Rapid Road to the ACA1221 and then the ground wire to the chassis. The floppy drive screw provides a good location for this. There is no need for any other cabling, apart from the USB plugs themselves!

Some might call it butchering... I call it creative-license. Yes, I didn't really measure or calculate a precise entry for my grinder, but in the end, the USB sockets are firmly installed. I used M4 screws that I had lying around and drilled them into the rubber of the plugs.

Everything fit back together nicely. The trapdoor cover is now an essential part of this Amiga 1200!

Software Installation

The USB stack used is known as Poseidon. You can find the links on the Icomp.de Rapid Road Wiki Page. Once downloaded, get the LHA to the Amiga. Of course, you can't do this via USB yet!

Installation was very next-next-finish. The default options put everything in the correct locations. Once the installer finishes, the USB stack is actually loaded! I had already put my USB key into the slot and the bloody thing showed up on the desktop. It also made a really funky space-ship sounding noise... turns out this happens upon device insertion.

At this point, I thought I was done. I rebooted the Amiga after playing with files on the USB key. Upon reboot, I got an error from the startup script: PsdStackDLoader not found. Turns out that this script is created once you've gone through the configuration. This is done via the Trident Prefs file which you'll find on the drive you installed Poseidon to.

Run through this, it's all pretty self-explanatory. As long as you chose the correct driver during install then it'll be selectable. It should come 'online' after configuration. Make sure you save all your changes at the end. I didn't configure any further classes or devices.

On the next reboot... my USB Mass Storage Device was mounted again.

USB CD-ROM Drive

I have an external drive and tried it... unfortunately it needs more power than the USB ports put out. I'll be finding a powered hub shortly and will test this again.

The hub in the middle didn't help... it just chewed more power as I didn't have an adapter for it! Turns out that buying a powered hub didn't help either... I needed a specific cable that provided two-ports-worth of amperes to power the CD unit.

Ok, we're now recognised... I can see the CD drive in the Trident prefs tool... but we don't have a CD mounted on the desktop? What gives?

Ahhh... big hint there. I needed to download and install AmiCDFS. After doing so, and rebooting, I had a CD mounted on the desktop! I got lazy whilst installing AmiCDFS and just dragged the C, L and LIBS folder to OS:. I expected this would merge the folders, and it did, but it also overwrote the icons! Must be stored in folder metadata somewhere.