Folgende eMail habe ich mit dem Autor von PARadise, Giuseppe Mignogna <raze@iol.it>, ausgetauscht: Es geht um Parallelport-Schwierigkeiten.
Dear Uwe,
I'm so sorry that Paradise not worked with you. I'm almost sure the problem was an hardware incompatibility, I hope to solve some kind of them in the future (actually, my new mainboard allows Paradise to work only in standard mode, not in EPP etc. Studing what happens in the other modes, maybe I'll be able to create a version more compatible with all the mother boards).
Anyway, I'm glad that you found another way to transfer your data: in the end, what is important is that all the Amiga software will not be lost with the years :-))
Many thanks for your wishes, and thank you for tried to use my little program!!
Best regards,
Giuseppe
----- Original Message -----
From: Uwe R. Hoeppe
Sent: Wednesday, July 24, 2002 4:50 PM
Subject: PARadise
Hi again,
I just finished transferring my entire Amiga hard disk (80MB) to my PC. However, I used "Twin Express" (serial via Null-Modem) because I couldn't get PARadise working on my system. I don't know what the problem was, but I double- and triple-checked the cable, and I even got one "connection established" message on the Amiga side when changing my BIOS settings (to basic funcionality, no EPP etc.) for the parallel port on the PC side. Still, after booting up, the programs did not "find" each other. I even tried Win98 as an alternative to my usual Win2000 environment - to no effect (I think I even tried a clean DOS boot under Win98).
Never mind. It wasn't a bad problem - contrary to what I had expected, transfer speed was not at all crucial: In order to preserve long file names and file paths (I work with Kick 1.3), I had to pack my hard disk into several LHA archives anyway. As it turned out (even at the fastest compression level), this compression proved to be the most time-consuming part of the whole process. For a 10MB archive, my old A500 had to sweat for about one or two hours. The transfer of this file to the PC then only took about 10 minutes.
So even if file transfer had been a lot faster, it would not have saved me a lot of time. In fact, even uncompressed transfer via serial connection would have been much faster - but my problem was to keep the file and path name structure intact (otherwise, the virtual HD would not have booted later). I guess the full functionality of PARadise (with wildcards and long file names) would have been the only attractive alternative - but my old Amiga 500 doesn't have the necessary Kick 2.0 for that. Whatever, I got the job finished in a single 28-hour-non-stop session, and as far as I am concerned, my ol' A500 can blow up now ;-) because WinUAE works perfectly well for all my old stuff (I do miss the case design of this antique calculator, though...).
I don't know if this information is any good to you, but I suspect that my PC mainboard (Abit KT7A-Raid) does not support basic parallel port compatibility to older systems (like A500 etc.) any more. I did have trouble finding BIOS settings as described by you in the PARadise manual, so hardware incompatibility might be an issue here (the serial ports, however, worked fine - well, that is, as fine as you can expect Windows to work... every second system boot I had to re-boot before a serial connection could be established).
Well, other than that, I'd like to thank you again for your feedback earlier - even if I didn't get to enjoy your program :-) - and wish you all the best with your studies and future programming. Yours,Uwe Hoeppe.
