LaCie MO 230 drive for PB 190 or 5300

[EvieSigma]

Thrift stores might still be lousy with old-stock Zip disks (although, honestly, I kind of feel like that flood has mostly dried up.) but it's not like ultimately much better solutions like the SCSI2SD are expensive. (I mean, really, let's get real, a SCSI2SD doesn't cost much more than taking a family of four out to Denny's. I know we're all used to getting things for free, but if you remember at all what the computers we talk about on this forum cost when they were new it's positively cringeworthy to see how worked up people get over sub-three-figure price tags.)
 

I used to think the SCSI2SD was expensive, then I bought TWO Amigas and saw that every cool upgrade for an Amiga is bare minimum about $130USD plus shipping...

 

[Unknown_K]

Which Amigas?

 

[EvieSigma]

Which Amigas?

A 1200 and a 500. Big box machines are out of my budget and the upgrade cards even more so.

 

[Unknown_K]

A 1200 and a 500. Big box machines are out of my budget and the upgrade cards even more so.

Yea, most of the Amiga stuff I have is too expensive (for me anyway) to snag again these days. The hobby is getting more expensive every year.

To be honest all the original Amiga games released will play well on either an A1200 or A500 anyway (which is what they were designed for).

 

[Gorgonops]

$130USD plus shipping...

Of course, if you look through the period magazines the prices today are still less than things sold for back in the day. To take an over-the-top example the (currently out of stock, granted) Vampire 500V2 accelerator which effectively includes a CPU, video card, *and* mass storage controller costs about $400 US. In October 1993, which was a year after the 1200 came out, $400 *would* buy you a closeout 68030 CPU accelerator and mass storage for your Amiga 500, but according to the ol' inflation calculator that's around $700 in today's money. Things get far worse if you look through the prices in, say, a 1989 Amiga magazine; at that time the minimum cost of entry for just a hard disk+controller was around $600, and a feeble little 68020 accelerator was around $250. (That's around $1,200 and $500 respectively in today's money.)

Realistically speaking does a Vampire 500V2 offer less "utility" than 2/3rds of an Amiga 500 CPU/hard disk upgrade did back in 1993? I dunno, arguably?, since you could still be using an Amiga 500 as your only computer at that point (was getting pretty awkward, though...) while obviously an Amiga 500+Vampire today is a "toy". But, well, the vast majority of Amiga 500s spent most of their time playing video games and were also therefore "toys" so... yeah. Even Amiga people *technically* don't have much excuse to gripe. If they can't afford them today they *definitely* couldn't when they were new.

 

[EvieSigma]

I'm not even talking accelerators, god damned flicker fixers are a lot too. I don't even know if my UltraSharps do 15KHz...

 

[Gorgonops]

It's a bummer how few monitors do 15khz RGB. (It's especially annoying when you have a monitor that actually has a composite video input on it to handle TV input but won't sync 15khz on the RGB port.)

 

[EvieSigma]

Somehow my LG 27 inch TV will actually display the A1200's video via composite, I have no idea how but I've got picture proof of it doing so.

 

[Gorgonops]

Somehow my LG 27 inch TV will actually display the A1200's video via composite, I have no idea how but I've got picture proof of it doing so.

Is it a European A1200 or something? Displaying on a TV is what the composite video port is for. Is it in black-and-white only? EU Amigas won't output NTSC-Compatible color. But on the flip side, because modern TVs generally use mostly "universal" guts, you will sometimes find that a TV in the US will be able to lock onto a PAL video signal. (But often in black and white because the US TV *will* be lacking a PAL color decoder.)

 

[EvieSigma]

I'm pretty sure it's black and white only, but I was still kind of surprised it could handle a PAL signal. 

Yeah, it's a PAL 1200. Imported from jolly old England.

 

[Unknown_K]

I wish I had more then 2 Commodore Amiga monitors (1x 1080 and 1x 1084). My NEC Multisync 3Ds that I shipped from Canada back when the dollar was king and shipping across the border was peanuts is screwed up and I am too lazy to find out how to fix it (I also had to buy a silver commodore video dongle to use that monitor). I do have a 20" Mitsubishi monitor that came with one of my AVID systems that is supposed to be Amiga friendly but I keep that heavy monster in the garage and have not tried it. A3000 thankfully has a built in scan doubler/flicker fixer so any VGA monitor will do. I also have a Retina 4MB video card in the A3000.

Amiga cards have been pricey for a while, lucky to have what I have.

 

[Gorgonops]

flicker fixers are a lot too

I guess I forgot to ask, have you tried one of those cheap-tastic Gonbes arcade scalers, like this?

https://www.paradisearcadeshop.com/home/electrical/video-converters-and-tools/gonbes-video-converters/23_cga-vga-hd-video-converter

Full disclosure, I use one with a IIgs and it's pretty lousy for that, but I've heard they work better on Amigas. (Supposedly the IIgs has strange pixel clock or such some nonsense that makes it suck especially for the cheap scalers.)

 

[EvieSigma]

No actually, I haven't. I guess it's worth a shot.

 

[Skate323k137]

15khz analog video has a crazy amount of "resolutions" that are technically within the spec. The iigs is definitely a resolution that many scalers probably won't like. Depending on your issue you can always try a lm1881 on your sync signal before the gonbes if you're having glitching. It often helps with that scaler and is a dirt cheap circuit regardless. 

One of the best options for 15k rgb in the usa is a good scart to component transcoder. Especially if you have a crt television with component video input. That looks great. On the flip most hdtvs won't sync to 240p anymore on their component inputs but some do. 

On the same lines while not practical for most folks everyday use, many projectors sync to 240p (15khz) analog rgb. I have a few sharp models and a hitachi that accepted it. Crystal quest on a 100 inch screen is pretty ridiculous

 

[olePigeon]

@Charadis and anyone else interested, I made these icons for MO disks a few years back.  I thought they looked nicer than the stock icons.

 

[ArmorAlley]

These are nice icons!

Thanks for putting these up.

 

[Charadis]

Syquest was an entire company. I've heard varying reports on the reliability of their stuff, a lot of it is just that "hard platters in a plastic case you insert into a drive with heads in it" (same as Jaz) is kind of a really bad idea. IBM gave up on it in the 1960s or 70s.

I have an EZ-135 and I have had good luck with it in terms of media reliability, but I can immediately tell what the biggest problem is going to be. I like having it around, but I only have like 3-4 cartridges and one drive, so I use a serial cable and ethernet to transfer files between my old Macs instead.

I don't know if this got shown here, but I know that USB ones will work in Mac OS X 10.13.x. You won't be able to write to HFS with that version of Mac OS, but you would be able to use the drive.

10.4 or 10.5 would probably be a good mid-point in terms of being a good OS for going on web sites that v4/v5 browsers can't load (like mac garden) and also for writing to external media that is HFS formatted.

Interesting bit of history, I've definitely heard of Jaz disks/drives from Iomega, but never knew of the company Syquest producing their own medium, or the company itself.  

Appreciate the heads up! I'll probably limit my usage of MO to my Wallstreet then, but would be a dream to be able to download software on my MacBook and write them on MO  -_-

@Charadis and anyone else interested, I made these icons for MO disks a few years back.  I thought they looked nicer than the stock icons.

Cool, thanks for these graphics! I'll have to try them out. I'm in the process of reorganizing things and moving things around as I get ready to move from my current location, but I may pull the Kanga out this weekend and try this out. The stock MO icon is...okay...I think these would really add a nice touch to the desktop. 

Now my worry is wearing out the drive just to see the icon pop up 

 

[finkmac]

Logitec (not to be confused with Logitech!) sold them in Japan for the 5300/3400, but not the 1400.

Yup. I have a Logitec LMO-PB400K, which is very similar to OP's drive. I think it's actually the same assembly too.

Has some formatting/reading issues. Probably need to clean it like OP did.

I made these icons for MO disks a few years back.

Cute icons. There's a million different MO icon sets for Macs… Years ago I started scouring internet archive pages for old japanese icon sets, lots of good quality stuff that I managed find, with tons of fancy MO icons.