Thylacine vs. Deneb USB for Amiga A4000T

[crazyegg]

Hi All,

I am trying to get my feet wet finally with USB for the Amiga.

Firstly, which is superior Thylacine or the Deneb? By all accounts, it seems that the Deneb is but it is over 3x the price of a Thylacine.

Secondly, which is recommended for an A4000T? I am reading that with an A4000T, it can only run in Zorro II mode of something (do to it having built in SCSI)?

Can someone please shed some light on this? Thanks!!

Regards,
ed...

 

[fitzsteve]

Deneb is worth every penny more you will pay for it.

Deneb vs. Thylacine facts:

Deneb has 1 Type A USB Port & 2 headers for cables/media bays/etc vs. 1 Type A Port on the Thylacine

Deneb can work in Z3 PIO Mode with the A4000T or DMA under buster -9 the issue relates to DMA Bus Master which you can only have one of under Buster -11 The A4000T's A4091 SCSI is a DMA Busmaster. Any A4000 with Buster -11 is affected i.e if you have a Fastlane Z3 or A4091 in your A4000. (However I'm not sure rolling back to buster -9 is such a good idea in the long term)

PIO is still fast, from USB II HDD I get 5mb-6mb/sec transfers on the Deneb, you will probably see only 600k on the Thylacine

Deneb has FlashRom you can put boot modules into, so if you want to cut out the reboot in OS3.9, no problem.

Deneb in DMA mode uses FPGA for some of it's work and uses less CPU when accessing USB devices, but of course this isn't available in PIO mode but as said, Deneb is still fast!

If you can't find a Deneb and want USB then the Thylacine is an option, but I wouldn't call compare it to Deneb as a proper solution for A4000's

Hope that helps

 

[Xanxi]

The Deneb is the most useful amiga expansion ever.
Fast enough (even in Z2 mode) to be a network card (with a 2 EUR dongle), an audio card (with a 3 EUR dongle), a disk controller card (with any USB to IDE/SATA adapter), as well as an USB facility. And indeed the flashram does come handy.

 

[Storm]

The Deneb is definitely worth the price. I couldn't live without it now. I have all my custom AmigaOS 3.9 modules and libs in the flash ROM which is 4MB I think.

 

[crazyegg]

Hi all

Thanks for all the replies.

I just purchased the Deneb here on amibay. I can't wait to begin using it on my a4000t.

ps Steve the overclocked aca630 which I bought (which you previously owned) is working amazingly. Thx again

Regards...
Ed

 

[fitzsteve]

Nice one, seems like you have some kick ass systems! Enjoy :-D
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.5; en-gb; HTC_DesireHD Build/GRJ90) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1

 

[CrashMidnick]

As Fitzy says, even in PIO mode the Deneb rocks !!! I have 2 two Deneb, one in an A3000 with DMA activated, the other one in PIO mode in my A4000 (the CSMKII that I have has the DMA problem so data are corrupts on any DMA storage devices but it does not really matter).

have fun with it ! Shame that no more production is planed.

 

[ChaosLord]

I kept thinking Deneb was only awesome on A4000.

I keep forgetting that it is great on A3000 too, right?

And I have 2 A3000s!

So why did I never get a Deneb? I never knew about them when they were produced. And I was too ill to get any enjoyment out of one back then anywayz. Oh wellz.

Is there a USB FAQ somewhere?

I am curious what is the best USB solution for A1200T/060 (my main miggy) and how does it compare to a Deneb?

Full Disclosure: I actually hate USB 1.0 to 2.0. Yuck. I hate it on PC and and I hate it on Miggy. PIO must die. I am interested in USB transfer speeds for scientific purposes and so I can help make recommendations to others.

USB 3.0 ahhhh now there is something I can respect! I bought a new Intel Core i5 PC simply for the fact that it came with 2 PS/2 ports and 4 USB 3.0 ports! (As well as VGA and HDMI)

Any USB 3.0 solution for Amigas?

 

[rkauer]

Hi James. Sorry, currently there is no USB3.0 for the Amiga land.

And just the Deneb (Zorro Amigas) and Spider II (Mediator systems) for USB2.0.

The Spider itself is a generic NEC USB card with its firmware serial number(!) modified to show as "Spider" for MediTator bus. Using a normal Nec card will make the Elbo* PCI code to overwrite the bootable Amiga RDB.

USB 1.0/1.1 is covered by Subway (A1200's clockport), Norway (Zorro), and Thylacine (diddle).

 

[ChaosLord]

Thanx Rkauer! That was the best Amiga USB FAQ in 100 words or less that I ever read!

 

[rkauer]

Must I twit it?:blased: