Problems along the way...

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Gamer Concepts

The Disk Drive

Another relatively minor problem is that the Mavica writes to the disk in the MS-DOS format. The Amiga doesn't normally read this format. But, as most Amigans know, CrossDos comes with WB 2.0 and up. So, I dug out my WB Storage disk, dragged the PC0 icon out of the DosDrivers drawer, and renamed it to PC3 (the high density drive came up as DF3:, so PC3 seemed reasonable, rather than FollowKingBill: :^) I then click on the icon, selected the "Icons/Information" menu, and changed UNIT=0 to UNIT=3. I then double clicked on the icon, which then mounted PC3: I dug through a pile of disks to come up with a high density disk, popped it in and formatted away.

Now, being a rabid downloader, I have piles and piles of disks. Ever since I bought my Zip drive, though, I didn't believe I would ever need to use them again. Good thing I didn't get rid of them. A good number of these disks are high density disks, because in the past few years it has become close to impossible to find otherwise. At the time, they formatted in double density just fine.

The night I bought the Mavica and finally got the battery all charged up, I ran into a problem. After using the high density drive to format them with CrossDos, the Mavica wouldn't accept them, saying Disk Error. So, I had to use my first charge to format a batch of disks. Since all my disks had been reformatted by the Amiga, I don't know if this happens with brand new MS-DOS disks or not.

I somehow had a day off on December 29th, so I figured a good test of the new camera would be to go down to the San Diego Holiday Bowl Parade and snap some pictures. I took about 12-15 disks with me, and had the battery fully charged. Over the hour and a half that I stayed at the parade, I easily snapped over a hundred pictures. Try that with a different type of digital camera. You'll have to spend hundreds on the various flash-rams that come with other cameras.

After I got home, I turn my Amiga on and started popping in disks. I was really impressed with the pictures I was seeing. Then I came to another problem. Like I said, most of these disks had been originally re-formatted using a normal double density Amiga drive. Additionally, a bunch where cheap, no-name disks. On some disks, I started coming up with disk errors like crazy. It ended up that about 4 pictures per disk couldn't be read by the Amiga, and another 2-3 had to be copied several times before they would copy correctly. The Mavica has no problems reading these images.

Now, after playing around with various programs, I've been able to get at many of these unreadable files. Remembering that the NickPref program had options to control disk drives, I started it up and set all the disk options to their highest settings. This allowed me to get a couple more files. Then I noticed that ImageFX could read these unattainable files. Very strange. Finally, I tried using COPY FROM PC3:*JPG TO RAM: BUF 2 CLONE. The BUF 2 part of the command forces COPY to use only two 512 byte buffers to do the copy. This slows it down and seems to allow CrossDos to work better. Sometimes it took an extra try or two, but this seems to do the trick.

I have to say that the disk problems are only happening on the no-name disks. On the first few disks I had stuck in the camera, I had no problem copying the files onto my hard drive. Interestingly enough, those first few disks where Sony disks.

After much testing, I've finally gotten most of the no-name disks to work. It takes a while, but if you format the disks with CrossDos, then format them in the camera, you are more likely to have less trouble with copying the files off the disk. I still have yet to check if new disks, which haven't been re-formatted to the Amiga disk formatting have problems working between the Amiga and the camera.

UPDATE:

Yet Another Update

Viewing the pictures using datatypes and other programs

NOTE

Another problem with using the Amiga and the Sony Mavica camera is the fact that the camera creates rather unusual jpegs. Most jpegs have the byte sequence of JFIF at seven bytes into the file. The Mavica jpegs do not have this byte sequence. This may cause problems because some programs look for this sequence to identify the file as a jpeg. At the moment, there is only one datatype that can support support Mavica jpegs. The newer versions of the akJFIF.datatype will correctly identify Mavica jpegs, but make sure you get at least version 43. 155, as there where problems with earlier attempts to add this ability.

Some of the programs that have been reported to work with the Mavica jpegs are:

• ADPro
• akJFIF.datatype (use ver 43.155 up for best results)
• ArtEffects
• AWeb JFIF plugin - NOTE: The AWeb JFIF plugin will view Mavica Jpegs, but there is a problem. Since AWeb has separate JFIF and GIF plugins, it is quite possible for a gif misnamed with a .jpg extention to be given to the JFIF plugin by mistake (most servers give MIME type by the file extension). In an attempt to work around this, in version 3.2, Yvon made AWeb check for the JFIF byte sequence, which, of course is not in a Mavica jpeg. AWeb version 3.1 and 3.3 will view Mavica jpegs properly.
• Cyberview/window
• IBrowse
• ImageFX
• Personal Paint
• PhotoAlbum
• Photogenics

It's becoming appearent to me that most programs will read Mavica jpegs properly, it's just the few (mostly datatypes) that try to identify the file as a jpeg by the JFIF byte sequence that will fail.

Most of the people hitting my page seem to be looking for just Mavica information, and very few Amigans have yet to show up here. If you are an Amiga user and are able to see the pictures using a program other than the ones mentioned above, drop me a line and let me know, so I can add them to the list.