SCSI on the Amiga (CU Amiga Feb 1995)

CD Player software - free, too!

CD-ROMS also allow audio CDs to be played. Jukebox is an excellent shareware program allowing you to do this and is incredibly easy to set up. Again, you just feed in your device name (scsi.device) and the CD-ROM’s SCSI unit number and you have full control of any audio CD you choose to insert into your CD-ROM drive.

Blittersoft (01908 220196) have recently announced a new piece of driver software for use with AGA amigas. This little beauty will do the previously thought impossible and allow you to play CD≥≤ games on your 1200 or 4000 with a SCSI interface. Priced at £39.99 for everything you need, we’ll be reviewing it shortly.

Tape streamers are invaluable if you have data that you just could not afford to lose on your system. Dumping the whole lot to tape and storing this tape in a different place to your computer protects you against most conceivable disasters happening. BTNtape, again PD, is a handler for tape drives which allows dumping of files to tape. In the commercial world, AmiBack and Quarterback both allow writing to SCSI tape drives when making the backup. An interesting product for tape drive users is a package called TapeWorm FS allowing random access to data on a tape as if it were a hard disk. This is no mean feat: by nature, with a tape you have to advance through data until you find the bits you want. This software attempts to fix this and does so pretty successfully.

All in all, a SCSI interface will open up another cheap expansion route to your Amiga allowing you to branch out and be more adventurous with your buying. Of course, if you don’t buy from an Amiga dealer, don’t expect support when it doesn’t work with your machine, though…