Just got an Iyonix after a long time away and have some questions.

Hi everyone,

As mentioned in the title I have just got another Iyonix after selling mine a few years ago.
I’ve tried to keep up with progress in RISC OS land but I know there is lots I have missed so I have a few questions…

Was Geminus ever updated to allow the use of the later graphics cards? I want to get a dual screen set up running with 2x FX5200’s.

I also want to install a Soundblaster Live card (the onboard sound is terrible) and I know that drivers were being worked on… How far did this progress and whats required to get it up and running?

Thanks in advance,

Lee

Well I’ve been playing with the Iyonix all day and I have to say it’s great.

I have come accross another couple of issues though that I hope someone can help me with.

Firstly I need a MDF file for my HP w19 monitor that can do 1440×900.
Secondly can anyone talk me through connecting to my Windows 10 machine using Omniclient. I get as far as mounting a drive on the Iconbar but when I click it to open the directory I get an access denied error.

Lee

Secondly can anyone talk me through connecting to my Windows 10 machine using Omniclient

try Soft Rock’s explanation

Soft Rock’s explanation

I’d be tempted to modify that to say the permissions should only allow only the specific user access to the share rather than “Everyone”

The shares on the household NAS have different username and password combinations and one overall administrative account. The individual pass/name combos work fine on the individual shares and the overall admin accesses everything.

Wonderful job.

Firstly I need a MDF file for my HP w19 monitor that can do 1440×900.

Assuming you are softloading a recent rom – which you need to log on to windows 10 – after typing

*readedid

in a taskwindow can you select a 1440×900 screenmode?

If so change

!boot.choices.boot.predesk.configure.monitor 

to

readedid
wimpmode X1440 Y900 C16M

Firstly I need a MDF file for my HP w19 monitor that can do 1440×900.

E-mail me at johnrwatukgateway.net and I’ll send you one I used for my Belinia.

I’d be tempted to modify that to say the permissions should only allow only the specific user access to the share rather than “Everyone”

Yes I use my username but ‘everyone’ works and I think is the default using the method outlined to share a folder so it’s probably best to keep it simple.

What Colin said.

I wanted to write a set of instructions that were fairly quick and easy to follow, so opted to use ‘Everyone’ because setting up a Windows Share (on 8, at least) defaults to that at the stage they appear in my guide.

With Windows, ‘Everyone’ simply means “Everyone who has an account on this computer” – and they have to use their log-in details to access the share.

If you have more than one person with an account on the computer and you want them all to be able to access the share – or if you access the computer yourself using more than one account – then using ‘Everyone’ is a quick way to set things up.

To be fair, though, there are things I should have explained or made clearer – and the purpose of ‘Everyone’ is one of those things. (Especially in case anyone has a ‘Guest’ account enabled)

The shares on the household NAS have different username and password combinations and one overall administrative account. The individual pass/name combos work fine on the individual shares and the overall admin accesses everything.

My current NAS is utterly, utterly rubbish. Probably because it was fairly cheap (A Seagate something or other).

With my older ones, the way they were set up was using a group policy: you’d set up user accounts (say, JohnSmith, JoeBloggs, JillJackson, etc) and you’d assign each to a ‘group’. Then, when you created a share, you could say which group(s) could access it, and with what permissions.

The current one is simply a one user = one share approach. Naff.

Doubly naff because Windows will only access the one share on the device if there are more than one, and they need different log-in details. ISTR the error suggests it’ll only access one share on any given remote device, but distant memory suggests the group policy allowed me to get around that. Unless older versions of Windows (than 8) were just more capable in this respect.

RISC OS, OTOH, happily accesses more than one share on the device with different username/password combos – like a good system should.

I wrote:

E-mail me and I’ll send you one I used for my Belinia.

Perhaps I should just insert the main bit here:

#1440 × 904 (60Hz)
startmode
mode_name:1440 × 904
x_res:1440
y_res:904
v_timings:3,32,0,904,0,3
sync_pol:0
endmode

but the full MDF has other useful bits as well!

Note that it’s 904 for the Iyonix to conform to multiples of 4.

My current NAS is utterly, utterly rubbish.

Is it a real NAS, or an ADSL box with added features?

My Livebox, for instance, can share files on a connected USB drive, and share a printer. I’ve never tried the printer.

The files? Well… VLC on iOS can find the files. The Livebox with the older (non-upgraded firmware) can stream 480P animé and dorama episodes without too much bother. The one-in-use with upgraded firmware cannot manage this, there is just not enough grunt to do all the stuff the new firmware is doing and keep up with a lowish-rate SD quality bitstream from an attached USB drive. Yeah, it’s pretty pathetic.
Oh, yeah, and I had to mux all the AVIs and MP4s to MKV wrappers so I could paste in the subtitles as this method doesn’t permit separate srt files to be opened. Thankfully as muxing in subtitle data doesn’t require transcoding the video itself, the process is quick and painless.

Under RISC OS, I did manage to get Omni (or LanMan?) to find the files on the Livebox server. Once. But it is horrible jumping through hoops. VLC found “a server” and then a folder, and then content. RISC OS couldn’t see any of this, so I needed to poke around, having managed to find the stuff on the XP box, to find out what the paths to everything were. Compound this with no instructions to Omni that I could find (maybe I’m looking in the wrong place?) and it was a pain to get going.

To be fair, though, there are things I should have explained or made clearer – and the purpose of ‘Everyone’ is one of those things. (Especially in case anyone has a ‘Guest’ account enabled)

Yep, that was the reason for my comment.
I regard Guest access as solid door with big complicated lock and the key sat under the plantpot at the side of the door style of security.

But, as you say the article suffices to give a simple instruction set.

Is it a real NAS, or an ADSL box with added features?

I could be wrong, but AFAIK Seagate only do storage – be that NAS drives, USB drives, cloudy stuff.

The problem, I think, is a combination of the term “fairly cheap” with the modern trend of dumbing things down. Setting up a group policy is probably considered too arduous for the modern punter.

The problem, I think, is a combination of the term “fairly cheap” with the modern trend of dumbing things down.

The problem, also, with “fairly cheap” is that the firmware within is often the barest minimum to provide the advertised feature set. Usually. Sort of.

It is a depressingly familiar theme on my blog that sometimes you come across what has the potential to be a good bit of hardware, let down by woeful firmware. To the point where you really wish these (Chinese) companies would dump the sources on GitHub and let the users do what they obviously couldn’t be bothered to do.
But that sort of thing doesn’t happen, so potentially good hardware risks becoming yet more landfill.

Setting up a group policy is probably considered too arduous for the modern punter.

Thanks for the replies.

I managed to get connected to my Windows machine using softrocks guide and the latest (5.23) softload. Nice to see this has been fixed and I’m looking forward to 5.24.
John the MDF didn’t work, it complained about missing something or another. In the end I managed to edit the generic MDF using MakeModes to get a 1440×900 display in 16million colours at 64Hz :-)

I played about with Geminus but it seems to have some redraw problems in the filer.. I’ve got my fingers crossed for an update.

I’ve got a soundblaster live card ordered so any advice on using it would be much appreciated!

My main sticking point at the minute is my old back-up DVD is half unreadable.. I got most files off it but when I try and access the !Boot folder to get some items out of Resources it complains that it cannot read audio CDs. In particular I’m looking for the Replay folder… can anyone help?

Thanks again,

Lee

The only official source for !Replay etc is in the ROOL ‘DiscImages’ from here

The only official source for !Replay etc is in the ROOL ‘DiscImages’ from here

Just to clarify, none of the archives which Chris links to appear to contain !Replay, unless I’ve missed it somewhere?

Quite correct Andrew. The latest copy of disc images on our server that contains !Replay is 5.16 for the Iyonix.
I suspect licensing issues may be behind its omission. I wonder if there is anything else that was considered as ‘standard’ that isn’t in the ROOL downlands

I wonder if there is anything else that was considered as ‘standard’ that isn’t in the ROOL downlands

The DDE doesn’t contain FormEd.
This is probably just as well given that I recall FormEd being rather horrible to use. :-)