Ordered an Incognito. What CF card should I get?

[StickJock]

I just ordered an Incognito from Lotharek.  Exchange rates are favorable for US right now.  So I figured that I should order a memory card as well in order to have everything ready when it gets here.  I think I read in some thread here that there are issues with some CF cards.  Is that true?  Or am I getting confused with SD to CF adapters having issues?

 

Anyway, I have a bunch of questions concerning this.  Is there an Incognito FAQ somewhere with this info?

 

1) Should I use a CF or SD to CF adapter?

2) Which CF cards are recommended?

3) Which CF cards should be avoided?

4) Which SD to CF adapters are recommended?

5) Which SD to CF adapters should be avoided?

When using an SD to CF adapter:

6) Which SD/microSD cards are recommended?

7) Which SD/microSD cards should be avoided?

 

My laptop has an SD card slot, so that would be a preference.  Otherwise, I would have to get a dongle to connect a CF card to the PC.

 

Thanks for the info!

 

 

 

[flashjazzcat]

32 minutes ago, StickJock said:

Should I use a CF or SD to CF adapter?

If you want. Two known to work:

 

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NEW-microSD-To-CF-Compact-Flash-Memory-Card-Adapter-Reader-type-1/264389144915

 

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/SDXC-SDHC-WiFi-SD-to-CF-Compact-Flash-Memory-Card-Reader-Adapter-Convertor-Speed/303449396235

 

Lotharek sells the MicroSD adapter, which I have and which has been tested with Incognito here:

 

https://lotharek.pl/productdetail.php?id=96

 

Choice of SD media should not matter at all with these things; I've not noticed one brand working any better or worse than any other, and there is no functional difference between MicroSD and standard SD cards. The SD adapters in general have some quirks which are fully addressed by the Incognito firmware I am about to release (basically the loader could trip up from time to time).

 

You can order a suitable MicroSD card pre-filled with software plus the CF adapter here:

 

https://lotharek.pl/productdetail.php?id=154

37 minutes ago, StickJock said:

Which CF cards are recommended?

Sandisk, as far as I'm concerned. Personally I use a pair of 4GB Sandisk Ultra cards. Some of the much more modern, high capacity cards apparently lack 'true IDE mode' entirely, so should be avoided. No doubt others will chime in with their recommendations.

 

But if you go the SD/CF adapter route you should have no problems. I've found them to work extremely well too.

39 minutes ago, StickJock said:

Which CF cards should be avoided?

Kingston 'Flower' cards have a bit of a poor reputation with SIDE cartridges, etc. Basically, avoid the old 64MB 'no brand' card you found in the drawer.

 

I think you should just get an SD or MicroSD adapter.

[jamm]

I've been testing with one of these and not had any trouble:

https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-CompactFlash-Memory-SDCFXSB-064G-G46/dp/B00NUB2RPW

 

Now all I need is for SDX to support large partition sizes...

 

[_The Doctor__]

How large do you need? I mean 16M and 32M are currently the norm for SDX * 15 drives at a time... but many more if you swap them in and out....

[jamm]

7 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:

How large do you need? I mean 16M and 32M are currently the norm for SDX * 15 drives at a time... but many more if you swap them in and out....

Well, it's just that when you have multi-gigabyte storage cards sitting around, 32MB partitions seem minuscule. It'd be nice to use a reasonable chunk of the available storage space - for, say, having all of the atarionline.pl archive in one drive - unstead of slicing it up into tiny bits.

[_The Doctor__]

but you can have all of the read only stuff in a fat system pretty much as large as that and use Sparta's fatfs driver to read it all, or possibly some of the more capable loaders to do the same...

[flashjazzcat]

Indeed so. The bulk of the atarionline.pl archive (which runs to about 900MB or so) consists of stuff you'd reasonably want to run from the FAT loader anyway, and some stuff (ATRs) which you HAVE to run from the FAT loader. Those applications and DOS tools which are better off on a HDD partition generally don't run into the hundreds of megabytes.

[TGB1718]

As @flashjazzcat says Sandisk every time, I tend to use the smaller ones i.e. 1GB and 4GB, they just work.

 

Using one in an Incognito and the other in a U1M/SIDE 2 130XE

 

[jamm]

4 hours ago, flashjazzcat said:

Indeed so. The bulk of the atarionline.pl archive (which runs to about 900MB or so) consists of stuff you'd reasonably want to run from the FAT loader anyway, and some stuff (ATRs) which you HAVE to run from the FAT loader. Those applications and DOS tools which are better off on a HDD partition generally don't run into the hundreds of megabytes.

Fair enough. But then, if I want to be able to access that FAT partition from SDX for whatever reason, I have to keep that partition in FAT16 size.  Which wouldn't be bad at all if FDISK could create multiple FAT partitions or if SDX's FAT driver could handle FAT32...