A4000 system soon on eBay!

I will soon be posting an A4000 for sale on eBay.

The battery for the clock HAS BEEN TAKEN OUT TO AVOID DAMAGE!

Description of the system:

-A4000 with 8mb chip ram, 16mb fast ram, Commodore 3640 over-clocked 33MHz 68040.
800mb IDE HD
GVP EGS True Color Retargetable Color System with Video card, 2mb ram, slightly overclocked.
    Additional Cybergraphics drivers.

That's right, 8MBytes of CHIP RAM!!

[eidofoor]

Someone has been tampering with the sex and free beer jumper again!

[Robbie]

That's right, 8MBytes of CHIP RAM!!

haha. I don't mean to be rude, but that's not right is it?  :crazy:

[TjLaZer]

That's right, 8MBytes of CHIP RAM!!

You sir need to get laid more often and maybe lay off the beers for a while!  

Why is it that somehow I expected stupid comments like that...

Awrite... This machine belong to Brian Guralnick who worked for RCS management. He designed the PCB for the Excalibur accelerator.

If he says there is 8MBytes of chip RAM in this machine then that's because THERE IS 8Mbytes of chip RAM in this machine.

He did specify that most people don't know that the A4000 can support this.

Especially coming from you Mr. TjLaZer... you should know who Brian Guralnick is since you are authorized to distribute the ROMs from another RCS management product.

[PaperMario]

if there is 8mb of chip ram indeed, I'm going to bid high  8-)

PaperMario wrote:
if there is 8mb of chip ram indeed, I'm going to bid high  8-)

It appears getting any A4000 to have 8MBytes of chip ram may not be so difficult.

I asked Brian for clarifications on this matter.

[adolescent]

eslapion wrote:
Why is it that somehow I expected stupid comments like that...

Not stupid comments.  It's commonly refered to as the "Sex and Free Beer" jumper.

Dave Haynie wrote:
Close. People were changing the 2/8 meg jumper around, and complaining it didn't do anything. I said it doesn't do anything, and in some cases might even cause you problems. That jumper was left over from the original A3000+ prototype, back when there was a chance that there would be a CMOS Alice capable of 8Meg addressing. It was just an idea, I made sure Alice had the right connections. I believe the production Alice may even use those pins for something else. So you leave that jumper alone. I said you shouldn't change any jumper you don't understand, even if it's labelled "Sex and Free Beer".

Now, if you can show us some proof of the magic 8MB chip... :roll:

In the early 90's, I remember witnessing a totally crazy (and in fact destructive) experiment on an A4000 performed by the people at RCS.

They replaced the oscillator normally used to clock the AGA custom chipset by a programmable board with a PLL system (phase locked loop) that could increase the system's normal frequency up to double its normal rate.

This had the undesired effet of making all music and sound shifted up in frequency and since Paula takes care of communicating with the floppy drive, reading and writing to a floppy was impossible at higher than normal rates.

Using one of these rates and alterations to the monitor devices, it was possible to display resolutions up to 1280x1024 (in monochrome or 1 bit per pixel, mind you) on a NEC multisync monitor which was considered the top of the line back then.

Eventually, these experiments overheated and fried some of the customs chips on the A4000 MoBo. I wouldn't know which.

[adolescent]

But how did it provide 8MB of Chip RAM?

[TjLaZer]

Dude relax, my comment was in reference to the Sex and Free Beer comment from Dave Haynie.  You familiar with his comment on the 2M/8M jumper?  If not read it below!  

Why is it that you seem to know so much about advancements of Chip RAM in the 4000 but you do not know this infamous comment by the legendary Dave Haynie himself?    :-?  :-?

[Fixer]

I am going to have to see this to believe it.

[issarad]

Screenshots, or it didn't happen.

TjLaZer wrote:
Why is it that you seem to know so much about advancements of Chip RAM in the 4000 but you do not know this infamous comment by the legendary Dave Haynie himself?    :-?  :-?

I know nothing about advancements of Chip RAM in the 4000. All I know is Brian wants me to take care of the sales of his A4000 system. He also has an A3000UX to sell.

He says there is 8MBytes of chip RAM in it so that's the specs I publish.

In the early 90's my job was to publish advertisements made on the Amiga so I knew a good number of people involved in this area. I worked on a Compugraphic 9800 imagesetter and I had my own A3000.

I had the opportunity to meet Suresh once or twice. I worked for Rick Rock of CompuArt and I even sold an Opalvision card to Olusegun Olaniyan.

Today I do electrical engineering but I knew nothing of electronics back then. I was a simple desktop publisher and machine operator.

I was also considered to be a royal pest by both Softwares co. (Codell Audio still exists today, BTW) and the people at Maison du Logiciel. But they had to contend with me as I was a serious customer of their products and services and contributed to increase their sales.

P.S.: I know generally what a PLL is but I could certainly never make one that works for you... at least not now... maybe when I finally get my engineering degree.

[countzero]

AFAIK, the custom chipset was never modified to make use of 8 mb chip mem. Even if it is there, it doesn't mean it gets used. What I know, you need a major rework of custom chips to fully utilise 8mb chip ram.