Upgrading Amiga1500 but concerned about hardware conflicts

[swarfendor437]

Hi everyone,
I hope someone can assist! I have an Amiga 1500 which I have brought out of its mothball suit and was considering purchasing a zz9000 board (Zorro II slot version).
However, I have an Oktagon2008 SCSI controller, with a 1 Gb SCSI hard drive and 4 Mb Zip RAM. Is there likely to be an issue accessing the Hard Drive if I were to purchase a zz9000?
Thanks for any help forthcoming on this issue.

[TribbleSmasher]

The ZZ9000 can be flashed with either the 4MB or 2MB firmware. So if you are running out of Z2 address space you can flash the latter and be fine.
you will lose higher resolution tho.

[Thomas]

Z2 space is 8 MB, so 4 MB on the Oktagon and 4 MB on the ZZ9000 should fit. The SCSI part runs in I/O space which is independent.

[swarfendor437]

Hi TribbleSmasher, Thanks for the quick response (I am still awaiting moderator approval from English Amiga Board and stumbled on this forum. I don't want to flash anything if it can be avoided!

[swarfendor437]

Hi Thomas,
This is very useful information. The ZZ9000 is a graphics card with Picasso Graphic support and comes with two ARM Cores and 1 Gb of DDR3 Memory! The only other thing to point out is that I did upgrade the ROM chip that upgraded Workbench from 2.0 to 3.1. Interestingly the Kickstart ROM installation guide stated I would have to bend one of the ROM prongs up, but I didn't have to and had no issues installing Workbench 3.1. In order for the zz9000 to work properly, will I need to install Amiga Workbench 4.0? I don't have a SCSI CD-ROM drive and have seen some advertised on eBay - but Optical drives tend to fail at some point - is there any supplier of new(er) SCSI CD-ROM drives?

[Tumbleweed]

Amiga OS4.0 and later only runs on PPC and next gen Amiga's. For the A1500 the latest OS would be OS3.2.2.1. If you dont have a SCSI CD Drive there are other ways to install it. I used a combination of my PC and a Gotek drive in my A2000. You can copy the install disks from the OS 3.2 CD toa USB pen drive which you can then use in the Gotek as virtual floppies. You can easily get a gotek - https://www.retropassion.co.uk/product-category/gotek-drives/ - and install it in one of the floppy bays in the A1500.

Weed

[RhoSigma]

Have a ZZ9000 (Zorro3) running here in my A4000T under a plain AmigaOS 3.1 system and the latest P96 version, the only thing I noticed after installing the ZZ9000 were some random crashes due to low stack issues, as under that old OS version many standard handlers/devices/tasks etc. running with too small stacks. So I grabbed StackAttack2.lha and PatchStack.lha from the Aminet and inserted the following lines right after SetPatch into the startup-sequence:

StackAttack 6144
PatchStack >NIL: "ramlib" 3072

No more issues since then under OS3.1. However, if you're going to use OS3.2 or OS3.9 then these patches shouldn't be required, as I'm pretty sure the stack issues are already fixed in the newer OS versions.