Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Marketplace => Topic started by: on August 01, 2007, 01:26:15 AM
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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!!
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Someone has been tampering with the sex and free beer jumper again!
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That's right, 8MBytes of CHIP RAM!!
haha. I don't mean to be rude, but that's not right is it? :crazy:
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That's right, 8MBytes of CHIP RAM!!
You sir need to get laid more often and maybe lay off the beers for a while! ;)
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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.
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if there is 8mb of chip ram indeed, I'm going to bid high 8-)
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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.
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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:
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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.
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But how did it provide 8MB of Chip RAM?
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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? :-? :-?
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I am going to have to see this to believe it.
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Screenshots, or it didn't happen.
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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.
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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.
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Yes, you can install 8MB of ChipRAM in the SIMM slot, and even set the jumpers for it. But you will NEVER get the chipset (or any other part of the system) to see it as 8MB. It can not happen with an A4000 without a revision to the AGA chipset, and calling that difficult is like calling a category 5 hurricane a little rain.
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countzero wrote:
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.
my thoughts exactly. maybe he means 8MB fast?
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Could be "Other" memory. That's how my HC+8 is seen.
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Why not just power the machine on and check? If you don't you're going to have a seriously annoyed bidder when they find out it's just a standard A4000 with 2MB of chip RAM.
--
moto
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8 MB chip jumper?
Is it this time of the year again?
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:roflmao:
I think DoomMaster/Doomy had intersex with Mil. Spec. condoms and a _fill_in_your_favorite_animal_ and now he's spawned (notice the Doom terminology) little Doomies all over the world.
Now Canada has their own Doomy! Canadians, rejoice! :-D
On another note, I've just installed a QuadCore UltraSparc in my Amiga500. It took a lot of vaseline, but it fitted perfectly - finally. Anyone want to compare benchmarks? :roflmao:
Oh, did I mention that I'm now using RDRAM instead of DRAMs in it? Yeah, RCS did the hack for me. Mil. Spec. screws - I'm positive! Sorry no photos - my camera only has Gigabit ethernet, and right now my Amiga500 Gigabit clockport card (it's a Quiznos, not a Subway...) is burnt, so I can't upload...
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I'm throwing my vote in for there not being 8MB chip possible because if it was, it totally would have been done and widely hailed as a great achievement even before C= went under.
...or, let's say if it had recently been discovered to be possible, we wouldn't have had to find out about it on an ebay announcement for sure anyway.
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How about some screen shots for us, that'd put an end to this forum. What ya say poeer her up and take a few good screen shots. Cheers
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if that's indeed 8mb of fast memory instead of chip, that's a serious mistake...
just turn the system on, >show config snapshot will do it.
wouldn't be awesome to have 8mb of chip ram?
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amigakid wrote:
How about some screen shots for us, that'd put an end to this forum. What ya say poeer her up and take a few good screen shots. Cheers
It'll just be a screenshot of a fullscreen UAE connected via the TV out to a 1084S on top of the A4000 :-D.
This thread gave me a smile to start the day with =).
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Come on, give the guy a break. He just got misinformation, you don't need to stone him (http://youtube.com/watch?v=olVZY6OtNfs&mode=related&search=&) to death.
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eslapion is a Ok guy, I know he is quite knowledgeable about 8 bit things as I am on a Vic forum. I suspect he is just not as knowledgeable about the 4000. The guy probably told him there was a 8mb simm in the chip ram slot and he assumed there was 8mb chip. I use 8mb simms as 2mb are getting hard to find. I say cut him a little slack, but I would still like to see a picture of the desktop to be certain the 4000 powers up and works.
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Nobody is stoning anyone. This is a forum right? If there was a way to have more than 2MB Chip RAM it would of came out years ago! :)
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8mb of chip ram :crazy: only in my dreams :roll: I've been looking for a solution for years to this and there is no possible way to do it.
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In the end, it turns out that it is not a question of amount of chip RAM but of speed.
Turns out the reason why there is an 8Mbytes SIMM in there is because there were no 60ns 2Mbytes SIMM in existence. Pretty much all 2Mbytes SIMMs were 80ns or slower.
The official reply from Brian:
About the A4000 chipram. Even though I have an 8 meg module, workbench says that I only have 2mb. I may have done this to make the 'TurboAGA', my amiga chipset overclocking project, operate at such a high frequency. It is a 8mb, -6 module. Commodore's 2mb module was a -8 I believe.
I guess my memory is as small as the amiga's.
And with that the official specs for the machine now are:
-A4000 with 2mb 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.
But I can attest to the fact that his 3640 is REALLY overclocked to 33MHz.
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@eslapion
about overclocking custom chips... I know two hardware hackers in Spain who did that. One with his A4000 (He was "bacterio" the guy who used to exchange the GAL/PAL to make IDE go faster, up to 5MB/s. Also the one who made the 64MB hack for A4000) and the second one is a very friend of mine who overclocked his A2000 Denise chip to get 31Khz screenmodes. He says that demos usually hang but that WB worked perfectly. I think he ran some of the custom chips at normal frequency to avoid problems but still wasn't perfect.
about 8MB of chip... it's impossible without new custom chips.
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Crumb wrote:
@eslapion
Also the one who made the 64MB hack for A4000
oops. what's the 64mb hack for the A4000 ?
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countzero wrote:
Crumb wrote:
@eslapion
Also the one who made the 64MB hack for A4000
oops. what's the 64mb hack for the A4000 ?
You don't know? It's the 64MB chip-ram hack!
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Stupid eBay.
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An update from Brian concerning the "sex and free beer jumpers.
If you read my second email, 2mb is all the chipram my system has and yes, the jumpers do something. They allow you to run the system with a 4mb module, NOT 8, in the 2mb chipram module location. However, you still only get 2mb chipram without any additional fastram. It's like the extra 2mb never seen or used. My system will not even run in the 2mb jumper positions unless I can find the original 2mb module which no longer exists.
Cheers.
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LOL, it's 64MB of slow a4000 motherboard "FAST ram" and it's achieved reprogramming some GALs, cuting traces and passing wires. I know an user with that trick. The guy who made that hacks left the amiga scene 6-7 years ago. He worked as technical repair service for cbm and asked David Haynie the sources of various GALs. He reprogrammed the IDE port to make it faster on old A4000 motherboards (I heard newer ones changed from GALs to PALs so the code probably would be useless). I know 2 people with the IDE hack. With a CS MKII 060 the standard IDE transfers around 5MB/s.
Please notice that these hacks involved de-soldering the old GAL and soldering the new one so it was not so easy. He did the hack at some spanish parties. The memory hack was more complex and required that you sent him the motherboard. Unfortunately I doubt I still have his phone number.
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countzero wrote:
oops. what's the 64mb hack for the A4000 ?
It is as Crumb says, and best described by *the man* himself, David Haynie:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.amiga.hardware/browse_thread/thread/3726897a6bf1e89a/f180904dfc7d79e8?lnk=gst&q=4000+64mb+haynie&rnum=1#f180904dfc7d79e8
It is possible. While on the other hand, the 8MB ChipRAM jumper does nothing:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.amiga.hardware/browse_thread/thread/ab575681a29073df/ef9edd7721db27c3?lnk=gst&q=david+haynie+sex+and+free+beer&rnum=1#ef9edd7721db27c3
And one last thing: putting 60ns or 70ns RAM in the Chip RAM slot of an A4000 won't make things faster without a hardware hack to speed up the chipset. Supposedly the A4000 to be sold has this, but I wouldn't be so sure without photos and documentation, as it's a hack that is not common (I've personally not seen a reference to it while reading all the Haynie newgroups mails).
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Here's a reply from Brian Guralnick:
I personally verified. When using a single side 4mb SIMM in the chipram module location, moving both jumpers (J213 & J214) to the 8mb position allows you to see 2mb chipram. All other memory on the module is ignored.
I was mistaken about the original 8mb quote. It's been 9 years since I powered the computer up.
I did this originally to get access to faster ram modules & lower capicitance loads & shorter RAS-CAS cycle time to allow overclocking of the AGA chipset up to an almost double 50 MHz.
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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.
Priceless! :lol:
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eslapion wrote:
Here's a reply from Brian Guralnick:
I did this originally to get access to faster ram modules & lower capicitance loads & shorter RAS-CAS cycle time to allow overclocking of the AGA chipset up to an almost double 50 MHz.
I'd be curious of the method used to do this overclocking. Anyone have any pointers or sites referencing this?
Also, he said the computer has not been on for 9 years - I think it might be necessary before the sale to check the battery for any leaks...
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Here's a reply from Brian Guralnick:
I personally verified. When using a single side 4mb SIMM in the chipram module location, moving both jumpers (J213 & J214) to the 8mb position allows you to see 2mb chipram.
I verified it and it works. Never saw it mentioned anywhere. I wonder if there are any side-effects.
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Is there any chance to get faster ChipRam-access than 80ns on an A1200?
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What about redrumloa's chipset underclock? Makes the Z3 fly. Probably as usable and stable as the hack above, but it's safer.
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Ok, my AGA overclocking was done with a programmable PLL clock.
(Never had a stability issue related to the acceleration itself.)
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-Bad Effects-
Bad system clock
Floppy drive access useless.
Genlocks disabled it.
Need a multisync monitor, &, 'MonED' to make all the new possible monitor modes.
Audio was also off.
Serial port was also off, however, I made a little utility to fix the baud rate.
requires the change of the chipram module.
MUST HAVE fanned heatsinks on all of the Amiga's chipset chips.
-Great Effects-
60Hz 640x400 was possible in the non-DLB scan aga mode not only freeing up double time CPU to chipram access for those 35ns/pixel modes, now you use the 70ns/pixel, the chipram controler was also almost double speed. This made the software only version of lightwave layout editor in a 60hz progressive mode run at 4x speed, it scroll smooth like silk with complex scenes.
48Khz audio.
After the serial port patch software, far better 38400 performance.
Parallel port operated at extreme speeds.
PLL design allowed real-time system clock speed changes.
Additional hardware clock line tied to the floppy drive also made it read at almost 2x speed, however, writes were not guaranteed to be good.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Though I can easily make a replacement 'Turbo-AGA' pcb today, there is absolutely no financial incentive to do so, +, if I sell my A4000, I will no longer have a test fixture.
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Hi there Brian,
Its good to know you created an account here.
I am convinced you can make a very positive contribution here.
I am sure people will want to know all the technical details on how you overclocked the chipset in your A4000 and how you overclocked your 3640 from 25 to 33MHz.
I will be sure to publish all the necessary pictures we took yesterday!
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da9000 wrote:
Also, he said the computer has not been on for 9 years - I think it might be necessary before the sale to check the battery for any leaks...
I made sure the clock battery was REMOVED before any potential problems might occur.