Amiga.org
The "Not Quite Amiga but still computer related category" => Alternative Operating Systems => Topic started by: Will-i-am on October 06, 2004, 04:28:10 AM
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I recently acquired two great classic amigas jacked up to the hilt with lots of boards and stuff like that. In the "stuff like that box" was a prototype board the folks who sent me the stuff had. I believe they were essentially working on making an '060 Amiga mobo for some reason or another. Since both amigas they sent had CyberstormPPC/060 cards, that seems reasonable. I kept the board for parts but lately I had this mad concept of powering it up, adding what you need to make it work and all, and seeing if I could, in fact, make an '060 'puter from scratch. If this were possible with my limited training....actually non-existant training....would attempting to load the OS 3.9 be a good idea, assuming it has all the special chips, or should I be thinking Linux? I have one Linux box running and this old thing here...a Sony Vaio...is soon going to be a dual-boot beast, and just cause I am a glutton for distractions...bad back pain all the time...I would like to try to do something with this board rather than pry parts out of it. Any concepts? comments? seem too crazy to be encouraged? I also have a 1960 Willys pickup in need of work, but I live in the NE and being on my back in the gravel in winter is not an option.
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power it up by all means, but the chances of running AOS-whatever version are highly unlikely. AmigaOS requires the custom chipset to run (Exceptions being a modified version for the Drako line of computers, and AmigaOS 4 for AmigaOne) or software emulation thereof.
But who knows, you might well have a missing link system there, and even if it blows, who cares? it won't effect your amigas.
A word of warning though, don't connect anything to it that you can't readily replace or afford to loose.
Oh and good luck :-D
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Pics! We want pics! Loads of them! In a very high resolution!
Weird prototypes rule :-).
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I second that! :-)
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I think you should photograph the unit as much as possible before you power it on, then let all of us here study the photos (someone might see a potentially Amiga fatal short on the set up).
Building an 060 board wouldn't be too hard... I would say... running AmigaOS on it would be though.
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Yeap, photos please!
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Wow!, someone from NY that is above Albany - Syracuse.
Yes, please post detail pictures to the gallery. From whom did you acquire these boards?
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I'll bet it's a working Nyx :crazy:
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odin wrote:
I'll bet it's a working Nyx :crazy:
Nyx wansn't 060 :-(
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Yes, let's see what goodies you have!
:-D
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Dan wrote:
bloodline wrote:
Building an 060 board wouldn't be too hard... I would say... running AmigaOS on it would be though.
So run AROS then :-P
How did you guess? ;-)
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Geez, I didn't expect so much attention... You got to understand that I may be an Amiga devotee, I have no hardware training. The guys who had this stuff worked for a company called Atlantis, a sub of Phillips. They designed 4D sonogram hardware/software and since it was imaging they used Amigas. When they went to NT/Linux they used the Amigas as doorstops and when they sold them on in-house auction a buddy bought the tower and the desktop plus a box of stuff for $7.50 (AmaxII plus, EGS Spectrum, ethernet etc). So I got 2 CyberstormPPC cards, everything in the A4000's and what was in the box. This board, as I examine it now is designed to fit into the CPU slot on the 4000 mobo, except it clearly is too large for a desktop, so it was either a rack-mount, a tower or just a table top with no case. Larry included it because he saw it had an '060 and thought it could be a spare for the Cyberstorms. I have NO idea what will happen if I plug it in and power it up. For one thing, the daughter board rack is in the way, if you know what I mean. The front of the case is in the way so I have to detach it or bend the front down. The card itself is about 3/4 the size of the mobo with the '060, two scsi slots...one slightly broken from some jerk being impatient...two lengths also...three ram slots, don't know what kind yet....several chips from "ALTERA", some chips with hand-lettered labels. I'm pretty sure it's meant to be a single processor accelerator board. Kinda neat actually because it has every appearance of having been used. Trouble is, the engineers who made it either don't work there any more or don't know what they did with it. It's a prototype, that's all. But what would it do?? What got me hot was when I realized the holes on the board matched the pegs on the Amiga mobo. So it wasn't designed to be a whole different computer, it was designed to DO something for an Amiga. Cool, eh? I may combine some parts from my Intergraph 2000 workstations that I'm tearing apart. Scsi HD's, psu, etc. Might be fun. What's the worst that could happen? I have 3 A4000 already and two of the Intergraph boxes.... :-D
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@Will-i-am
Yeah, nice story... What about some photo's,
so we can see what you're talking about.
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Will...
We
Want
Pics
Pleeeeeaaasssseee!
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I just took a pic of the beast. Try googling Altera and take a look at what their chips do. This board has three such chips. I can't find out much about them except they are used in high res medical and military imaging boards so that fits with their use by Atlantis. Now I have to figure out how to upload the pic. This is fun!
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I have no idea if the pic made it. I resized it and so forth but if it's anywhere it's in the misc amiga photos. If it doesn't make it up, I'll try again. kinda hard to see much and my camera card seems to be failing unless the batteries are down. sigh. sometimes I prefer lo-tech.
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Yup, got it just fine.
I moved it to Assorted Hardware.
Everyone can take a gander at it here (http://www.amiga.org/gallery/index.php?n=827=38).
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@Will
Send the pics to www.amiga-hardware.com.. I´m sure Ian would appreciate them.. :-)
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Hi,
for me it looks like an 68060 accelerator card with on-board SCSI-controller and three 72-pin simm sockets.
Are you shure it is a prototype ?
The professional look and the label with the barcode suggests me that it is a comercial product. If it was mine, I would plug it into the CPU-socket of an A4000 (remove the motherboard from the case if it doesn't fit) and look if it runs.
Are you shure it is for an A4000 ? It looks as it might fit perfect into an A3000T.
Noster
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That indeed doesn't look like someone's bedroom hobby-prototype. Any chance on getting close-ups of the chips?
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really, really interesting, indeed :-)
one of the socket, seems a 50 pin SCSI but the other one?!?
A better closeup pics, could help to understand something better.
You have a little rare jewel, you know?
Bye
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@ Framiga
Is it SCSI and IDE?
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With the design of the board it would fit perfectally in a 4000T. Maybe this is the Board used in that company who produced the 4000T with the 060 installed in factory???A4000T- the new QuikPak version W/ 060
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QuickPak 060 board (http://www.amiga-hardware.com/quik4060.html)?
It *does* have Altera chips on it, perhaps the board in question is indeed a prototype for the QP card?
Notice how the '3rd' Altera chip is missing (though there is space for it on the QP board) together with the 'IDE/SCSI' (?) headers (again, there is space for a header on the QP board).
The board layouts seem radically different from each other though :-?.
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Makes sence to me .
Looks too professional for a homebrew product..
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Glad you folks know about some of this. First off, I'm an idiot and I can blame it on the pain meds I'm on. Neurontin is great for nerve pain but screws up your memory and thinking. One of those "scsi" ports I looked at is obviously the floppy port. I don't know why I couldn't see it. The short one with the broken corner. I never said it was a "homebrew" product. Atlantis sold all of their Amigas and one guy at Softhut told me when I first got mine that he had purchased one, he recognized the description...the Amiga, not the board, I seem to have the only one of these....that there was so much hacking done to the software onboard that he just formatted the thing and reloaded it all. I did that to the desktop model but kept the Tower intact, just replaced the startup. This was a board built by a company designing both software and hardware for high end medical/military imaging. Their main product seems to have been a moving sonogram image (hence 4D). I have a bunch of their presentation files onboard and have looked at them. Pretty cool images on the inside of someone's body. As far as I know they had no A3000s. The tower I got had an ethernet card, egs spectrum, amaxII+, a CyberstormPPC/060 and about every kind of animation-image software you'd ever want. It was obviously installed in a multi-platform network as a lot of the files pointed to Macs and unix or Linux machines in the LAN. This card was in the box of various spare parts and my buddy told me that it was just part of the package that he bought. He's mostly into music and photography and MGs but he screwed around for a couple of months, didn't really "get" the Amiga stuff and shipped both the A4000s and the box of spare parts to me. I never really looked at the board because I didn't need the "spare" '060 onboard and it obviously wouldn't squeeze into the desktop, which is what I was using. I was preoccupied trying to install a CD drive into the tower and getting OS 3.9 to work. I would call it a prototype or a one-of-a-kind board because they made the thing. I don't know if they ever expected to market to their core clients or if it was used to process images for their presentations. Altera makes some pretty powerful chips as I found when I checked out their website, although I can't find out anything about these particular chips. The chips have the following numbers on them, in case anybody else wants to sniff around. I'm sure it's no "top secret" deal, just sort of a mystery: EPX7800C132-10. There are no empty sockets, maybe the pics were badly lit. Three of these Altera chips, one '060, a scsi (I think) port and a floppy port. Three 72 pin ram slots... it definately fits the CPU slot on my A4KD, but I haven't yet opened up my tower to see how well it would fit there. My buddy told me that some of the prototyping was done on table tops so maybe the thing never actually was in a box, but it obviously was being used as the corner of the floppy port was broken off when the cable was removed. My immediate thought when I looked at it last night was that it was possiby a single processor version of the Cyberstorm/Cybervision pair. ya know, make one board do what two boards were doing? Something like that. So, yeah, I will figure out if it fits into the tower and pop it in to see what os 3.9 thinks of it. If it fires up and seems to work I will run some software thru it and see how fast it is. Anybody feels like offering some suggestions, I'd be happy to listen, but it would be helpful if anybody could walk me thru how to make the damn thing talk to my cable modem because so far none of my Amigas have gotten thru the router. All my stuff comes down into this funky Sony Vaio and then sneakernetted to the Amigas. When the CD works I am able to move large files over to the tower. I have an Ami-2-PC cable and software as well as a 4065 card in the tower. Maybe this should be in the "hardware forum"?
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@ Will:
http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2000/01/10/story5.html
The link hints that ATL used an Amiga in one of their ultrasound machines.
Unforunately ATL merged with Philips and I can't find any references to Amiga hardware in Philips products.
If you find any Philips or ATL software on the drive, you'll know it was part of an ultrasound setup from ATL.
Also, Philips was fond of Motorola-based hardware in other systems. For example our (now ageing) Philips CT scanner in JHB had an 020 on board that just handled the transfer of slice info.
I'm willing to bet that this dude is behind it (long shot), but read his resume...
http://www.nebulasoftware.com/Pages/Resume.htm
If he didn't do the software, I'm sure he knows who did.
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@Will-i-am:
Could you perhaps count the pins on the SCSI-ish and Floppy-ish connectors?
And tell us what is written on the small lables in the corner? Someone might recognize something, you never know..
From the picture i counted 60 pins on the larger one, and 48 or 50 on the smaller one (please confirm). This suggests that there might have been some sort of daughter-board plugging in there, or perhaps they are debug-connectors.
As for the Altera chips, they are IIRC programmable logic chips, often used in prototypes and amiga hardware, since it is cheaper than manufacturing custom chips in small quantities. They probably serve as 'glue-logic' between the A4000 motherboard and this board.
-Paul
P.S: It seems to be four 72-pin SIMM sockets there.
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Yeah, ATL stands for atlantis or some such thing. I have tons of Atlantis files in the HD. I suppose my buddy knows the whole story behind the company...ultrasound, not sonograms, that's sounds familiar. The movie files are babies inside. Larry is some kind of an engineer but I forget what kind. I always think of him as "Mr. Wizard" because he can reel off facts on cars, music, cameras, old bits and pieces of just about everything. The kind of guy who would buy two packed Amigas and then give them away to someone who would love them. Trouble is he didn't work in that area of the business. He just noticed the Amigas going up for sale. I expected them to be cleaned up so I was happy to get Scala and DP IV and a few other progs I didn't already have. I should stop speculating and fire up the tower and read more of the files. Most of their proprietary software is gone so I only have the videos and some hints based on the startup how their LAN was working. The board is marked "ATL s/n 00M4J2" under the bar code. The small floppy-ish port has 50 pins. The larger one has 60 pins. The small hand-marked chips are about 1/2 inch across.. one is "1934- 01 LL 7DF5 L18" the other two are similar numbers.. not much help. Two have maybe 7 pins to a side, the third seems to have 7 on two sides and 9 on the other two. There's a dinky socketed chip maybe 1/4 inch, 5 pins on a side, marked simply "7C F8" The ram slots have some chips soldered on the back and there are a few resistors or something soldered across points on the back as well. Nothing spooky or anything. When I first looked at it I thought it was a regular A4000 mobo, so cool I had a spare but then I saw that there was no place for the daughter board and the length was wrong. You guys having fun yet? This weekend I think I'll open the tower and replace the Cyberstorm with this thing and see what happens. I have ram for the slots and a spare HD or two....Oooooo the mysterious computer. When I was a kid I used to fantasize about something like this, ya know, a radio that talks to Mars or something. :-P
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and I finally tracked down a note from Larry about the mystery board:
"Bill, today I mailed the Amiga Mouse I was using, an adaptor that I was using to connect a Windows type PC keyboard the Tower, the video adapter so you can hook up a VGA monitor to the tower and the ATL designed CPU PCB that was in the tower before I put in the Cyberstorm PCB. You can use it instead of the Cyberstorm PCB as long as you don't have to run any software that requires the Power PC. The clock speed of its 68060 processor is 50MHz and I think the IDE connector works as well. We never used the IDE interface on the product we sold, we used the SCSI HD interface instead. It should arrive by Wednesday and there are no packing beads in the box, just lots of wrapping paper.
As I remember, the A4000T motherboard was the final version made by Commadore. It was the top of the line. I believe it will handle Zorro II and Zorro III type PCBs. The ATL CPU PCB was designed around the GVP design. In fact it identifies as a GVP PCB on bootup. I think we purchased the design rights so we could make our own version. It will handle 16Mbyte and smaller RAM, so its maximum is 64Mbytes. Some place at work I have a real A4000T CPU PCB. I will try to find it and send it along as well."
So that's all the information he sent me. Kinda interesting, do you think? So I can reasonably replace the Cyberstorm in the tower with this other board and put the Cyberstorm into my desktop which is currently using a Gforce '040. That means the Gforce board is either a spare or I could sell it used. Maybe. I still need to replace my psu from the A4KD that blew out. Somebody said a standard AT PSU should work. I want to towerize one of my A2000 or the spare A4000 with the blown PSU. So many options.
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ATL stands for "Advanced Technologies Laboratories" and Atlantis was a group within the company that built Ultrasound devices (model HDI-1000) out of Amiga 4000's. (I know, I worked there before they were bought by Phillips Medical.) They are still right down the street from me.
When I was working there they had their machines powered by custom built 060 boards for the 4000's. That picture is one of them. Underneath the ultrasound software you see on an HDI-1000 Workbench 3.1 (at the time) was running alive and well. Their keyboards have been redesigned to make finding the Amiga keys along with the "real" ctrl key difficult. But Should you figure out the key set, you can control it just like any other Amiga and get the mouse pointer to let you scroll the screen down and go to Workbench.
They were working on an custom in house PPC card to make their HDI-1000's faster when I quit (bad bad management) and it was apparently using tech licensed from Phase5. (I can't confirm that one though) I do know that ATL and the Atlantis group built their A4000 motherboards in house and had Commodores approval to even make the custom chips. When I was there they were having to do talks with Gateway when they bought the Amiga IP to make sure they would be in the free and clear to continue their business with it.
I was wondering when I would see one of those cards show up after one of the company "garage sale". I don't know if you will be able to get it to work or work well. I think they had a custom 060 library that you would have to swipe off one of the ultrasound machines. Anybody know a doctor?
(Oh yeah, they had a custom daughterboard for special DSP's for the ultrasound equipment that looked like nothing else out there. A huge thing that only fits inside an Ultrasound machine)
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Well, I'll be jiggered. Any chance you knew a guy named Larry Meek? He lives in Everett now, which is real ironic since we lived together in Phoenix and prior to that I spent a year in the Seattle/Everett area. I went to high school in Everett when my dad was surveying the 747 plant. Sooo yer saying this board might not work? Larry indicated in his note that it was usable when he swapped a Cyberstorm into it. Could be fun.
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Can't say for sure now if I knew him. This was in 1998 and I had a pretty bad taste in my mouth from that place when I quit so I have pretty much put it all behind me. If I remember right the board will probably boot up but have serious stability issues. However, don't hold me to that because I was testing all kinds of "unknown" hardware of theirs when I was there to find out what worked and what didn't. Litterally dozens of different 060 boards, 040's and 030's from A4000's both original and towers. Nobody seemed to know what worked and what didn't as it was all just stacked in giant drawers, on static free workbenches, and in closets.(There were stacks of A4000(d)'s in closets like people wouldn't believe!) I do recall it being indicated to me though that their boards needed their special 060 and 040 libs to run right though but this could have been specifically for debug purposes. Nothing you can do but plug her in and see what happens though! :-D I hope it works! I always wanted one for my A4k at home when I worked there. (No chance it would fit in a desktop though unmodified.)
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Well, that's how Larry described the place. One of the desktops was being used as a doorstop. He wrote me and asked me if I could use a Cyberstorm which was just hanging around as a paperweight. When I got all excited he proceeded to obtain the whole mess of stuff, including the '060. He's a hell of a nice guy and real good with fixing things. Came up here for a visit and immediately figured out why the BMW my daughter was fixing up didn't start. But if I fire this '060 up and it works, assuming the tower can run it...and that's where it was so I suppose it will, would you have any idea if os 3.9 will like it? It was running, I think, 3.1 when I got it. I started thinking about Linux and loaded that onto an old Sony Vaio and then thought maybe a dual boot tower would be fun...just horsing around. I know there were weirdnesses with the '060 libs when I was working on the Cyberstorm but I believe there were "special" libs in some of the netboot discs that came with it. Larry said the boys that used these things did a lot of customizing but figured I could always just replace the HD and start fresh. That's what I did with the desktop.
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I have no idea if 3.9 would run on it, but if it boots and runs fine under 3.1 its certainly worth the shot. When I was working there only 3.1 was out. There was certainly a lot of seriously custom hardware there. I wish I could have seen the end results of their PPC based systems. Oh well. Wonder they have any of that hardware still hanging around in that place? I'd love to get another A4000 again. I hope it works out for you.
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fantastic thread :-)
It's incredible how many Amigas are around in some basements and we are bidding-purchasing A4000s and CS at shameless prices!?!
Thanks to both for the rare and usefull infos :-)
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@ Will
Can you get more of those boards? I am also curious as to what other custom hardware ATL had. Can you get more info?
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Well, see, here's the thing with me. My boy, currently 29 yrs old, was tossed thru a windshield four years ago at 30 mph. We got him from AZ to here upstate NY and he's in a brain injury facility, mostly unresponsive, about 100 miles south. I was trying to be self-employed as a cadd guy at the time because my back is degenerating and I can't work full time. Larry is a life-long buddy, bounced Jon on his knee and all that. Comes up from WA for Thanksgiving, helps me whenever he can...gave me these Amigas to play with...Hell of a nice guy. If there is anything there that would make my day a little brighter you can bet he'll send it up. I wrote him just now telling him how much fun I'm having with these machines and this board and he'll look around and see if maybe there might be something for me. So if he does I will certainly let you folks know! In the mean time, I was wondering if somebody here might point me to some information I need on connecting a 4065 ethernet card in an A4K running os 3.9 to a cable modem thru a router. That's where I've bottomed out. I haven't been able to get the BB1 or 2 downloaded, I'm trying to deal with a lot of pain from my back injuries, taking pills that make you stupid and clumsy....and this is my retreat, if you will, from an otherwise kinda crappy life. Not looking for any sympathy, mind you, but just so you know that I am an artist, a sculptor who fell in love with the Amiga and I'd like to do things with it because there just isn't any machine I have ever worked on that had such great potential. I am not trained in computers. I buy the books, I have a "rom kernel manual" and all that, for what it's worth. I even got my wife to change into a computer programmer from a microbiologist but she works in Windoze and has no interest in Amigas except to play games.... So I'll share whatever information I get and it would be great if someone who knows how to solve this modem problem could drop me a line and kinda walk me thru it, bearing in mind that I am a novice. How's that? Hell, I'd be willing to trade a Toaster off in exchange for getting my tower hooked up to the web! It's that important to me.
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well crap oh dear. My budy Larry came to spend Thanksgiving with us all and I figured he would help with this project and wouldn't it be nice to be able to tell y'll about how this board works. Larry said it was installed and working when he bought them. Well, This Monday morning Larry collapsed in our bathroom while shaving. We took him to the ER gasping for breath and with a heart just flittering all over the place. About an hour later he died. My best friend, the guy who would listen for hours and help you figure out any problem you had, personal and mechanical... is gone. So I got two machines working and was going to show him, but now I can't and now I don't know if he could have helped me get one of them to work with this card. I guess I'll figure it out myself. Be well, all, and if you guys are overweight and not paying attention, let me tell you: gasping for breath on the bathroom floor, pissing your pants and trying to talk is a real lousy way to go and real lousy thing to put your friends through. Try harder to be good to yourself.
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Dude, I am really sorry to hear about that....
Loosing your best friend sucks the big one..
I hope your son make a good recovery after all this
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@Will-i-am
My condolences to you, your family and Larry's family.
Take care.
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@JetFireDX
Dude! I wonder if we can get some Amiga gear from this place for cheap? ATL Ultrasound. I am local, in Tacoma, WA. :)
@Will-i-am
Sorry to hear about your friend. He sounded like a great person to know. :(
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@ Will-I-am
Sorry to hear that, dude! :-(
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@will-i-am
When I saw your post, I didn't know what to say... loosing your friend is one thing, but seeing him pass away in such a state is something I never could have handled.
Sorry to hear about your loss, condolances from Norway to you...
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@Will-i-am
What can you even say? That is simply tragic. My sincere condolences :-(
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@Will-i-am
Hang in there. Chin up. Life goes on.
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@Will-i-am
I offer my sincerest condolences to you and all involved, I hope everybody gets through this ok.
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I would also like to add my sincere condolences...
been there....
My old friend was also an Amiga expert who was almost single handedly responsible for starting and maintaining a large and very active Amiga community in the Western NY and Toronto areas back in the mid 1980's and early 90's. I bought one of my first Amigas from him when they first came out. I still have and treasure it (and still use it, old as it is....it's never failed.)
I moved away back in 1996 to take a job in Japan. I went back on vacation to visit relatives (and him) some years later. I called his old office and was greeted with the oddest silence on the other end before they finally realized who I was. It turned out he had passed away about 8 months before, and no one had told me.
If you have an old friend you haven't called in a while, do it now....you never know....
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Dear William,
no one will be able to replace your friend but, when you will be ready, we (here at AOrg) will proud to help you or at least to attemp to.
All my best
Franco
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Well, back home from Phoenix and delivering Larry's ashes. I'm surounded by all these lovely computers just waiting for "Mr. Wizard" to figure out what I'm doing wrong. My chronic back pain and my son being in such a state and all the meds I take make it hard to think clearly most of the time and Larry could poke around, find a solution and explain it so clearly to me that even through the meds I could repeat it. Folks, seriously.... it means a great deal to me that you were so kind in your posts. I'm nobody to you, just another crazy Miggy devotee and you reached out. I have the philosophy that kindness binds the earth together. I'll plug away and let you know if something interesting happens on this beast here sitting on my desk mocking me..."No Larry to bail you out, eh?" That's okay. Larry said the damn thing should boot and by golly if I am careful and remember to document what I did to what I should be able to figure why it just sits there. Bottom line: it's just another way to make an Amiga run better, so if I am forced to manage with my Cyberstorm, I suppose I can do that too. Unless it's that jumper pin I moved....when did I do that? Where did I put it? What the heck is that pile of hard drives doing over on that shelf??? Why couldn't Larry have lasted another few days? Or maybe many decades...? damn.
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@Will-i-am,
Sorry to hear about your friend, I kinda know what you`re going through (Gran passed away a couple of weeks back).
One thing I`ve learnt, the more you think about them, the easier it gets. I know it sounds wierd, but it helped me a lot, especially thinking about the stupid/little things from over the years, it just brings a smile to my face and makes me glad I was part of her life.
Anyway, about that A4000..there`s no such thing as a stupid question, so don`t be afraid to ask.
It`s often something infuriatingly simple, such as when Xray`s A4000 became unstable, it turned out the plastic spacers under the CPU card were the wrong length for that card !
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Sorry to hear about your friend. He seemed one of kind and most likely you will never have such a friend again. Never try to forget him, it just won´t work. Try to remember as many good things as possible and thank him for having made your life richer ...
As for Amiga.org, this is totally different then pc boards, we are all not only devoted to the Amiga itself but also to the community. This forum is here to help eachother and not only at soft and hardware but in this case also emotionally. When you see so many time ´sorry to hear about your friend´ then these guys mean it !!
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The ATL CPU PCB was designed around the GVP design. In fact it identifies as a GVP PCB on bootup. I think we purchased the design rights so we could make our own version. It will handle 16Mbyte and smaller RAM, so its maximum is 64Mbytes. Some place at work I have a real A4000T CPU PCB. I will try to find it and send it along as well."
this is a good clue to start.
If it was designed around the GVP design, it could be T-Rex-II (GVP 4060) compliant.
http://www.amiga-hardware.com/gvp4060.html
http://www.gregdonner.org/gvp4060/gvp4060.html
Bye
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Again, thanks so much everybody for the kind words. One of the way I am working through my loss is to reinstall the '060 card and see what I can do to fire it up. It occurs to me that when Larry installed the Cyberstorm he would have installed the software for it first, and probably the '060 libraries vary from the original libraries running the '060 card. That being said, knowing Larry...very patient, very orderly thinker... he would have backed up the libraries and other files. Now we just have to hope that they weren't hacked libraries in case in a fit of youthful enthusiasm I lost the files by installing OS 3.9. I think I put the original HD aside for that very reason but my meds make my memory unreliable, so as I begin the reconstruction process I guess I better start by writing everything down. Seems obvious, but try to remember that I am by inclination a sculptor and Larry was the Alpha Geek! I do rocks and clay and wood very nicely. I just happen to have fallen in love with the Amiga when I first saw the juggler on a 500!
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Will-i-am : it´s not what education you have or what work you do or not, it´s how you use your skills to get the most out of your Amiga´s (in this case). At Amiga it´s all about teaching yourself because it´s hard to use an Amiga when you have done a Windows crash course. So don´t think a rocket scientist will have it much easier than you. Most rocket scientist will never have a friend like Larry :-)
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@Will-i-am.
You don`t really need the '060 library to check if the Cyberstorm card works.
On boot, get the early startup menu by pressing both mouse buttons, and select 'boot with no startup sequence'.
That`ll stop setpatch trying to load the 68060.library and you should be able to copy the correct libs over from a floppy.
The latest libs are available at vapor`s ftp site here (http://ftp://ftp.meanmachine.ch/pub/phase5/060/68060-191099.lha)
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"You don`t really need the '060 library to check if the Cyberstorm card works."
I know the Cyberstorm works...it's installed in the tower as we speak. It's the '060 card I'm talking about. Larry took it out of the tower to make sure the Cyberstorm worked and once he knew it did he left it there for me. Probably figured the dual processor was better than just the '060 on a one-of-a-kind card. My concern, for what it's worth, was just that the Cyberstorm needs to have it's software installed before you place the card, according to the instructions. If the people at ATL had made special '060 libraries to run their funny card, the Cybertsorm might have overwritten those files. I'm hoping/betting that Larry backed up the appropriate files before installing the Cyberstorm software. For me the problem now is figuring out which of the various HDs he sent me is the original which booted the '060 card. I'm 99% sure there's an issue with the libraries because when I swapped the '060 back into the tower nothing happened...no boot, no lights, nothing AND on the 3.1 install disk that came with the beast there's a piece of masking tape with a mention of the '060 libraries, as if to point out a modified install floppy different from the other install floppies. For one reason or another some of these disks have CRC errors and/or bad blocks. I have to assemble a good deck of disks which will get the '060 card running. There might also be a problem with HD ports etc. Larry sent me the card with a note saying if nothing else I could use the '060 chip as a spare for the Cyberstorm!
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Okay people, I finally got hold of the right Philips engineer, the guy who knows about the ATL machines (here in the UK).
Anyway, it is not good news. Apparently all the units in operation at the moment were either converted to Winblows or have been redesigned for Winblows (or NT or whatever). When I asked him what happened to the Amiga boards and the Amiga hardware, he told me that Philips sends all their defunct or obsolete hardware to an enviromentally-friendly recycling plant where they are 'melted'.
I felt like saying :furious: but I told him that there would definitely be people who would buy those boards (I'm sure we could buy them for under £50). But he said Philips would not be interested in such a 'small' market. So they won't sell to us but will instead have them recycled :-?
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Well, that sounds about right for a multi-national corporation. Here's more bad/good news: the tower is blazing merrily along on this '060 card. The only trouble I have with it now is the number of my favorite programs which break under os 3.9. The card itself, once you locate the right '060 libraries, is just fine. So I have the Cyberstorm running in the desktop A4000 and the Beast with it's one-of-a-kind (apparently) '060 card. This reminds me of the time I saw several Intergraph CADD workstations in the dumpster behind my office at Dept. of Transportation (NY) They had their 18x20 digitising tablets, 15 button mice, 19" monitors... and dual processor cpus. I dragged two out of the dumpster and took them home to discover that not only did they work just fine, they had all their software intact, except for data files! That means enough civil engineering stuff to design an entire highway system. But they were running under unix and Intergraph had stopped supporting unix, so DOT dumpped their machines. The next day they had noticed that someone had salvaged two machines so they had the rest of them up on pallets with miles of shrink wrappping to make sure nobody else got any use of them. They were going to be crushed and buried!! The Law wouldn't even allow them to be given away to local schools, even if wiped of their software. I still have them, and my good old pal Larry even came thru on that one. I told him that the hardware was all propriatory so I could not use the extra monitor I had with my amigas. When he visited this last time, the time he collapsed and died on us... he had brought me the adaptor that would allow me to connect the monitor to a PC. It was a several hundred dollar thingy that someone at the office was throwing out. I guess Philips had one of those unix workstations and did the same thing DOT did. Go figure.