Next you'll be telling me you used 100% tin solder instead of 60/40 tin/lead with a decent flux   If anyone cares, I'd recommend one of the Kester leaded solders with 3.3% 245 no-clean flux, which is a great all-rounder for this type of work.

If you're trying to solder to heavily oxidised IC leads, I'm not surprised there are so many soldering issues.  You can do the solder wick thing, or a much faster/easier way is a couple of wipes with a fibreglass scratch brush to expose a clean surface, then brush IC leads and PCB solder pads with a no-clean liquid flux pen immediately before soldering. 

No, I'm using good old 60/40 and chip quick flux, everything looks great now with a good clean and re-tin. That done, I've been making good progress replaced the faulty U450 and display output is now perfect.

Started installing Workbench and was successful, but getting lots of intermittent crashes and 8000 0004 guru errors, mainly when there was activity on the IDE interface. The machine was somewhat temperamental with which SD / CF cards would work, it was more reliable using a mechanical HDD but still not happy.

Did some research and the only thing I hadn't done was change the Kickstart ROMs so I burned some fresh ones and all the problems went away, the board is now totally stable.

So the next problem was getting the BFG working. With the scope I could see some activity on the data bus, but the power led would never change state. Verified the onboard boot ROM was correct, and re-programmed the CPLDs over JTAG, still no change and wouldn't boot even in DiagROM.

Went back to the 030 and played around with it for a while, running great with no issues, then went back to troubleshooting the BFG. I suddenly noticed that one of the CPLDs was getting very hot, connected it up standalone without a CPU to the bench PSU and both CPLDs could be seen over JTAG but the board was drawing far too much current. Rather unusual as the CPLD's were both still programming/verifying. Replaced the CPLD that was getting hot, reprogrammed everything and the BFG is now working perfectly.

Have also been working on the PSU issue - I was originally using a modern SFX PSU and it would occasionally "chirp" on start-up and go into oscillation. Swapped over to an old AT PSU and everything was happy.

The SFX PSU has sense leads on the 12v, 5v and 3.3v outputs which were all connected up as they should be. As it senses these three outputs, they should all be independently regulated so it could be unhappy about no load at all on the 3.3v output. A modern motherboard would draw more load on the 3.3v output than anything else so no load probably isn't a good idea. I'm going to try adding a few ballast resistors and see if that helps.

Very pleased it's now running reliably, it's been a good learning experience.

Hi Mario,

Welcome back to the forum!

Hi,

Congratulations on ordering the A1200NG!

You can plug in a USB thumb drive, and it will show up in AmiBench or your custom Workbench installation. Very handy for transferring files between computers!

When adding games, demos and applications to the built-in launcher, the easy way is to have the ADF's or WHD-Load packages on an USB thumb drive, and install them from there. They will then be copied over to the computer.

The A1200NG is a lot of fun, so I'm sure you will enjoy it when it arrives!

Hi,

Last week I ordered an A1200NG board with options at Amigakit.fr, since the website says it’s in stock. I also sent an e-mail with some questions but didn’t receive a reply or any indication of the board being shipped. I don’t have an order confirmation, just the PayPal receipt.

One of the questions I asked was if there was no option to add a CPU booster. I guess this past weekend made this question obsolete. 

Another question is if the SD card gets corrupted or damaged (or if we want to use a bigger one), will it be possible to download a recovery image or install the system on a bigger card?

Thanks.


Edit: Almost forgot… can a usb thumb drive be used to load files on a workbench installation or does it just work like a gotek? I expect the CF card to work like that but I have this doubt about usb thumb drives…

Did you read thread? They can mount drive in linux, but data is all messed up.

I was replying to your own post where you suggested using a Windows PC with WinUAE. No Linux required.