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Offline A4kT

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Re: Newly Adopted: A4000T
« on: November 24, 2008, 03:28:32 AM »
I'm the guy who "donated" it. I spent the entire preceeding 24 hours bringing it back to life prior to OSS542s arrival live the Grim reaper :-o . That A4000T was my savour in Japan during my first few years here and for quite a while afterwards. For about 5 years a monthly magazine for a Japan-foreigner social club- OSS542 was a valued member from inception.
Over time I upgraded the A4000T to CyberStorm MKII, 16mb on the MB, 128 on the CS MKII, a RetinaBLTZ3 graphics card with auto switcher (Retina overclocked to 40Mhz) (very rare now), 1.76mb floppy, IOBlix with an extra PAR port chip). CyberGraphiX4, TurboPrint 7. PFS3 (Professional File System) the latter allowed me to add two IBM 9 gig UWSCSI drives. I also replace the stock onboard battery with a commonly available 2032 coin battery.
Not content with all that I made a driver to allow me to connect a Buffalo SmartMedia/CompactFlash card reader which allowed formatting and installing OS3.1 on a bootable 4mb card  :-D
All of the above elevated this machine to workstation status. But due to the nature of my work - phonetics for Japanese - the day came when the A4kT just could not deliver the goods but I DO feel sad that my best friend for many years is now departed but happily to the nice home of OSS542 who lives not far from me in Japan. OSS542 is without a doubt, the holder of one of the largest collections of Amigas in Japan and they were very evident in the A1000 ~ A4000 production years as most Japanese TV commercials were made using them.

In readying the A4000T for the big hand over and as a smoker, I decided to clean the motherboard and CS MKII. I washed them both using a local product called "Magic Clean" - the US equivalent would be something like "Simple Green". The trick is to use hot~warm water, avoid getting too much water-cleaner near capacitors, after washing, vigorously shake excess water, rinse the washed areas with distilled water - lots of it - off and hang to dry in the open air for as long as possible in daylight hours only.
Before scoffing at washing a motherboard check this out : Wash board
In any case, the A4000T sprang back to life using the original '040 board - there seems to be a problem with the '060 MKII as it was problematic prior to any washing.

My current 'baby' is a 2007 8 core 3ghz Mac Pro with 9 gig RAM + ATI X1900XT video card with 512mb. I run Amiga OS 3.1 in E-UAE on this beast quite a bit faster than my old A2000.

Take good care of my first baby OSS542, I miss it already.
 

Offline A4kT

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Re: Newly Adopted: A4000T
« Reply #1 on: November 24, 2008, 05:14:16 AM »
Yes, the Mac Pro will run everything I throw at it. OSS542 is jealous of my extra 4 cores. I regularly load up 700mb Photoshop PSD files (X-Plane scenery stuff) with several other progs running in the background. Best Mac ever made.

In E-UAE I mainly want PageStream 3.x to run as I have it also for Classic and OSX and use it in my work - lots more development for E-UAE to get to the printing stage but at least I can setup an OSX ~ AMIGA shared directory for passing files around for print.

I still cannot get E-UAE/ Hi Toro to recognise inserted CDs & DVD's - if you have any ideas I would appreciate hearing them.

I am getting off the topic - A4000T : In its 'fully loaded' setup it was insanely fast with Amiga apps and even OS9 emulation was sometimes faster than a real Mac and it burned Mac CDs to boot which helped me greatly in transitioning from Amiga PageStream to OS9 PageStream.

Until yesterday I had not given any thought to how noisy it was but that was only the PSU fan which can be easily replaced these days.

I forgot to add in my first reply that I replaced the stock Amiga Techologies A4000T PSU - which failed in the first  year - with a standard 400 WATT PC PSU - the only caution is to ensure that the connectors have the P6 and P8  or a single connector that includes both. Never ever had any more PSU problems after that. Lovely machine.