yikes!! serious amiga 2500 & video toaster 2.0 issues.

[paup]

hello amiga friends,

i'm really excited to be on here and EXCITED to own an Amiga.  i finally tracked down an amiga 2500 with a video toaster 2.0 in great condition.  i got it up and running and wound up with some serious issues not addressed in any troubleshooting documentation.  at first all was fine and dandy… i'd say for 8-9 boots, (aside from some weird signal strength issues that made no sense considering i'm using TBCs), and then something curious would happen.  I'd be a couple of minutes in to switching or color processing a simple setup…. one video camera on input one, a preview out and a program out (the three monitor setup)… then upon switching between two channels with the fader (t-bar) or upon rendering an effect in the color processing section……. the amiga UI would go absolutely berserk, the program out would lose synch and go crazy and then upon pressing return sometimes it would go back to normal… only to do it again a minute later.  by returning back to normal i mean the amiga screen would look fine but my program out would have a slightly scrambled feed of input 1 with the video toaster UI posterized/juxtaposed over top of it.  major bummer.  if I could manage to close out of the toaster upon opening it back up the program out would still be messed up.  reboot would temporarily fix everything.  

and video!!!!!
http://youtu.be/IB2TK_2Y4XQ

i tried adjusting the frequency pot to no avail (that just made it harder to successfully load the video toaster UI)

haunting side note… i just had the computer freeze on a greyscreen (i only use the monochrome out for my monitor… could be blue) after trying to open something simple like notepad.  this looks bad. hmmmm.

what would you attack first?  buy another video toaster board, swap it out and see if i still have the same troubles?  or replace a processor or something?  not sure where to go from here… but i won't stop til she is in tip top shape.  so much fun…

hey, thanks everybody, thanks for reading, :pint:
take care,
drew

[paup]

@AmigaClassicRule
....it's funny you mention it but i break video for a living.  http://circuitbentvideo.com  typically i get very excited when this happens.

@QuikSanz
.....thank you, I will make that my weekend project.  I'll let you know how things go.

[paup]

ehhhh.... i opened 'er up, took the toaster out, disassembled it and put it back together, cleaning as i went along my way.  no luck.

it appears to have deeper issues... if I just leave it on the workbench for 3-10 minutes some times it will just go to a blank screen (once again, no color monitor to figure out what color it actually is).

i didn't notice this until today but my hard drive only has 722k free (on a 50mb drive) which seems curious being that not much is on it... well, i guess video toaster is huge, but still, can't find much to get rid of..
i'm also confused as to why my RAM disk appears to say 100% full, 0k free, 15k in use. at least i think that is what it says, my monitor situation is poor... i just won a 1084s so that should help make things more decipherable.

thanks everybody for your time,
cheers

[paup]

thanks  Matt for the RAM and HD reassurance, very helpful.  I removed the battery as a preventative measure as well, it still was intact.

Quiksanz.... excellent suggestion.  Upon removing the toaster the 2500 had no issues.  It ran smoothly at extended lengths with no crashes. Nice to know it's the toaster at least.  There are no visual signs of ruptured caps or anything.

Perhaps I will keep my eyes on ebay for another one to test against this one.  Let me know if anybody thinks of anything else to try.  Once again, thanks for all your help.
Cheers.

[paup]

what a great company!!
i will give them a call for sure.  you know they're going to roll their eyes as soon as i say "video toaster."  hahaha

[paup]

oh man....
the post is back!!!!  still chasing ghosts.....

to summarize: amiga 2500 w a video toaster 2000, had intense graphical glitch-ing after running the video toaster program for a very short period of time.  determined it seemed to be the toaster because the amiga worked smoothly without it installed...

so i managed to nab another video toaster off of ebay (for way too much money, ugh) and i've been getting even worse results with this one.  opened video toaster and right off the bat after attempting a fade between two channels (with no sources) bam... same graphical glitches.  I booted back up and went to run video toaster again and it seemed to crash and freeze the whole system. such a bummer.  left it alone for a hill and got back in to toaster... but that did not last long.

Am I at the point of replacing chips and components?  It could be anything at this point right?  *Sigh* I might put 'er up for adoption, I'm just not sure I have the skills to pay the bills on this one.  There are other cards installed on this thing and I have no idea what most of them do... could they be creating conflicts?  Running out of ideas.

You guys have been really great, thanks in advance...