Amiga ACA500 is awesome!

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I have an NTSC Rev 5 and it does "not" work for me. I had to find a Rev 6A board. What happens is it just locks up, can't choose anything from the power-on menu when it first appears. It would be nice if Jens could figure out what is causing this, because in the US, most boards that I see readily available are Rev 5.

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What Amiga 500 board revision do you have? Mine sees the RTC in the trap door expansion. It also says "Oki" in the menu. Your ACA500 doesn't see the trapdoor RAM at all, maybe that is the issue. Mine shows 512 Kb in the menu for "Trapdoor slow ..." Do you have the trapdoor RAM switch turned off maybe? Most have a switch on them to turn off the trapdoor expansion.  Regarding the RTC, your battery might be dead as well, they only last 3-5 years I believe, unless you have a battery that isn't soldered in and replaced it recently.

Update: Oh wait, you state you think it's Rev 6 above. I would pop the top and look myself, you only need to lift up the right lower corner of the RF shield to see after removing the keyboard.

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You can turn that off I believe with a menu option. I believe it is set by default to "not" use your on-board Kickstart.

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Yeah, it would be nice to know more about all these options. They are very vague to me.

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Yeah, I checked that earlier as well.

What is strange is mine says "MapRom off". But yet it still says copying rom to ram when I boot to WB 1.3

I'm confused as well about these settings. I really haven't paid that close attention to mine. My main purpose for getting one was just to transfer ADFs to floppy. Works good for that

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That is weird. Question for you is, do you see all 2MB of your FAST RAM with MapROM off? Do you have KS 1.3 in ROM on your machine?

I have a real 1.3 Kickstart installed. I'm still missing 512k.

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So it is happening to you too?!?

That's actually good news. Maybe it is just a matter of finding the right configuration settings. So you also have the latest firmware (0.99)?

Right v.99. I was just thinking my missing 512k was due to Kickstart being copied to ram, which it probably is. When I use my Amiga Analyzer disk I can see the 512k expansion ram separately from the ram provided by the ACA500.

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Well, I played around with the settings and changed my profile #1. Here is what I selected:

Add other on-board RAM On
1M Chip RAM expansion On

Now I see this:

1528k Fast Memory
511k   ACA500 Fast Memory
1029k  Chip Memory

I believe this accounts for what I have installed in mine, 512k + 512k trap door and the 2 M in the ACA500.

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I'm still rather new to the Amiga, so all this Chip RAM/Fast RAM stuff is still confusing to me.

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Right, what I mean by "see" is that I'm using the Amiga Analyzer disk and listing the memory configuration.  What I typed was straight from the output of the Analyzer screen.

When I boot to WB 1.3 it shows 2.9+ M at the top of the screen.

I believe that my configuration choices have made my 512k trap door expansion look as if it was chip memory. I found a simliar post about it on the website:

"this maps a Rev. 6 (and up) A500's 512K expansion to chipmem, instantly upgrading it to 1MB chipmem!"

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2.9MB? Then that would appear to be working for you. I am only getting 2.4MB total under WB 1.3. This is a WB 1.3.3 boot floppy, mind you. Not running anything on top of that to eat up FAST RAM.

Do you actually see something greater than 1536k FAST RAM in your ACA500 system information screen?

No, in my "System Information" screen it shows:

Chip RAM: 512k
Trap door slow: 512k
ACA500 on-board Fast RAM: 1536k
1M Chip RAM expansion option available

I made the changes and saved them as profile #1.

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It is still strange that system info reports 1536k RAM, but if your total memory available under WB1.3 is 2.9MB, then you obviously have 2MB FAST being recognized where it counts.

Another thing you can do is open a Shell in WB 1.3, enter "cd c" then type "avail". That will show us how the ram is configured from the Workbench point of view.

 

Code: [Select]

Type     Available     Maximum     Largest
 chip       955384         1047520   955288
fast  1960256       2089208  1526792
 total     2915640      3136728        1526792 I'm running WB 1.3.3 as well. I thought I understood how this thing worked until I started looking more into it after you posted your issue.

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Yeah, your system is seeing the entire 2MB FAST RAM just fine. In this case, I would just ignore what your system configuration is reporting.

Attached is what my "avail" command shows me.

By the way, I've tried both Kickstart 1.3 options from the boot menu. What option did you pick?

 Before I started changing things here, I used the menu option for either 1.3 or 3.1. But now I saved my changes as profile #1 and I use that selection now to boot into my WB 1.3

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You could open a ticket on icomp.de and see if they could provide a reason/fix. I didn't know you could do that until recently on a mailing list for Turbo Chameleon 64.

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Yeah, I think they want you to hit up your re-seller first of course.

I guess one benefit of posting on that other board (EAB) is that Jens actually posts there