prototype board question

[Will-i-am]

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.

[Will-i-am]

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

[Will-i-am]

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!

[Will-i-am]

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.

[Will-i-am]

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"?

[Will-i-am]

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

[Will-i-am]

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.

[Will-i-am]

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.

[Will-i-am]

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.

[Will-i-am]

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.

[Will-i-am]

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.

[Will-i-am]

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.

[Will-i-am]

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!

[Will-i-am]

 "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!

[Will-i-am]

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.