Help, I think I f***ed my WarpEngine, or A4000!

[Jose]

This afternoon I decided to do some upgrading to my A4000. Basically I wanted to put in a bigger scsi HD using the scsi controler of the WarpEngine (my current setup has a small IDE one). I also wanted to finally upgrade the ROMS to 3.1 and the Buster chip as I had these lying around for a long time.

I took off the resistors in the WarpEngine to use my 68 pin (connected using a 68->50 pin adaptor) cable's own terminator. I also took off the memory simm in slot 1 and VERY stupidly broke the plastic pieces that hold the simm in place :madashell: Not so drastic I guess, and I guess I can work around it. But after upgrading the ROM's the bloody thing doesn't give any sign of life. The roms are well seated, as well as the CPU card, before you ask. U175 is on the righ ROM socket. They also seem to be correctly oriented (the little hole is on side of the ROMS towards the backside of the computer). I tried putting the 3.0 ROMS again but the same happends.
Now I don't know if I {bleep}ed up the WarpEngine or the motherboard while exchanging ROMS (unlikely I think, no cracks).
I also don't have another CPU card to try.
Any suggestion appreciated, before I freak out and put it out of it's misery once and for all :madashell: Seriously though, it's frustrating. I now have the A4000 up in pieces all over the room again.

[Jose]

"First off, the Kickstart 3.1 roms will have a longer boot time than Kickstart 3.0 when no IDE devices is connected. An Amiga with a SCSI harddrive instead of an IDE drive tages ages to boot. 30 seconds isn't unusual."
I know that, I'll have to do the no IDE hack one of these days...

"Have you tried arranging everything as it was in it's initial state? Reinserting resistor packs (why you would do that is a mistery to me), Kickstart 3.0, etc."
I took off the resistor packs cause the terminator on my cable can't be disattached from it. It's actually less than initial state here, just the CPU card (even unplugged the Zorro daughter board).

"Have you gotten some speakers plugged into the audipo outputs of the A4000? If so, does it give a buzz/tone when powering on (caused by the WarpEngine)?"
No sound at all from the TV...

[Jose]

Small update. The screen is actually grey, not black (had brightness too low).

[Jose]

I think I found the problem. There seems to be some leakage near on the capacitors near the audio outputs on the motherboard. I don't know if it's actuall leakage but there's some liquid like dark formations. And white too! Not on a large area but probably enouph to do harm.

[Jose]

I think I found the problem. There seems to be some leakage near on the capacitors near the audio outputs on the motherboard. I don't know if it's actuall leakage but there's some liquid like dark formations. And white too! Not on a large area but probably enouph to do harm.

[Jose]

@Patrik
You never know how these things are going to behave. I'm sure I've waited more than 2 minutes, even waited around 5 once. I decide to give it a try and connect the floppy again. Now I'm getting a yellow screen wich is a 68000 error IIRC (let's see, red was rom error, green chip ram error, blue custom chip error.. maybe there was more...).
I've got the accelerator connected ok, so I run out of ideas again  :-)
Maybe I'll have it running by Monday ;-)

[Jose]

Yet another update. If I put a Simm in slot 1 in the WarpEngine the screen doesn't flash yellow anymore, it just stays grey.

[Jose]

Got it displaying boot screen again! After trying out various combinations of settings I discovered that with resistors back, a memory module on Simm4 and scsi disconnected it works again. It won't work without memory or with the Simm in any of the other slots. Simm4 was the one I broke BTW, I had to find a way to put it in place again using two pieces of plastic.

But wait the saga continues. Scsi won't work. Without anything connected to the scsi bus it will boot with the config I described above regardless if the jumper for scsi termination power is on or off. However if I connect my HD the screen just stays grey. I've already set the scsi confif jumpers to the lowest possible (delay, LUN scan, 200ns).

[Jose]

Has anyone managed to get one of these 7726H Acard adapters to work with a WarpEngine ? I remember some guys here had acard adapters but they were a previous slower version wich didn't support LVD. There is no jumper on the card for termination power and the manual doesn't specify if it needs it (I guess not then).
It is possible to set the IDs and RSV0, RSV1 but I don't know what those are.

How my setup is and what I've tried:
40Gb Seagate HD (ATA) connected through an Acard 7726H adapter (wich is for LVD but said to be backwards compatible). Since I was using a weird cable config (50pin connector on the WarpEngine connected to a 50 to 68 adapter connected to a 68 pin cable. The 68 cable also has a terminator on one end wich probably doesn't go to well with the WE resistors. With this cable I also tried the following config: taking off the resistors on the WE while setting termination power jumper on. Nothing, nada.

Lastly I took off the 68pin scsi cable and tried with a 50 pin one, using a 50 to 68 pin adapter on the connection to the Acard adapter (wich is 68pin). The same happends, just a grey screen.
BTW, also tried a jumper on RSV0, same result.

[Jose]

Hi. Just to tell you that I got Scsi working last night :-D
From the various combinations I tried I found the following:
- The WarpEngine won't boot if one takes off the resistors and there's no scsi devices attached to it (maybe with two terminators it would), you have to leave them on.

- The Acard 7726H doesn't seem to have termination. When I added an actively terminated CDRom to the chain using the 68 pin cable (wich has it's own terminator) everything worked fine, with or without ther resistors.

- Note that, as I said previously, when using just the resistors with the 7726H it wouldn't work!

So now I have another dillema:
For the whole thing to work I need the external CDRom to be turned on when booting to use it's terminator.
A solution would be to add a terminator when not using it, but it would be a PITA  to keep adding and taking off the terminator everytime I wanted to use the CDRom.
Maybe some daisy chain like thing, taking the 68pin external scsi connector off the last node and using yet another terminator on the last node while disabling the CDRom's terminator would be the solution ?
Has anyone tried that ?

[Jose]

@Patrik

Ahh.. much easier than I expected. I'll just get an active external 68 pin terminator.

Cheers