My ongoing adventures with my A2000.

[r0jaws]

@rkauer

Cheers for that, I'm happy with the 8 Megs of Fast RAM and 2 Megs of Chip RAM at the moment, the Memory master uses ZIP RAM anyway, which is a little tricky to track down, so it's useful to know that there's not much point.

The 68000 Hack, as you mentioned, will now probably end up inside a 500, if I can track one down and persuade my wife to let me have another miggy in the house.
I'd like to see it running, just out of curiosity now, and to see if I can actually get it to work.
As you have mentioned it probably isn't 'dead' just that I am unable to get it to work in my 2000.

I'm actually very happy with the 2000 as it is now. I have 2 accelerated 1200's for more strenuous tasks, but this system is a firm favorite of mine and the kids. (Mainly because I'm happy to let them play on it without having palpitations at the thought like I do with my 1200's)  :-D

[r0jaws]

@Tenacious,

Spot on Post there mate. TBH I hadn't even heard that these hacks existed, but having googled around a bit and combined with your experience I don't think I'll bother pursuing it any further.
On that basis, I shall probably pop it on Amibay (In the Recycle bin most likely) for anyone that's interested.

[shameless plug]
If you'd like it why not pop along to Amibay and have a look yourself?[/shameless plug]

BTW I'm not actually affiliated with Amibay, just happen to think its a great resource.  ;-)

EDIT: For those who haven't made it there yet, here's a linky: Amibay
You have to register and PM a Mod to get access to the Recycle Bin (Free Miggy stuff) to make sure it doesn't get abused by traders.

@WA9YOZ.

I just got off a couple of lucky shots with my rather old Goodmans G-Shot Digital Camera. It's auto focus is pretty good and can usually be relied upon (with a little help sometimes). However I do usually fire off about 3-4 shots and then pick the best of the bunch. Depending on the lighting at the time really dictates  the flash, but I find it does bring out the internals really rather well.
Sorry I couldn't be more helpful.

[r0jaws]

Right Update Time.

It's been a while but I've finally managed to make some 'real' progress with the 2000.

First things first, a BIG thank you is due to Zetro of Amibay & EAB fame, he's helped me a load so far.

The Battery has finally been removed (and in good time too as it was on the verge of disintigration!)

Zetro did a lovely job desoldering it as you can see below;



He also took the opportunity to tidy up my Agnus board Hack's tinning and sealed the connections with hot glue.



Then he sold me a SCSI CDROM that I had been pestering the poor bugger about for the last month, which I have just successfully installed this evening using IDEFix '97 (unregistered);





I'm looking forward to being able to get some games across to the system now (hopefully running under WHDLoad)

I'm awaiting a 3.1 ROM, and hopefully that install should go smoothly, as I'm currently running a nice smooth fast 2.1 install I'm not sure how 3.1 will behave on an unaccelerated system such as this.

I upgraded the 50 Meg SCSI HDD to a lovely 500 Meg HDD, Partitioned her into 3 partitions, Workbench (80Meg), Work (300 Meg) and MS DOS (120 Meg).

The final partition is to be used by the KCS Power PC Board installed to run MS DOS 5.0 under emulation.

With a few false starts I managed to get this up and running too. (the aim is to run a few DOS games and programmes in the future)

Since the installation of my CD ROM, however, the viewable area of the emulator has shrunk itself to the top half of the screen, and takes about a minute and a half to start, whereas before it took mere seconds! (some further investigation will be called for I think)





Finally, The only real fly in the ointment is an unusual error on boot up.



It doesn't present any significant problems but I do wonder why it's there.

Any ideas anyone?

[r0jaws]

You're both right it isn't needed, It's a remenant of a backed up wb 2 installation (on prepping the disc the GVP software offered to copy a disc to the new bootable partition, so I grabbed the first disc I had)

It was easily fixed by editing it out of startup-sequence.

Thanks for the prompts gents.

[r0jaws]

Cheers for the idea rkauer.

Unfortunately, that little piece of kit is now in zetros sweaty paws.

I believe he is hammering it into a 500 as we speak, I shall certainly pass that idea onto him. His further intention was to see if he could reproduce it, or something similar for a 600.
Mind you he has so many projects on the go its hard to see how he has time for other stuff, like breathing and feeding himself.  :lol:

[r0jaws]

The thought had crossed my mind, but I haven't had any compatibility problems so far. Everything seems to run OK with the newly installed 3.1 ROMs and WB 3.1
The only obvious no-no is any AGA only games, but I have a 1200 for that.
If I come across any problems with 'must have' software then I'll certainly be investigating the possibility.

Right now I'm looking at tidying up the cosmetics (painting/ dyeing the CD ROM to match) and maybe installing Windows 3.1 to the DOS partition.

I have heard of someone doing this using the KCS board, so it has intrigued me.

[r0jaws]

@ Corflot

Aha!

I did wonder, I have had a cursory nose about to see what was out there about this and didn't find a lot.

Thanks for the heads up, I shall adjust my targets accordingly  :-D

If you get a moment, piccies would be great!
I'd love to see that on a 500!

@abbub

Its a work in progress but I shall keep this updated with some hardcore Hardware pron pics when complete.

[r0jaws]

Ok, Brace yourselves, significant update time!
I've managed to get hold of 2 improvements to my baby the first being a lovely clean Keyboard courtesy of G-H from Amibay (Cheers mate)



Secondly, and also from Amibay (courtesy of McVenco) I received an a2620.



Fitting it was a little tight but not difficult.



She booted up straight away and worked brilliantly!! (Or so I thought initially)



The speed boost is modest, but significant. Doubling her clock speed, and making her run at equivalent to a standard 1200 (or 2500  :-P )



However, there was a problem. The board came with RAM fitted, and only 2 Mb of Fast RAM was displayed.
My SCSI card has 8Mb on board, I had just lost 6 Megs of RAM without trying!  :-o
Time to dig out some manuals I think!!!



Firstly I thought to disable the 2620's on board RAM using the Jumpers.
On reboot, brilliant! It worked, 8 Megs of Fast Ram back. However, Sysinfo shows a different story.



Quite a significant drop in performance, What the F has happened?

An inspection of the card led me to believe that there was 4 Mb of Zip RAM attatched, however the jumper settings were for 2 Mb.
Well if I can't have my full 8 Mb, 4 Mb will have to do until I can figure out the correct configuration.
Swap a few jumpers around and BINGO 4 Mb's Fast RAM.



Great, I think. Time to fire up Deluxe Galaga and have a blast to celebrate! :-D



Oh Sh1t.

Not only that, sysinfo chucks up loads of recoverable errors whilst checking it out.
Another look at the Zip chips, revealed that I do only have 2 Mb of RAM. The serial numbers do have 256 on them (in my defence)

Ho Hum.

Another, think and a dig out of the SCSI manual reveals that I may just have to reduce the Fast RAM on board the SCSI drive.
Dropped it down to 6 Mb and changed the Jumpers, no Joy. (wouldn't even boot from the hard disc).
Dropped even further down to 4 Mb and BLAMO!
She Rides!!!



Now I know its not perfect, and my reasoning is a bit sloppy and slapdash. But it is late & I have had half a bottle of wine.  ;-)

However, that said, my 2000 is now running at double her original speed and I have 6 MB of Fast RAM and I still have my 2 MB of Chip RAM.

I've just had a blast on Deluxe Galaga and she is significantly more responsive than she used to be.

All in all, not a bad nights work. In the future I will sort out the RAM configuration issues and hopefully get her back upto the full 8MB that the 2000 supports.

But for now, she'll do.  :-D

[r0jaws]

I have been really going to town on my 2000 lately, and have finally got a few things that I had planned to do completed.

First things first though, many thanks to Zetro of EAB & Amibay for helping me through my first 'proper' soldering job.
The thought of wielding a soldering iron anywhere near the motherboard had filled me with dread, but zetro allowed me to use his brand new air-station to solder on a new coin battery.
The difference decent kit makes is unbelievable! My own soldering iron is the b@stard love child of a chisel and a malfunctioning hotplate.

Needless to say, I was very pleased with the results.  :-)





Finally, I was able to reset my clock and the info stays put, no longer does the Amiga belive that Stayin' Alive is top of the charts and it is still 1978!



You may remember that I have a KCS Power PC board installed. This was running DOS 5.0, however, after having attempted to botch some drivers for the CD-ROM using an old Win 98 boot disc and having manually adjusted config.sys I was left with a lovely DOS system that would hang indefinitely on boot up and no emergency back up boot disc to rectify it!

Luckily, I managed to restore it back to it's original state after tracking down a suitable disc which was just as well.
I had been inspired by a thread on EAB some months ago that aluded to someone actually getting Windows up and running on their 2000 using a KCS.
It was something that, whilst possibly not terribly practical I had to give a go just to see if it worked!

It does.



Windows 3.0 running on a 2000.  :-o

Many, many thanks to The Corfiot who was the original weaver of this magic and was absolutley essential in me being able to pull off this little feat!

I had an enjoyable time playing the slowest game of solitaire ever at a fraction under one quarter speed.  :-P

Whilst it does works, the refresh rates are somewhat slow, but it does work.

I'd like to see an 18 year old PC run WB 3.0!!

@TJlazer

After having a bit of a chat with zetro, and although it doesn't seem to mention it in any docs I have read, the 2620 does seem to reserve the first 4 Mb of address space for its own RAM even if it doesn't have 4 Mb fitted and the jumpers are set to 2Mb.
This would account for me having to drop the GVP's Fast RAM down to 4 Mb in order to get the 2000 to boot.
It's not really a problem though as I'm now on a slow time search for another 2 Mb of zip RAM for the 2620.
I'm sure that when they do turn up they'll be tucked away under that Pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.   ;-)

[r0jaws]

@KinHell,

Thanks m8, I did notice the speed drop is significant when the  onboard Fast RAM is disabled!
I won't be doing that again in a hurry.
The GVP SCSI ROM is Version 4.0, I have no idea why the 2620 made the RAM disappear but I'm sticking by the theory that the 2620 hogs the first 4Mb of RAM space for itself, regardless of actual RAM fitted or jumper settings.
I did try populating the SCSI adapter with 6 Mb again and ensured the correct jumpers were properly fitted and she still refused to boot from the Hard Drive, infact the Hard Disc LED starts up strongly then flutters weakly as the boot process continues, leaving you with only the Insert floppy screen.
I know Zip RAM are like hens teeth to find, but Zetro is working on a project to address this as we speak (the man is a relentless hackery machine to say the least!  :-D )

I don't have GVPDAT installed and I couldn't find anything about it through Google, is it some sort of aditional software driver/ memory controller?

Anyhoo..

I had been hoping to do a little gentle hackery myself by knocking up a KVM switch of a kind for my 2 miggys.
The problem being that I actually have a 1200 and a 2000 but only one 1084 monitor.
There is no point them sharing a keyboard and mouse, but the monitor would save a lot of fannying around plugging cables in and out.
I thought about using a Serial switch box and serial cable, initially as a template for the  switch.



I had never seen the inside of a switch box and didn't know if it would be compatible with what I wanted for it, or if any work would need to be done to make it work.





I secretly hoped that it wouldn't work and that I would have to spend some time getting a usable little box of tricks going, turns out there was absolutely no need to do anything bar plug them all together and switch both miggys on.
Bah, Foiled!  :-P



It does work very nicely and combined with an audio cable splitter it means that I no longer have to dive about behind my desk just to switch between machines.



This means that I can now easily and instantly switch between my miggys and bask in the glow of the backdrop of my 2000 that I spent ages knocking up
(a small prize to the first person to guess what it is!  ;-) ).



Now, I'm just trying to work out why my 2000's screenmode High Res Pref is stuck at 16 colours in PAL.
Is that standard for an ECS machine? I noticed Los Res allows upto 32 colours, but I wouldn't mind a few more.
Any ideas anyone?

One of the visitors to Amibay also PM'd me his concerns about the coin battery soldered to the board. He voiced the  concern that

"there will still be a charge circuit trying to push power on your battery when it's on. I'm sure you have to Diode one side of the battery to avoid this. It's been rather a long while since I've undertaken this work so I could be wrong but I'm sure you do."

This thread on EAB HERE  has come to the consensus that these new lithium batteries should have no problems at all, however, I'm not 100% on this myself, is there anyone out there who can confirm or refute any possible risk to my beloved 2000?

[r0jaws]

TC

Spot on mate, have a smug feeling of satisfaction as your prize.  :-P

Just finished adding a 9Gb SCSI drive to the 2000, unfortunately it meant having to ditch the second floppy drive, but with the CD Rom this isn't so much of a problem (I actually prefer the single floppy look for some reason)



There were a few problems, namely getting the right jumper setting so that it didn't conflict with the CD-ROM, attempting (and failing) to get SFS installed to it (I'll work on this later) and the fact that my boot time has drastically increased.
I've split the drive into 3x 3Gb FFS Partitions, the boot sequence now takes about 25 secs!
This may also be due to the fact that I've installed ClassicWB ADVSP using a copy of the files from my 1200.
I realise that this installation is optimised for an accelerated 1200 (with AGA obviously) but I just wanted to check it worked.
The sharp eyed among you may notice that the installation is using 3 Mb of Fast Ram just to sit there!



When Bloodwych gets the packs back up again, I'll be chucking ClassicWB Lite on there.
She runs Ok but is a bit sluggish compared to a vanilla 3.1 installation.

[r0jaws]

Yes it is, and its been running with no problems so far.

It's a simple but absolutely essential mod that can literally save your 2000 from failure.

The one we all got hold of came from HERE

Hope this helps  :-)

[r0jaws]

Currently I have 2 MB on the 2620 (Zip RAM) and 4 MB on the GVP, totaling 6 MB.

I have been playing with the 2000 more and more recently, trying to iron out a few issues that I'm not happy about (namely boot time). Should have an update fairly shortly.

[r0jaws]

I'm really sad to say that in order to pay for some nice upgrades for my 1200, I've finally had to let this go.

I'm parting it out, and if you're interested the bits and pieces can be found on Amibay In the Hardware/ Amiga threads.

I have listed all the bits and pieces on Amibay and ask that any correspondance is entered into on there according to the site rules.

She was a great little machine, I shall miss her and hope she goes to a good home.  :cry:

[r0jaws]

It is a real shame, it's also a decision that I have been making over the last 2 months. That said, I'm really getting to grips with my 1200 and am really enjoying the hacks I have for that, and the plans in the future.
However, I always promised my wife that my Hobby would be self financing (mostly), so I really had to make a hard choice.

The long boot time was purely down to a Seagate drive, which seemed to take an absolute age to spin up (and sounded like a jet turbine once it got going).
I timed it and it took exactly 59 secs from power on to workbench.
Using an older 500Mb Quantum drive took around 20 secs, much better.

The KCS was an absolute treat TBH, it worked quite nicely with MS DOS, it had been a while since I have used a native DOS machine, but the usability was comparable (as far as I remember).
I never hooked up a printer to the Miggy, but the KCS does support printing via the miggy's parallel port. I suppose there would be no bar for it to be used for other things as long as you had the appropriate software and drivers.

I have really enjoyed working on this Miggy, and I will have fond memories of it, and I'm glad I started this thread as a record of it's ressurection.
I'm also really glad that it seemed to strike a chord with certain users and certainly enthused them enough to dig their old big berthas out and breathe new life into them.
It's a worthy machine, and as far as I'm concerned an unjustly overlooked system.