A4000T Video Toaster System.

[Ami_GFX]

Two of these have been listed on eBay with a really good BIN. I just bought the less expensive of the two and just about emptied my Paypal account. This one is still available:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/261176112287?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2649

Someone here should get it. These are vintage systems set up back in the day. There are only so many more that are going to show up in this condition for this price. I couldn't resist when I read that I wouldn't just get the hardware but all kinds of animation and video work on the drives.

[Ami_GFX]

It isn't mine, I just bought one of them. I'm sharing a good ebay find. I've done this before on this forum. So much complaining about high prices for Amiga gear, good deals do happen and I'm sharing one. There was an A4000T for around the same price on Amiga.org for a while but I couldn't afford it at the time. This time I could, but just barely.

[Ami_GFX]

No surprise that that was gone in noooooo time

Within minutes of me posting it here. I wonder if an Amiga.org member got it. The listings lasted more than 20 hours before I bought the first one.

[Ami_GFX]

The seller sold it as a Video Toaster, not an Amiga. The Toaster was what a lot of professional users bought, the Amiga was just the platform. Toaster mania isn't nearly what Amiga mania is nowadays. You had to look at the listing to see that an A4000T was included.

[Ami_GFX]

What were the specs on the machines?

A4000T Toaster Flyer systems from the orignal owner used for video production. A lot of these weere stock Amigas so I don't expect more than the Toaster and Flyer boards, TBCs and video hardware. Mine has 2 external drive enclosures and an external TBC. I couldn't ask for more. The great thing is they are still set up as they were in the 90s.

[Ami_GFX]

No kidding man, you might even find a nice accelerator inside

It came today and you were right. I got an A4000T in pretty nice shape, 2 Medea videoraid 80gb SCSI III external raid enclosures, a DPS rackmount TBC with 2 DPS TBC IVs, and a few SCSI cables. I opened up the chassis and knew it was good when I saw simms on the CPU card. It wasn't a stock quickpak 060 accelerator which was what I was hoping for at best, it was a Cyberstorm MK2. Whoopee!!! I've put it on the bench to make sure everything is together after it's trip accross the US. I will probably get it fired up tomorrow. I wonder what was inside the other one. The seller actually listed another one a few days later which looked like the spare parts machine. It had just the Toaster, was missing parts and had a 3640 inside. It went just about as fast as the other 2--just a little less than 24 hours.

[Ami_GFX]

Yeah, an O60 is more than enough for most of what I do. I've gotten some PPC software that's nice but I still use Deluxe Paint V more than anything else. Still, I'd never sell mine because it was, essentially, a gift and I'd never see another one if I let this one go. I like the way they designed the MK3 and PPC cards for speed in every detail: processor(s), ram speed and SCSI speed.

[Ami_GFX]

This is the A4000T I bought:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/261176115341?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1497.l2649

I'm getting into the fun stuff now. After opening it up to make sure everything was tight and nothing had come disconnected in shipping, I fired it up and it booted nicely and then hung up just after workbench started. It looked like a couple of cards had been pulled from it an I figured it was looking for hardware that was no longer there. I booted with no startup sequence and manually loaded workbench. I edited the user-startup a few times but it still hung. I pulled the Flyer out and it still hung. I pulled the Toaster out and it didn't hang anymore. After that, I pretty much completely dissassmbeled the whole thing, cleaned all the dust out and put it back together. Definitely a vintage configuration from the days when memory cost an arm and a leg. There are no simms on the mother board and 2 16mb simms on the CSMKII. The motherboard IDE isn't used either. There's a 2.1gb SCSI drive, a SCSI CD Rom and a SCSI zip drive.

Today I spend a couple of hours exploring what was on the hard drive. Lots of video software and a folder of wedding frame stores--classic, it looks like all this hardware was used to do wedding videos. So maybe there won't be anything really interesting on the video drives. I  know how many weddings I can watch--less than one. I'm not all that sure the video drives I got really went with the Flyer. They are SCSI 3 Videoraid boxes. Each has 2 40gb drives in a striped raid configuration for 80gbs total. They are rated at around 50mb/s. Overkill for a Flyer system. I opened one up today expecting to at least get some SCSI drives that could be used with the Flyer and to my surprise, they are ATA IDE drives and the raid board is also an IDE to SCSI converter. There are 4 IDE connectors total, 2 in use. I wonder if the board will work as a straight IDE to SCSI converter with just one drive connected. It's a lot bigger than the acard converters but it has a regular SCSI III cable connector.

[Ami_GFX]

I contacted the seller before shipping and asked him to do 2 packages with lots of packing material and ship Fedex. He did as I asked. I had the exerience of having a mint condition A2000 Toaster--one just like the one in the Newtek promotional video--arrive in pieces due to a clueless seller not knowing how to pack things. Since then, I get in touch with sellers before shipping something like this and make sure they know what they're doing.

The raid board has 4 IDE headers and one SCSI III header. Lots of jumpers. There are fairly inexpensive DOM ssd drive modules that plug right into an IDE header. 2 of those instead of the drives would make a really fast SCSI ssd drive is what I'm thinking of as an exeriment. That's a few months down the road. Right now, I'm digging through boxes of cables, hard drives, and simm modules, looking for stuff compatible with the A4000T. The biggest thing at the moment is where to put it. It's huge. I'm going to have to do a little bit of remodeling cabinets to make room for it.

[Ami_GFX]

Progress continues on this system. I got the Amiga OS system fixed and transferred to an IDE CF card. The IDE/CF module was a project for my A4000D but I could never get it working without data errors and it's working flawlsessly in the A4000T. I've got the memory maxed out and tested all my unlabled 72 pin sims on the motherboard. Most were 4mb. I needed to use 2 8mb simms to fit the Toaster in the first video slot--it overshoots the first simm socket. I found out that the description in the Amiga hardware database-- http://amiga.resource.cx/mod/a4000t.html --is incorrect regarding EDO ram. The only 8mb simms I had were EDO and one pair  works perfectly and one is recognized as  4mb simms. There were quite a few 72pin simms that didn't work--either weren't recognized at all or hung the system--but no consistent reason why they worked or didn't The MKII got 4 32mb simms salvaged from old Power Macs.

I found some female centronics internal external SCSI cable brackets in my scrap pile and a 68pin to male centronics external SCSI cable and checked out what was on the Videoraid boxes. The Flyer played back flawlessly and there were loads of weddings and one bar mitzvah and some footage of horses and festivals. Nothing exciting like some nice Lightwave animation work but at least I know the Flyer's good. The Toaster has sync issues--pretty common for the Toaster 4000 but I still managed to do a test recording from a DV camcorder.