Amiga 2000 arrived yesterday!

[Sig999]

Powered it up and it runs fine.  No monitor cable for the 1084 so I plugged it in via composite video.  The display came up, but only in Black and White. Ran a game that was on the HD, and it was in B/W as well - so it's not Prefs settings (sounds dumb but on my first Ami, a 1000, I changed  everything to grey scale due to WB 2.0 envy)
I plugged it into the TV - same, so it's not the monitor.  

I've ordered a monitor cable anyways and it should arrive in a couple of days (the guy I'm dealing with on Ebay - Amigatoaster - is extremely fast with his shipping).

I remember reading somewhere about OCS and B/W composite signals... my old amiga ran in color, but it was ECS as well. Or I recollect incorrectly - it's been a while since I tooled around with these machines (10 years).

Sound worked well through the monitor - and it looks like I've got 2 megs of ram, KS 1.3. 2 3.5 floppys and 1 5.25 floppy (my god can you even BUY those anymore?) and an 80 meg HD.

So - time to dig inside the case and see what I got for my money (very reasonable - 105 bucks for the machine, 80 bucks shipping and handling).

Dust.  Dust, dust and more dust... I used 2 cans of compressed air - and I have to go to Frys Electronics to pick up 4 more.  I got most of it out. from the powersupply to the floppy drives was a dust bunny so big I could have bought shoes for it.. I think it growled at me when I turned the air on it.

Scary stuff!

Motherboard - Rev 4.5
Chipset OCS (?) - 8370 Agnus, 8364R7 Paula, 8362R8 Denise, 5719 Gary.

Cards:

GVP A2000 - HC+8 Series II rev II - controller with Quantum prodrive ELS - populated with 2 Sims (2mb)

and a bonus - not in the listing:

A2088XT Rev 3 Bridgeboard.

The battery had very little corrosion on it, and no corrosion damage I can see to the board - but I removed it anyways - I have a lithium battery replacement ready to install.

So - not bad for the money paid! So now for the questions on how to proceed.

1. The B/W composite signal isn't a huge deal - but I'm curious about it.

2. Upgrading to 3.1 rom - I have the rom, but do I need to go up to ECS?  and given that I can get the chips for ECS, is the revision of motherboard a factor?

3. I'm going to be replacing the HD controller with a GVP 030 combo board - the sims look (at first glance) the same size - interchangable? I know GVP used 64 pin sims on the 030 board.

Ok - off to Frys to continue the war on this grubby machine!

Cheers.

Sig.

[Sig999]

Thanks for the clarification Dave! The monitor cable should get me back in color!

As for the battery - I've stripped the machine down and removed all the cards for cleaning.  The battery had very little leakage and it hadn't reached the board yet. I removed it, and I'm soldering in a lithium battery tonight.

[Sig999]

@ Matt

I'll have a check when I get it back together.I'm not sure if  this agnus does 1m of chip ram. I looked up the Fat Lady on wikipedia.  I guess I could aways plug the rom in and cross my fingers

Thanks for the info!

Sig.

[Sig999]

Got the motherboard dusted down and clean. Cleaned up the power supply and drives as best I could with the old can-o-air.

I replaced the 1.3 kickstart rom with a 3.1 - and it boots up just fine.

Managed to find some utils (whoever originally owned it used was into audio - just about everything is midi) and checked the ram;

512 chip ram - and 2.5 meg of fast.  So with the 2 meg on the HD controller card, the motherboard must have 512 of each.

This might rule out 3.1 wb for now.  I'm currently doing some web surfing and looking to see how I go about upgrading the chip ram - I admit I am totally ignorant on how chip/fast mem is setup.  Is it a motherboard, chipset, or OS issue?

*shrug* I can't really do too much software wise until either my 3.1 disks arrive, or I get CrossDos installed on this HD.


EDIT - didn't have to look too far to find out it seems.  If I'm reading this right Agnus decides how much chip mem it can handle... mine is 8370 Fat Agnus - so I'd need the 8375 (ntsc fatter 1mb). Don't know if the 2mb version will work in the machine.. who knows... btw, if I'm totally wrong on this let me know  :-?

[Sig999]

@ banzai

Thanks for all that info mate!

I should be able to get the fatter agnus no probs, and I was trying to find the name of the tool to take it out too

Good to know about the ram, which to tell the truth wasn't too big an issue as the combo board I purchased came with 4megs on it already.  This is perfect for me, as I have 2 PC's for anything that needs masses of grunt.  One for 'play' and one I custom built for video editing (so I can take work home and run freelance projects if needed).
(same reason why the bridgeboard isn't going back in the box when I reassemble it I was just surprised the seller didn't mention it was in there).

My main goal is to rebuild the machine I left behind when I moved to the US. My great joy was assembly programming, it wasn't until 1997 that I bought a PC. So I've always wanted to 'recapture' the insane amount of fun I had with the Ami.

The specs were :  1 meg chip ram. KS 2.0. 200meg HD (If I recall correctly on that...)  and an 030 with 4 megs of ram.

So apart from the 1 meg chip ram, I'm pretty much there.

Cheers!

Sig.

[Sig999]

Ok nearly midnight and I have to work in the morning - so the update.

030 board works great.  I'm going to need a longer scsi cable (duh!) - I have a mate who can make me one and drop it over in a couple of days.

Chip extractor tool was an easy find on Ebay, and only cost six bucks with shipping.

Fatter Agnus (1mb chip) and Super Denise are on the way.  Thanks again for the point in the right direction on that Banzai! - I've located the jumper and trace, for the trace I just have to cut the trace on the top side of the board with a thin point hobby knife right? or is there something on the bottom of the board too?

Software Hut also has GVP memory for use with the G-Force 030 - so if at some point I want another 4megs of memory, I know where to get it.

SCSI board and Bridgeboard won't be going back it, I'll probably try and find the setup software for them (I got no sofware with the Ami) and pack them away - for the rainy day when something blows up

Floppy Drives - it has 2 but I think they're on their last legs and are 'acting strange'.

DF0 - a chinon drive has a real hard time recognising a disk inserted. I had to insert the one amiga formatted disk I have 3 times before it recognized it at all.
I have a box of never used PC DS DD disks here - the drive got to track 80 and said it couldn't format it and try another disk... 3 disks (all new) did this.

My memory may be failing me - but I don't recall having probs using these disks 'back in the day' formatting them as Amiga disks... again - I could be mistaken.

DF1 - a Panasonic Drive. This one said that the disk was write protected when it wasn't and straight up wouldnt format it. It wouldn't free the drive when I popped it out either.

At one point DF0 wouldn't recognise a disk in it until I put one in DF1 as well - now THAT was strange!
Both, however, recognized the Amiga disk (the one and only I have) - so that is a start.

Getting the floppy working is a huge deal - as it's going to be the only way I'll be able to get the new software (including the new OS) on here (no terminal programs, no CrossDos, no TCP stack) - so I'm HOPING it's just the drives being old as dirt.

Guess it's back to cruising Ebay from work and waiting for more parts

Cheers,

Sig.

[Sig999]

Time for an update I guess!

After many tests I came to the conclusion that both drives are  pretty much shot.

Df0: won't recognize anything (df0:?) on the few rare times it actually detects it has a floppy in it.

Df1: enjoys spitting out that it has track errors and can't format disks.  (I have a couple of blank ami disks - no luck formatting at all).

Got Crossdos and managed to dodge read errors to get it installed.  Alas - Win XP won't format a floppy under 1.44 (I kid you not - go look and follow the 'error report').

Lucky for me, I have a Linux box set up... after many attempts I FINALLY got a floppy to format to 720, but Win XP wouldn't read it, and the Ami drive wouldn't read it either.

I have a new floppy drive on the way for the Ami - so fingers crossed I can get the rest of WB updated, then I'll hopefully be a step closer.

Tried 'Amiga Explorer' - the trial version.. didn't want to fork out for it until I knew it worked.  Got as far as getting the 'Setup' script to run, before the dreaded 'com error' - though it could be my null modem cable - 10 bucks sent off to get one that's 'recommended' for it.  Tried many times - searched the web for likely problems - and if someone - no joy for me getting past the 'setup2' stage.

PLCC extraction tool came - Fatter Agnus and Super Denise still to arrive, and still not very much closer to being able to transfer files to the Ami from the PC.

Hopefully better news next update - if anyone out there has anything I've yet to try - I'm all ears... I'm even thinking of using 'type SER: to RAM:filename' and seeing if I can get an executable sent one way over the cable via some crudely written shell script in linux.

[Sig999]

Whew! a bit of tinkering and messing around - the problem has been solved.

Amiga Explorer still doesn't like running (but I'm very sure it's a null modem cable issue now).. but I did the type ser: to ram:(filename) trick to get Arexx over to the 2000.

Lucky I had type from wb1.3, as it seems to handle binary files.

Then with some searching I found http://adfsender.stoeggl.com/adfsenderterminal/methods.html  I little messing around with Arexx and now I have a (cludgy) system to send binary files to the Ami.

Getting some ADF utils and Diropus sent across currently, so I'll rexxify the process and make it more comfortable to use.

Finally on my way! I think this thread has seen it's day and any other probs I have (and trust me, I'm bound to have some when those new chips arrive) I'll post on the relevant hardware/software help.

Cheers! and a big THANKS! to everyone who helped with advice and useful knowledge!

Sig.

[Sig999]

CD Rom would solve a lot of the hassles - but it was one of those 'chicken or the egg' problems:

The Ami came to me with wb1.3 - and VERY minimal software (I'm guessing the previous owner was into basketball and midi - becuase that's all that was on there).

Not so much as a terminal program - no disks - just what was on the HD.

So, no way to get software on there, so even if I installed a CDROM - I couldn't use it.

Right now I've managed to get AREXX and a handful of utils over - the 'what comes first' prob is solved for now - and I'm trying to get WB3.1 in adf form over and try and install from virtual floppies for now.

I'll try that command line format - that might bring me some joy too!

[Sig999]

Cool, I'll give that a try using the USB floppy on the main machine and see if I can't get it working myself.

Last time I really used floppys was nearly 8 years ago with Slackware Linux - and before that 10 years on my last A2k. Sure enough I didn't cover the hole, which was what probably lead to them not formatting properly.

Case of 'right tool for the job' - I used Banzai's suggestion for using copy to the ser port to get AREXX fully installed, which let me upload and mod a script to read files from the SER port better.  Virtual Floppy and TSGUI from aminet are working together to let me install wb3.1 - half done already!

I've seen some cheap 50 pin scsi CD roms on Ebay - around 30ish x speed - although I have promised my wife no more Ami spending for 2 weeks  Can't wait to get Devpac running again - although my time with Linux has made me partial to C... might start looking for a good compiler

[Sig999]

Super Denise arrived today! (YAY) now all I'm waiting for is a floppy disk drive to arrive via Canada. No point in opening the machine up just to open it all up again! I'll be installing the chips, making the adjustments, mounting 2 HD's and closing it up hopefully this weekend.  I think the 1 meg chip ram is a must if your going to be tooling around in assembly and making stupid programs.

Cheers - Sig

[Sig999]

Success!  Popped old Agnus out - literally - came straight up and out without any hassle.  Denise needed a little persuasion but came up with no problems.

Reset the jumper, cut the trace, booted it up and voila - one meg chip and ECS chipset appeared in Sysinfo.

Replaced the drives with a single floppy and set the jumper accordingly, and with a little gentle persuasion I can format disks no problems.  There is such a mishmash of software on there atm that I'm considering a clean install.  Found out my 3.1 install disk has some errors on it, so I'll run disksalv over it - if that doesn't help I have adf's of wb from 1.3 to 3.1 - all the ones I legitimately own.

Looks like I'm cooking with gas!