Picked up a 1000 today...

[DonutKing]

I met a bloke on another forum who had some old miggies sequestered away in his garage.
Took this 1000 home with me. Cosmetically its seen much better days.


But the inside seems to be in good order



I was a bit surprised when I plugged in and was greeted with the 'workbench 1.3 disk' screen.
I thought the 1000's needed a kickstart disk first.
A closer look at the motherboard revealed this:



'Phoenix Enhanced Motherboard for the Amiga 1000'





So apparently this is an upgrade board, but I can't find much more info than that. Can someone tell me exactly what the deal is with this board? Seems to have a 68000 CPU but I don't know what chipset? What other advantages does this have over the original 1000?


Also got this thing:


some sort of memory expansion? Where does this plug into? Can I use it with this phoenix board, or my Amiga 500?

[DonutKing]

What's all that stuff printed on the motherboard?  :confused:

Sounds like the fanatic type stuff nicholas would write...

It's the Desiderata http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiderata

[DonutKing]

I've pulled the machine apart in an attempt to clean it, and taken a few more photos.

Here's the two keyboard I got with it. They are foul - I think one's had milk spilled in it at one point because it was absolutely rank when I pulled it apart. I've tried to clean it as best I could. Both of them seem to have a few faulty keys. I'm hoping that when I get the system running, it will just be a matter of desoldering some working switches off one board and soldering them onto the other.




Can anyone tell me if a 2000/3000/4000 keyboard will work with a 1000 if I fit an RJ11-DIN adapter or something?


Anyway here's some shots of the board.












There are a lot of empty sockets but it works as far as I can tell. At least, its got 1.3 kickstart on it and it happily boots off a floppy.
Can anyone shed some light onto what some of the missing chips might be, or what options this board is equipped with?

I believe it has 256KB of RAM installed, with 8 256 kilobit DIP chips and another 8 empty sockets.

On the underside of the board there are a few wires that have been soldered in place.



There are heaps of messages and greetings all over the underside:









Sorry for the poor quality. This last one says 'Sorry sheldon we did it anyway' and 'the various user groups who supported us'



This one says 'To the 540 depositors who made it all possible, my thanks and in particular, Margaret Wilson, Jonathon Potter, Mike Chow and the others scattered around the board'.

The phone number is an old 7 digit number, in the mid 90's Australian phone numbers were changed to 8 digits.

[DonutKing]

Did you ever figure out where the memory expansion board/hard disk interface plugs into, or if it even works with the Phoenix board?

Its apparently a standard sidecar expansion. There are no external connectors, and the only internal connector is a 26 pin header.
A bit of googling suggests this could be a proprietary JVC hard disk interface : http://www.pd.com/gb15xx/messages/1489.html


The annoying thing about the sidecar expansion slot is that it isn't keyed in any way, and the unit was screwed into its case, so I wasn't sure which way it should be connected. I guess Amiga designers had a lot more faith in its users than what we're used to with PC users today

Thankfully pin 1 is labelled on the expansion card, and on my 500...  however in that orientation the card is inserted so the component side faces down.... the complete opposite to what I would have expected? Well, I wasn't going to argue with the markings on the boards...

With great trepidation I attached it to my 500 and flicked the power switch, and no magic smoke came out









Although the hard disk controller isn't very useful without one of those drives, the 1MB of Fast RAM installed on it is nothing to complain about
Since the 500 has got a 1MB Agnus in it I might do the trapdoor chipram mod and use this sidecar as fast RAM

As for the 1000, its been pulled apart for cleaning and retrobrighting, if the weather holds out I hope to have that all back up and running this weekend.

I found the manual for the phoenix board http://amiga.resource.cx/manual/Phoenix.pdf

It seems that most of the missing chips are just for additional Kickstart ROMs. The only kickstart installed is 1.3.
I'm missing the ROM switch mentioned in the manual, and it appears the SCSI controller chips are not installed - sounds like these are proprietary so I don't have much hope of ever finding those. There is no FPU installed but it looks like I can get a 68882 and appropriate clock crystal from amigakit for 25 bucks  It seems the only option that's installed is the internal DB23 floppy connector, so I could mount an external floppy inside the case.

[DonutKing]

This is coming along pretty well, the case and keyboard look like they'll clean up nicely (actually making a working keyboard is another matter), and I'm planning to solder on some new RCA jacks and maybe even a coin cell battery holder to replace the dead one that's soldered on, if I don't just remove it entirely.

Unfortunately, it looks like I won't be able to take advantage of all the bells and whistles of this board because the SCSI controller, FPU, kickstart switcher and the B2000 expansion slot all require PAL chips (programmable array logic, not the video standard) - which I don't have. They would have all been Phoenix proprietary. The SCSI controller also requires an EPROM installed in U31 which appears to have contained some sort of autoboot code (in addition to Kickstart ROMs that support autobooting natively it seems).

I imagine these things are as rare as rocking horse poop. They are generally programmed at the factory and have a security fuse blown so its not possible to simply read their logic. However, depending on the type of the chip used and its complexity it may be possible to reverse engineer these chips and program replacements.
More info here: http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/entry.php?314-Cloning-a-PAL-HAL-(Part-1)

Of course this is all just talk. I lack the knowledge and equipment to do this myself, and there was an effort to reverse engineer the PAL chip for the CMS upgrade on the Sound Blaster 2.0, which never went anywhere- and some of those guys actually had the chips.

About the only upgrade I can do is stick more RAM in it, otherwise it seems functionally identical to an A500, in a desktop case with an external keyboard.


I'd be interested to hear if anyone actually has these PAL chips? Having a board as rare as this is one thing but actually having one with all the options installed would be quite the prize.

For reference the chips in question are:
U59 - Kickstart switcher
U21 - FPU
U70 - B2000 expansion slot
Not sure about SCSI controller chips exactly, any of chips  U27, U23, U25, U26, U24  might be the PAL. Also requires EPROM in U31 and actual SCSI controller chip in U30


EDIY: I'm also chasing a front cover for the A1000 case (where the chipram expansion would go), don't suppose anyones got one lying around?

[DonutKing]

Interesting info about your board and it's missing chips.

I still think you should try to communicate with the guys at a1k.org.  The Georg Braun A1000 motherboard replacement was a later copy of the Phoenix design and they might even have some of the files needed to create the PAL & EPROM chips you need.

I've posted in the international section there, so hopefully they can point me in the right direction.

great find dude & welcome aboard! Have fun with the magic eraser on her and if all fails I spray painted my yellowed A500 & it looks great :-)

Thanks

[DonutKing]

A bit of an update on this project...

Thankfully one of the users at a1k.org was kind enough to identify and dump  the missing chips for me So I now have the .JED files to program replacements and the scsi autoboot ROM. Here they are for anyone that's looking for them.
All the other SCSI controller chips etc can be found online.

So to that end I've bought a cheap and nasty G540 USB universal programmer off ebay and some rewritable GAL chips from futurlec. Waiting for them to arrive so I can try them out

Unfortunately the U60 chip, which allows a 1MB Agnus to interface to 2MB of RAM won't work in a rewritable GAL. It will only work in a write-once PAL for reasons unknown (Andrew Wilson himself said he never figured this out). It's impossible to find the required type of PAL that hasn't already been programmed, and even if I did you can't program them with a normal programmer.
Of course if I managed to track down a 2MB Agnus chip that fits, the docs say that would work too, but these are pretty rare. I might have to just make do with 1MB.

The board has 1MB of RAM installed which I've configured as all chip memory. You can reconfigure it for 512 chip and 512 slow (similar config to an A500 with the 512KB trapdoor expansion) while the sidecar expansion is 1MB fast. Funnily enough, if I configure for 512KB/512KB Chip/Slow, sysinfo reports about 3% faster speed than 1MB/1MB chip/fast? I thought the whole thing with slow memory was that it was like chip memory (controlled by agnus, which introduces a delay as the CPU can't access it every cycle) but processor had exclusive use of it, while fast mem was controlled by processor and could access it on every cycle so there was no delay. Strange.


Anyway, while I'm waiting for the chips and programmer to arrive I've been keeping busy. I've stripped the machine and cleaned it, and tried to retrobright it. I tried using cling wrap to prevent the retrobright from drying out unfortunately this just made it brighten the plastic unevenly (wherever there was a crease in the cling wrap). I work full time and I don't want to leave it out in the hot aussie sun from 8-5 without being able to check on it every hour or so... and I've been busy on weekends so its been slow progress on this front.


In the meantime I've managed to get a working keyboard.


The one that was missing the spacebar had only 4 or so dead keyswitches plus the missing switch for the spacebar. I managed to get the others working with a few squirts of WD40 to loosen them up. I managed to desolder 5 working ones off the other board (which had missing keys all over the place but funnily enough QWERTY at least worked fine) and solder them onto the new board.

I've also since replaced the dead clock battery with a coin cell holder so as to make replacements easier in the future





I've also replaced the corroded old RCA jacks with nice, clean new ones





Everything is humming along nicely It definitely sounds a lot clearer with the new RCA jacks.




I also got the steel wool and some Autosol and polished up those metal brackets on the edge connectors, they are still dull but at least they aren't brown and rusty any more. I don't think these serve any purpose anyway? the sidecar doesn't even touch them when its installed.
I tried to polish up the RF shields but they were too far gone. After an hour of furious scrubbing and polishing they still looked crap so I've put them aside for now.


So now its basically just waiting for the chip and programmer to arrive, at which point I hope to get the FPU, kickstart switcher and SCSI working. Planning to get a 50 pin SCSI card reader so I can install workbench to it.
Most B2000 CPU expansion card don't look like they'll fit inside the standard A1000 case so I'll just forget about that for now.

[DonutKing]

@DonutKing,

It looks like the A1000 you have went to the right guy.  It is great to see that you are spending the time to lovingly restore it and find the missing chips.

Thanks for the kind words

How does that GBA1000 come? Is it just a bare board and you need to source the components yourself?

You might take  a look at, unforetunatly most in German.

http://www.a1k.org/

Markus

Thankfully one of the users at a1k.org was kind enough to identify and dump the missing chips for me

:confused:

[DonutKing]

I missed that. But i'm glad we, over at a1k.org, have help you.

Markus aka Ché (@a1k.org)

yes I'd be lost without their help

[DonutKing]

Did a bit of work today on the standard A1000



On the right you can see the two LED cables that had been ripped out of the front panel. First job was to solder new LED's on to these.


Interesting thing about this A1000 is that its an NTSC board, and Australia is a PAL territory. I noticed this mod on a chip near the composite output jack:


Looks like a crystal oscillator and a tuning cap. I'd hazard a guess and say that someones modded this A1000 for PAL composite output, because this looks very similar to a mod I did to my PAL sega megadrive to run at NTSC speeds.
Not a big deal though as I won't be using composite anyway


The RCA jacks on this board were pretty tarnished too so they got replaced


Finished product:


Above are the two repaired LED connectors.
You might notice that I used a different kind of RCA jacks on this board compared to the Phoenix. Well for some strange reason, the polarity is different between the two boards. The RCA jacks have 3 terminals, on the A1000 the outer terminals are for the signal and the centre one is ground. On the Phoenix the outer terminals are ground and the centre one is signal...
Why? I dunno. Its pretty annoying though. I had to order the Phoenix ones online because my local electronics shop only carried the 'outer terminal signal' ones.

Success!




Not much more I can do with either of these boards until the parts I've ordered arrived... and since we've recently had some airline strikes and coming into the holiday season I think I could be waiting a while :mad:
Both boards are fully operational but at the moment the Phoenix is functionally identical to my A500.

[DonutKing]

They're generations apart.

The 1200 has IDE, PCMCIA, and a CPU expansion slot... the 1000 has none of these, it only as 256KB RAM on the motherboard (compared to the 1200's 2MB) and you need to load a kickstart disk before any other disks (later amigas had the kickstart in ROM).

There's very few upgrades you can do to the 1000 in comparison to the 1200.

The phoenix board at least has kickstart in ROM and 1MB on the motherboard, its functionally similar to an Amiga 500 with memory expansion. Of course the Phoenix has a few other upgrades you can do as well.

Of course the 1000/phoenix and 1200 have different chipsets but that's probably one of  the more subtle differences really...

As far as this project goes... my USB programmer arrived today but none of the GALs have shown up yet. hopefully they aren't too far off...

[DonutKing]

I hope you get a nice case for her!

I was toying with the idea of mounting the Phoenix in a different case, but that's going to be a lot of effort... It would make it a lot easier to mount a hard drive,  a B2000 CPU accelerator card and a video card though. (although a quick check suggests that there isn't a whole lot of useful video cards that will fit in the slot on the Phoenix... please correct me if I'm wrong


The plastics for the two original cases are pretty ratty. retrobright didn't work so well, it dried out in the sun and left white splotches on some parts. I'm investigating alternatives, vinyl dye unfortunately isn't available in any colour close to the original (closest is either pure white or a dark tan). I'm thinking maybe some weak acetone followed by a very light sanding, but I need to test on some unimportant plastic first

I've managed to find the appropriate Agnus chip on Amibay that will let me use 2MB of chip RAM, without the U60 PAL chip that I don't have the code for... just waiting for it to arrive.
I also ordered a SCSI hard drive off ebay, was advertised as 50 pin SCSI-2... when it arrived its a 68 pin SCSI-3... sigh. was only 10 bucks plus 10 for postage but still a pain in the arse. I was hoping to find a SCSI-IDE adapter so I can just use a CF card but the acard ones are too rich for my blood. There is a Yamaha one, the V769970 but they seem rare as hens teeth.

I did manage to get the G540 programmer working, despite its best attempts to confuse me with its broken english. I don't have the GALs but I pulled the EPROM BIOS chips off a couple of old 486 motherboards I have here and it read them perfectly I actually have new BIOSes I want to upgrade those machines with, but I don't have an EPROM UV eraser, nor any compatible Flash EPROM parts... that's another story though. At least it works once you get your head around what its trying to say :confused:

so yeah, that's where the project is at the moment... moving ahead but very slowly

[DonutKing]

So the mailman dropped off some GAL chips today I've managed to get everything programmed without too much fuss, unfortunately installing and testing them may have to wait for another day...

I've wasted some time fiddling with that XEL sidecar I posted earlier in the thread. I bought some 1Mbx4 RAM chips to upgrade it to 2MB total. It came with 1MB of RAM, in 8 256x4 chips. It can be jumpered for 2MB.
So I tried to install 4 1Mbx4 chips in alternating sockets, leaving every second socket empty. The amiga will boot in this configuration, but it gives a guru error straight away on every boot - once you're past that it boots fine.

Sysinfo detects the 2MB of RAM. On the Phoenix utilities disk there are a couple of RAM testers. Both of them fail with 2MB of RAM, but they pass with 1MB.

One doesn't give an address but one does, it seems everything after address 280000 fails. On Wikipedia there is a Zorro memory map, which says that 200000 is the start of an 8MB of address space for Zorro expansion RAM- 280000 is half a megabyte into this range, If this is not correct please enlighten me
Since the capacity of my RAM chips is half a megabyte (4 megabits) it sounds like the second chip is dodgy... except swapping chips around has no effect, it always falls over at that address. I've even tried 4 different chips and it has no effect.


No other configuration of RAM chips will boot. Swap empty/populated sockets, all four chips next to each other on the left or the right side... If I fill all eight sockets with the 1Mbx4 chips it will boot, but will fall over at the same address. Using eight 256x4 chips and jumpering for 1MB works perfectly without errors....


So have I overlooked something, or am I just being greedy for wanting a 2MB fastram sidecar... :/

[DonutKing]

Well I've given up on making that sidecar work with 2MB RAM. I've done everything I can think of and it still doesn't work and nobody else seems to have any ideas either :confused:

Still works perfectly with 1MB though, although I'd have loved to get 2MB working, 1MB is better than a boot up the arse


Another disappointment was the arrival of an 8735 Agnus which I installed into the board, and configured for 2MB Chipram, but then it wouldn't boot

Turns out that I require a new version of the U60 PAL chip to make the board work with an 8735 - otherwise the board will work without that U60 chip, but only with an 8732B or 8732AB if you want 2MB chipram.

That version of the U60 chip was never developed, the most recent version does not support the 8735 - so I've had to give up on that one for now. If you only have a 1MB Agnus you are stuck with 1MB chipram without that U60 chip. The U60 seems to do some address line hacking so you can get 1MB chip + 1MB slow on a 1MB agnus.

The other thing with the U60 is that it apparently doesn't work in a GAL, even on the 2005 boards all the other chips were GALs but the U60 remained a write-once PAL. Andrew Wilson (the board designer) said he never got it to work in a GAL.

So I didn't think this would work but I figured, what the hell. nothing to lose....








IT WORKS! :banana: no idea how or why... but it does :confused:

I ran the PHNXRAME.JED file through paltogal.exe, then burnt it onto a Lattice GAL22V10D, populated all the RAM sockets on the board with 256x4 chips, jumpered for 1MB chipram + 1MB slowram. It's not possible to configure for 2MB chipram with this configuration.

The board passes all the memory tests I tried, even with the sidecar installed with 1MB




Strangely enough, using the U60E chip made the phenomena-spectre 'dots' demo work perfectly- I tried it on the phoenix before and the graphics were corrupted, same as on an A500, only the original A1000 ran it properly.

There's some real wizardry going on in that U60 chip...

I have also fitted the kickstart switcher GAL, plus a 2.04 kickstart ROM...





So now I've got 1.3 and 2.04 installed The interesting thing about this board is that its got 4 sockets that you can use to install a single kickstart image across 1 megabit EPROMs. Since my programmer is not compatible with the normal kickstart roms or anything similar, I can split an image odd/even then high and low and write it to 4 EPROMs. I've ordered some ROM chips and I'll have a go at getting 3.9 plus updates installed, so I'll be able to have a 3 way kickstart switcher

I also fitted the FPU GAL, a 20MHz crystal and a 68882... unfortunately the system doesn't boot with the 68882 installed, screen goes black-grey-white over and over again. If the GAL is left in but the 68882 is taken out it boots normally.... if I leave the GAL and the 68882 in but take out the crystal it does the reboot loop thing again... so it makes me think the GAL I programmed isn't at fault, but maybe the 68882 is faulty... would it stop the system booting like that though? unfortunately I don't have another FPU to test, or a different card that I can try the 68882 in.

Under KS1.3 it will boot with the FPU installed but there is graphics corruption and missing text in the AmigaDOS window. something screwy is going on there.


I also tried fitting the chip for the 2000 CPU expansion slot but the system doesn't boot at all then. I don't have a card to use anyway but it should still boot with the chip installed - will have to look into it further.
Still waiting on some parts for the SCSI controller to arrive, but I did track down a Yamaha scsi-ide adapter so I'll try and get workbench installed on a CF card- that'll be the next part of the project

[DonutKing]

Haven't read every single detail, but have you managed to get the SCSI portion working yet?

Oh, and I've read were, if you fill all of those Kickstart sockets in, certain fat floppy drives no longer fit? You have to mount a slimmer floppy drive instead?

Basically just waiting for various chips to arrive before I can get SCSI working. International postage seems to vary a LOT and coming into Christmas surely doesn't help....

Not sure about the kickstart interfering with the floppy.... It looks like it should be fine. The FPU and crystal fit under the floppy.

I'm hoping it's just the FPU that's faulty  cos thats easiest to fix... Just replace it


Glad you guys like it, happy to help out anyone else trying to get one of these boards going