Minimig won't boot

[salab]

Hi everyone

After few years I decided to dust off my minimig as my kid gets older and I wanted to show him some oldschool stuff before he finds out X360, PS3 and so on.

The problem is that Minimig is not booting anymore.

What happened:

1) Minimig SD card is missing after we moved to new house, so I do not have old minimig1.bin and kick.rom files I used with it

2) I had hdd problem last year and lost my Amiga stuff (I already downloaded 90% of this, but have no idea what exact minimig1.bin/kick.rom combination I used with my Minimig)

3) I downloaded new files, formatted new card and put everything all together again, but Minimig do not boot anymore. All it does it blinking very fast drive led quite many times (it is to fast to count it) for about 4secs, then it stops and only main blue and red power leds lights. No video signal at all.


Is there any chance to get it working again except reflashing it? I remember I had some problems with it few years ago :/

Any advice is welcome

[OCS_User]

I would like to help out here.

First of all its important to know, what MCU (controller chip) is used on your Minimig board.
Is it the original PIC chip or the ARM controller?

PIC is a slim TTL-looking chip fitting the slim socket between SD-card slot and the MENU button.
ARM controller is an additional pcb (board) covering the SD-card slot with an micro-USB port at its left side.

After knowing this, there are 2 ways to get you Minimig back to work:
1. finding out the current Firmware release working in PIC or ARM chip and than using matching FPGA core (Minimig1.bin file) version.

2. Updating the PIC or ARM to its current release.

Fashing PIC is a bit hard because it only can be done via RS232 (serial) connection to a PC or real Amiga.

Flashing ARM will be easy if the Minimig is showing a Kickstart screen. Otherwise the ARM need an USB update with a special Atmel tool called SAM-BA or SAM-PROG running in Windows or Linux.

If you can remember any feature of the OSD menu when Minimig was running, it could be helpful finding the right FPGA core version.

You also could try out some releases until the matching version is found.
FPGA cores are stored here for download: https://code.google.com/p/minimig/downloads/list
Everything named Fxxxxx (F = FPGA) or full binary release can be used.
Just try all the available Minimig1.bin files in the archives, at least one will work right.

After the board is working again, an update to current release 100818 for PIC and ARM and also at least for the FPGA is recommend.
To enjoy most compatibility and features the current FPGA release FSB131020 will be right.

If there is any question left, I will try to help on.
Maybe the http://www.minimig.net forum will be better/faster since I am online almost every day there (known as boing4000).