prototype board question

[Will-i-am]

I recently acquired two great classic amigas jacked up to the hilt with lots of boards and stuff like that. In the "stuff like that box" was a prototype board the folks who sent me the stuff had. I believe they were essentially working on making an '060 Amiga mobo for some reason or another. Since both amigas they sent had CyberstormPPC/060 cards, that seems reasonable. I kept the board for parts but lately I had this mad concept of powering it up, adding what you need to make it work and all, and seeing if I could, in fact, make an '060 'puter from scratch. If this were possible with my limited training....actually non-existant training....would attempting to load the OS 3.9 be a good idea, assuming it has all the special chips, or should I be thinking Linux? I have one Linux box running and this old thing here...a Sony Vaio...is soon going to be a dual-boot beast, and just cause I am a glutton for distractions...bad back pain all the time...I would like to try to do something with this board rather than pry parts out of it. Any concepts? comments? seem too crazy to be encouraged? I also have a 1960 Willys pickup in need of work, but I live in the NE and being on my back in the gravel in winter is not an option.

[the_leander]

power it up by all means, but the chances of running AOS-whatever version are highly unlikely. AmigaOS requires the custom chipset to run (Exceptions being a modified version for the Drako line of computers, and AmigaOS 4 for AmigaOne) or software emulation thereof.

But who knows, you might well have a missing link system there, and even if it blows, who cares? it won't effect your amigas.

A word of warning though, don't connect anything to it that you can't readily replace or afford to loose.

Oh and good luck :-D

[odin]

Pics! We want pics! Loads of them! In a very high resolution!

Weird prototypes rule :-).

[Orjan]

I second that! :-)

[bloodline]

I think you should photograph the unit as much as possible before you power it on, then let all of us here study the photos (someone might see a potentially Amiga fatal short on the set up).

Building an 060 board wouldn't be too hard... I would say... running AmigaOS on it would be though.

[MrZammler]

Yeap, photos please!

[Argo]

Wow!, someone from NY that is above Albany - Syracuse.

Yes, please post detail pictures to the gallery. From whom did you acquire these boards?

[odin]

I'll bet it's a working Nyx  :crazy:

[bloodline]

odin wrote:
I'll bet it's a working Nyx  :crazy:

Nyx wansn't 060 :-(

Yes, let's see what goodies you have!
 :-D

[Dan]

[bloodline]

Dan wrote:

bloodline wrote:
Building an 060 board wouldn't be too hard... I would say... running AmigaOS on it would be though.

So run AROS then :-P

How did you guess? ;-)

[Will-i-am]

Geez, I didn't expect so much attention... You got to understand that I may be an Amiga devotee, I have no hardware training. The guys who had this stuff worked for a company called Atlantis, a sub of Phillips. They designed 4D sonogram hardware/software and since it was imaging they used Amigas. When they went to NT/Linux they used the Amigas as doorstops and when they sold them on in-house auction a buddy bought the tower and the desktop plus a box of stuff for $7.50 (AmaxII plus, EGS Spectrum, ethernet etc). So I got 2 CyberstormPPC cards, everything in the A4000's and what was in the box. This board, as I examine it now is designed to fit into the CPU slot on the 4000 mobo, except it clearly is too large for a desktop, so it was either a rack-mount, a tower or just a table top with no case. Larry included it because he saw it had an '060 and thought it could be a spare for the Cyberstorms. I have NO idea what will happen if I plug it in and power it up. For one thing, the daughter board rack is in the way, if you know what I mean. The front of the case is in the way so I have to detach it or bend the front down. The card itself is about 3/4 the size of the mobo with the '060, two scsi slots...one slightly broken from some jerk being impatient...two lengths also...three ram slots, don't know what kind yet....several chips from "ALTERA", some chips with hand-lettered labels. I'm pretty sure it's meant to be a single processor accelerator board. Kinda neat actually because it has every appearance of having been used. Trouble is, the engineers who made it either don't work there any more or don't know what they did with it. It's a prototype, that's all. But what would it do?? What got me hot was when I realized the holes on the board matched the pegs on the Amiga mobo. So it wasn't designed to be a whole different computer, it was designed to DO something for an Amiga. Cool, eh? I may combine some parts from my Intergraph 2000 workstations that I'm tearing apart. Scsi HD's, psu, etc. Might be fun. What's the worst that could happen? I have 3 A4000 already and two of the Intergraph boxes.... :-D

[JonoPike]

@Will-i-am
Yeah, nice story... What about some photo's,
so we can see what you're talking about.

[X-ray]

Will...


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