prototype board question

[Morley]

@will-i-am

When I saw your post, I didn't know what to say... loosing your friend is one thing, but seeing him pass away in such a state is something I never could have handled.

Sorry to hear about your loss, condolances from Norway to you...

[Karlos]

@Will-i-am

What can you even say? That is simply tragic. My sincere condolences :-(

[x56h34]

@Will-i-am

Hang in there. Chin up. Life goes on.

[adz]

@Will-i-am

I offer my sincerest condolences to you and all involved, I hope everybody gets through this ok.

[OSS542]

I would also like to add my sincere condolences...
been there....

My old friend was also an Amiga expert who was almost single handedly responsible for starting and maintaining a large and very active Amiga community in the Western NY and Toronto areas back in the mid 1980's and early 90's.  I bought one of my first Amigas from him when they first came out.  I still have and treasure it (and still use it, old as it is....it's never failed.)

I moved away back in 1996 to take a job in Japan.  I went back on vacation to visit relatives (and him) some years later.  I called his old office and was greeted with the oddest silence on the other end before they finally realized who I was.  It turned out he had passed away about 8 months before, and no one had told me.

If you have an old friend you haven't called in a while, do it now....you never know....

[Framiga]

Dear William,

no one will be able to replace your friend but, when you will be ready, we (here at AOrg) will proud to help you or at least to attemp to.

All my best

Franco
 

[Will-i-am]

Well, back home from Phoenix and delivering Larry's ashes. I'm surounded by all these lovely computers just waiting for "Mr. Wizard" to figure out what I'm doing wrong. My chronic back pain and my son being in such a state and all the meds I take make it hard to think clearly most of the time and Larry could poke around, find a solution and explain it so clearly to me that even through the meds I could repeat it. Folks, seriously.... it means a great deal to me that you were so kind in your posts. I'm nobody to you, just another crazy Miggy devotee and you reached out. I have the philosophy that kindness binds the earth together. I'll plug away and let you know if something interesting happens on this beast here sitting on my desk mocking me..."No Larry to bail you out, eh?" That's okay. Larry said the damn thing should boot and by golly if I am careful and remember to document what I did to what I should be able to figure why it just sits there. Bottom line: it's just another way to make an Amiga run better, so if I am forced to manage with my Cyberstorm, I suppose I can do that too. Unless it's that jumper pin I moved....when did I do that? Where did I put it? What the heck is that pile of hard drives doing over on that shelf??? Why couldn't Larry have lasted another few days? Or maybe many decades...? damn.

[Doobrey]

@Will-i-am,
   Sorry to hear about your friend, I kinda know what you`re going through (Gran passed away a couple of weeks back).
 One thing I`ve learnt, the more you think about them, the easier it gets. I know it sounds wierd, but it helped me a lot, especially thinking about the stupid/little things from over the years, it just brings a smile to my face and makes me glad I was part of her life.
  Anyway, about that A4000..there`s no such thing as a stupid question, so don`t be afraid to ask.
 It`s often something infuriatingly simple, such as when Xray`s A4000 became unstable, it turned out the plastic spacers under the CPU card were the wrong length for that card !

[Effy]

Sorry to hear about your friend. He seemed one of kind and most likely you will never have such a friend again. Never try to forget him, it just won´t work. Try to remember as many good things as possible and thank him for having made your life richer ...
As for Amiga.org, this is totally different then pc boards, we are all not only devoted to the Amiga itself but also to the community. This forum is here to help eachother and not only at soft and hardware but in this case also emotionally. When you see so many time ´sorry to hear about your friend´ then these guys mean it !!

[Framiga]

The ATL CPU PCB was designed around the GVP design. In fact it identifies as a GVP PCB on bootup. I think we purchased the design rights so we could make our own version. It will handle 16Mbyte and smaller RAM, so its maximum is 64Mbytes. Some place at work I have a real A4000T CPU PCB. I will try to find it and send it along as well."

this is a good clue to start.

If it was designed around the GVP design, it could be T-Rex-II (GVP 4060) compliant.

http://www.amiga-hardware.com/gvp4060.html

http://www.gregdonner.org/gvp4060/gvp4060.html

Bye

[Will-i-am]

Again, thanks so much everybody for the kind words. One of the way I am working through my loss is to reinstall the '060 card and see what I can do to fire it up. It occurs to me that when Larry installed the Cyberstorm he would have installed the software for it first, and probably the '060 libraries vary from the original libraries running the '060 card. That being said, knowing Larry...very patient, very orderly thinker... he would have backed up the libraries and other files. Now we just have to hope that they weren't hacked libraries in case in a fit of youthful enthusiasm I lost the files by installing OS 3.9. I think I put the original HD aside for that very reason but my meds make my memory unreliable, so as I begin the reconstruction process I guess I better start by writing everything down. Seems obvious, but try to remember that I am by inclination a sculptor and Larry was the Alpha Geek! I do rocks and clay and wood very nicely. I just happen to have fallen in love with the Amiga when I first saw the juggler on a 500!

[Effy]

Will-i-am : it´s not what education you have or what work you do or not, it´s how you use your skills to get the most out of your Amiga´s (in this case). At Amiga it´s all about teaching yourself because it´s hard to use an Amiga when you have done a Windows crash course. So don´t think a rocket scientist will have it much easier than you. Most rocket scientist will never have a friend like Larry  :-)

[Doobrey]

@Will-i-am.
  You don`t really need the '060 library to check if the Cyberstorm card works.
  On boot, get the early startup menu by pressing both mouse buttons, and select 'boot with no startup sequence'.
 That`ll stop setpatch trying to load the 68060.library and you should be able to copy the correct libs over from a floppy.
 The latest libs are available at vapor`s ftp site here

[Will-i-am]

 "You don`t really need the '060 library to check if the Cyberstorm card works."
I know the Cyberstorm works...it's installed in the tower as we speak. It's the '060 card I'm talking about. Larry took it out of the tower to make sure the Cyberstorm worked and once he knew it did he left it there for me. Probably figured the dual processor was better than just the '060 on a one-of-a-kind card. My concern, for what it's worth, was just that the Cyberstorm needs to have it's software installed before you place the card, according to the instructions. If the people at ATL had made special '060 libraries to run their funny card, the Cybertsorm might have overwritten those files. I'm hoping/betting that Larry backed up the appropriate files before installing the Cyberstorm software. For me the problem now is figuring out which of the various HDs he sent me is the original which booted the '060 card. I'm 99% sure there's an issue with the libraries because when I swapped the '060 back into the tower nothing happened...no boot, no lights, nothing AND on the 3.1 install disk that came with the beast there's a piece of masking tape with a mention of the '060 libraries, as if to point out a modified install floppy different from the other install floppies. For one reason or another some of these disks have CRC errors and/or bad blocks. I have to assemble a good deck of disks which will get the '060 card running. There might also be a problem with HD ports etc. Larry sent me the card with a note saying if nothing else I could use the '060 chip as a spare for the Cyberstorm!

[X-ray]

Okay people, I finally got hold of the right Philips engineer, the guy who knows about the ATL machines (here in the UK).
Anyway, it is not good news. Apparently all the units in operation at the moment were either converted to Winblows or have been redesigned for Winblows (or NT or whatever). When I asked him what happened to the Amiga boards and the Amiga hardware, he told me that Philips sends all their defunct or obsolete hardware to an enviromentally-friendly recycling plant where they are 'melted'.
I felt like saying  :furious: but I told him that there would definitely be people who would buy those boards (I'm sure we could buy them for under £50). But he said Philips would not be interested in such a 'small' market. So they won't sell to us but will instead have them recycled  :-?

[Will-i-am]

Well, that sounds about right for a multi-national corporation. Here's more bad/good news: the tower is blazing merrily along on this '060 card. The only trouble I have with it now is the number of my favorite programs which break under os 3.9. The card itself, once you locate the right '060 libraries, is just fine. So I have the Cyberstorm running in the desktop A4000 and the Beast with it's one-of-a-kind (apparently) '060 card. This reminds me of the time I saw several Intergraph CADD workstations in the dumpster behind my office at Dept. of Transportation (NY) They had their 18x20 digitising tablets, 15 button mice, 19" monitors... and dual processor cpus. I dragged two out of the dumpster and took them home to discover that not only did they work just fine, they had all their software intact, except for data files! That means enough civil engineering stuff to design an entire highway system. But they were running under unix and Intergraph had stopped supporting unix, so DOT dumpped their machines. The next day they had noticed that someone had salvaged two machines so they had the rest of them up on pallets with miles of shrink wrappping to make sure nobody else got any use of them. They were going to be crushed and buried!! The Law wouldn't even allow them to be given away to local schools, even if wiped of their software. I still have them, and my good old pal Larry even came thru on that one. I told him that the hardware was all propriatory so I could not use the extra monitor I had with my amigas. When he visited this last time, the time he collapsed and died on us... he had brought me the adaptor that would allow me to connect the monitor to a PC. It was a several hundred dollar thingy that someone at the office was throwing out. I guess Philips had one of those unix workstations and did the same thing DOT did. Go figure.