A2000HD - what can I do to upgrade....

[Rooster]

SO I had this big thing typed up and apparently tripped the timer for inactivity and lost my post..  (Will be copyign to notepad first this time..)

Hi..  I'm new to the forums here..  Been an avid Amiga 500 user in the past (when it first came out..), it's been garaged for a little over 10 years..

Came across an A2000 (2000HD, as it turned out) with a "Vid Tech Scanlock" unit, Commodore monitor, 2 3.5's, and key/mouse..  Got some questions for ya guys:

1.  Instead of using the scanlock device and a SVGA cable to my TV, I'd like to actually use the monitor.  Problem is, he did not have the correct 9-pin to (I'm guessing) 25-pin cable.  He did have a 95-pin to a rounded (maybe 5 or 6 pin) cable (looks similar to a keyboard plug) which he thought went to that monitor from either the scanlock or amiga directly (if I didn't want to use the scanlock).  Just kind of wanted to verify what the number of pins on a stock monitor to Amiga 2000 hookup should be, so I can start ebaying, or possibly cut and rewire a 9-pin connector on that unused cable he had..

2.  ROM is a 1.3, with a workbench 34.20.  Found a place that cerries em, not sure what to get..  One site listed the 2.04 as the latest for the A2k, others have reported using like 3.1's..  What can I use?  And related to that question, what workbench can I run on it?  I know my A500 was updated at least once, and I remember it being all gray, and 3d-ish, compared to the A2K.  Honestly not sure what the A500 had in it anymore - Getting ready to revive it tomorrow and find out!  

3.  Max RAM..  Read somewhere 8 or 9 MB is max..  What type/size of RAM does the 2000 use?  I can use 30-pin SIMM's (that era's PC memory) for instance?

4.  Tied in with #3..  I want to max this beast out.  Make it the baddest "farily-common part" A2K..  Nothing ultra rare, and therefore expensive, but..  What all can I slap in this to make it "the best of what it was"?

5.  When the system turns on, there's simply a white screen until a CLI with the ROM/version info comes up..  On the A500, I rememebr there being various logo's, dependig on which ROM or kickstart/workbench (whatever controlled that!!) was being used.  Is this white screen normal, or is it a side-effect of using this "scanlock" device?  By example, the animated disk going into the drive...  Even with my supra SCSI HD, I still remember seeing something.?

6.  The Vid Tech Scanlock VSL-A-N...  This was his method..  This device (made for an Amiga, it seems, though I've never heard of it) hooks to the video port on the Ami, and then offers various outputs and inputs..  Haven't monkied around with it, except to hook up a SVHS cable to it when I couldn't get anything to hook up to the monitor (see above).  Ironically, the documentation for it (a photocopy) shows the Amiga monitor sitting on top of it!  Ideas/comments welcome..  What I'm wondering is should I try and find a way to make this device work with the Ami monitor?  or bypass it completely with (hopefully) a computer to monitor cable (that is missing)?  Anyone use one of these things?  I read something elsewhere (some post about not having a RGB/Commodore monitor anymore) and they were saying some games/programs will not work because they need the RGB native resolutions or something, and that devices which seemed to fit the description of this one, prevent/cannot support that..  

Sorry for being so long-winded.  I'm all giddy about finding this..  Been going through disks all day long, checking out files, music/pics/games..  Can't belive after literally 10 years of sitting in a garage, EVERY one of the floppies I've tried has worked fine.  Maybe it was 10 years of use, not 10 years of life..  Anyway, tomorrow I'm off to dig up hopefully all the parts of my A500 (got it and the PS, gotta track down the SCSI expansion) and start tinkering/comparing the two..  I doubt I have the HD anymore that it came with (a 20MB, I believe) but I know I've got some old 650MB's sitting around..  Finding this thing has certainly brought me back to the scene..  Now I can show my son what a REAL computer can do, even though it's dated and aged..  

Thanks in advance for any comments/suggestions/ideas you may have.  I appreciate you taking the time!

   Rooster



 

[Darklight]

Hey, welcome to Amiga.org  :pint:

I'll try to answer some of your questions, others will fill in whatever I don't know,  :-) .  Whereabouts are you, btw  :-? .

1.  The A2000 video out is a 23 pin plug, which changes to a 9 pin plug on the monitor side.  The plug that goes into the back of my 1084S only has 5 actual pins in the plug, but it is a 9 pin socket.  There are also 23 pin to SCART cables around as well.

2. The 2.04 rom is the latest one that was actually shipped with an A2000.  However, there are 3.1 roms available.  (3.1 is the latest version).  There are several shops around that sell them, try amigakit or Software Hut.  AnythingAmiga in Australia also sells them.  You can also 'Softkick' your A2000 to 3.1, but you'll need a legitimate ROM image.  Workbench version goes with Rom revision - 1.3 can run WB 1.3, KS 2.04 can run WB 2.0 and 2.1 as well as 1.3, KS 3.0 can run 1.3, 2.0, 2.1 and 3.0, and 3.1 can run all of them up to 3.9.  Sounds like your A500 was running 2.0.

3. A2000's have a max of 1mb Chip ram without the use of a device like DKB's Megachip.  You can then add up to (I think)8mb fast by putting some on your A2091 SCSI card, or on RAM expansion boards.  I've got 1 mb chip in mine, plus 5 mb fast on the A2091 and a Ram board.  You can then add more if you use an accelerator board.

4. Well, there's a few 030 expansions you can find.  The 2500 came with an 030 Accelerator card in it that ran at 30mhz instead of 7.  GVP made them, as well as DKB and Commodore.  Search eBay, A2000 accelerators turn up all the time.  I'd say the GVP cards are probably more common on eBay.  Throw one of them in, plus a graphics card, and you'll have a nice 3.9 ready 2000.  You also might want to look at getting a 100mb SCSI Zip drive, they're easy to configure and a great way to back up stuff.

5. The Kickstart logo (White screen with hand) will only come up if you don't have a hard drive.  If one is detected, it will immediately boot from that, so you won't see the screen.  I don't know why you still saw it with your Supra SCSI HD though  :-?

6. Don't know too much about the Scanlock thing.  If you can get the monitor cable, I'd say bypass it completely, but you will get quite good quality with that if you use it to display on a TV.  It's much better than using a 520 RF modulator.  

Hope that's been some help.  :-D

EDIT - Also, make sure you check out The Big Book of Amiga Hardware.  This should answer any questions you have about most hardware oriented stuff.

[X-ray]

Welcome, Rooster!

Don't forget to check the battery on that A2000, for leaking. There are quite a few members here who have changed theirs for coin cells.

[Noster]

Hi, welcome at Amiga.org,

here are some more informations:

1. The monitor you describe seems to be a 1084S or 1085S (9 pin plug). The older monitors like the 1081 or 1084 have a scart-connector (like a TV).
Try to get a cable via eBay (or if you have experience in soldering and the right connector, change your existing cable).

2. If you want to build an Amiga that is somehow usefull (and not just for playing the old games) you should look out for Kickstart 3.1. Maybe you should try to get a complete OS 3.1 set incl. the manuals. The OS 3.1 manuals are very good and informative.
A Kickstart Rom could be gained via Vesalia (if you are from Germany or central europe): http://www.vesalia.de/
The default Workbenchscreen is still grey, but you could change the colors to your own taste.

3. If your Amiga has only 512KB Chip-ram, there is an easy hack to change to 1MB chip using a newer Agnus. I'll search for the link if you are interested.
To add fast-ram (upto 8 MB) you will need a ram-expansion card (or maybe you own a SCSI-controller that supports additional ram). Usually you have to add some kind of single ram-chips (e.g. ZIP-ram) to these cards. These chips are very hard to find, try ebay.

5. I think your Supra SCSI HD for the A500 could be shut-off with a switch, then you could see the boot-logo.

6. The Scanlock seems to be usefull, if you want to connect a video-recorder to your Amiga. The monitor should be connected direct to the Amigas monitor-port. You should try to find the correct name of the Scanlock and search here for a description:
http://amiga.resource.cx/

General: Have a look into the Aminet, here you find thousands of programms, tools, hacks, and documentation for the Amiga:
http://ftp.uni-paderborn.de/aminet
And you have to open your case to have a closer look to the parts (boards) placed in the Amiga.

AND AS ALREADY SAID: CHECK THE BATTERY!!!! If it is leaking, cut it off. You could replace it later, the Amiga will run without it, you just have to set the clock everytime you power-on the machine.

Noster

[Darklight]

Of course!  The battery, how could I forget that  :-o
If you need a reason to check the battery, look in the A2000 hardware section, and check out my photo (I think it's the second one) of a badly battery damaged mobo  :-(

[Rooster]

Wow, thanks for all the replies already!!  

First off, spent the morning digging up A500 stuff..  Luckily I DID find the RGB cable for it, so now I can use it (and my new A2K) with the real monitor instead of the TV via that scanlock device.  Yea!!

Second, can't track down my SupraDrive, lol..  Seems I didn't store it with my A500 or the peripheral box, so it's awol at the moment (sux because I'd like to see what I had on the drive).  It does have the 2.0 chip in it.  And I have the 2.1 Workbench disks..  So all I need is to track down that supradrive and that thing will be "running great" again, for now, it's the boot off floppy method.

Getting ready to crack the A2K case now, and check out among other things, that battery situation.  Will likely report back with the findings and what's in there if anything additional/unknown.  

Did have a question about to the person regarding the ROM boot..  How can I do that?  Would be interested in getting 2.0 on the 2K before I order that 3.1 ROM/Workbench..  If there's a site/link that'd be cool, don't need a step by step in here, at least I think..  hehe

Ohh..  Accelerators and vid cards that were mentioned..  IS the A2K limited to the 030 or can I use the 040 as well?  Also, what kind of vidcard options are there?  I'm assuming they are Amiga-based cards, not PC ones?  (Remember my life on Amiga has been a 500 - What's inside is what I had, lol)..  Well cept for the memory add-on port, and the HDD, and the digitizer (which I also can't find - though I found the camera and the color wheel...)

[Karlos]

Rooster wrote:

Ohh..  Accelerators and vid cards that were mentioned..  IS the A2K limited to the 030 or can I use the 040 as well?  

Sure. There were even a few 68060 cards for the A2000. I expect they are quite pricey and hard to obtain now though.

Hell, before they went bust, phase5 designed the Blizzard 2604 (a 68060 + PPC604e) but although DCE now own the rights, I don't think any production runs were ever made.

-edit-

list of A2000 accelerator cards here...

[Rooster]

"The innards revealed"

Ok, after a finger slicing incident on the last card and a bandage, I'm back to report the findings...

Card #1 - 8-UP! Memory expansion Board. Many empty slots in both vertical and horizontal rows, but 1 row in each direction is filled.. (Time to find that IC # and max it out, woot!!)

Card #2 - Modem!  Made by Supra Corp.. Model 30-0053-4..  Not a fullsize card, incidentally - has a seperate cord to the bracket..

Card #3 - SCSI Card - GVP HardCard A2000 HC2 Model # 015-HC-13701.  Thinking maybe my find was not a A2000HD, but an A2000 with an add-on SCSI..  Assumedly an A2000HD would ship with a Commodore SCSI card, right?  Still, a card is a card at this point..  FWiT, also has external SCSI hookup (time to dig out my old 6-disc scsi cd-rom changers...)  I could not fidn this card in the amihardware website..  Found reference to it on a site doing a google search, but the site was being redone/or moving or something..

Card #4 - An Accelerator card!! (woot) The Commodore 2620.  At first this made me very happy and suprised, till I read the AmigaHardware websites data on it, specifically:

"boot ROMs below rev 6 are incompatible with Kickstart 2.0 and above
the ROM address space overlaps the upper 256 kB of the 512 kB Kickstart ROMs (Kickstart 1.3 is 256 kB only)
by the time AmigaOS loads, the boot ROMs are supposed to be off but due to a bug in the A26x0 ROM code they remain active, causing an address space collision
fitting a rev 6 or 7 ROM pair solves the problem
some boards are reported being incompatible with the newer ROMs either"

And as you may have guessed, my chips are labeled top one as a V5, bottom one as a V4.  So I'll either be ROM hunting or just not worry about it if I can still snag a faster card..

Am curious about a slot that sits right next to the power supply.  Silkscreen says CN203.  Board rev. is 4.2..  I thought this is where the accel. card would've gone until I found an accel card in my system!  Now I'm wondering what this is, all by itself..  Only other thing I can think of is some type of additonal RAM slot or something?

Also - Took digital pictures of everything..  All cards, various case pics, some of the IC's, etc..  Just in case anyone wants to see something, or if someone is trying to match up real photos with components..

Took pics of the battery..  Looked fine, but I think I'll take the advice on desoldering it anyway, and rigging a replacement.  The guy used it fairly often for video work (text overlays, I'm guessing, unless he removed a card to sell (toaster/digitizer/something)..  There is an open slot in the back, by the connecters that are close to the brackets.

[Darklight]

Well, it seems like you got a good deal  :-)

The A2000HD did indeed come with a Commodore A2091 SCSI card, so yours is probably just a 2000 with a GVP SCSI card added.  

With the accelerator, you're probably better shelving it and looking for an 030 or something.  I saw a GVP 030 go for US $30 on eBay a while ago, so they're not particularly hard to track down.  If your 020 is incompatible with anything but 1.3, I don't think it's worth the hassle of using it, I can't see any reason for using an accelerator under 1.3  :lol:  
x56h34 on this forum has a whole bunch of Amiga stuff, he was advertising an 060 A2000 accelerator card, so you might want to send him a PM.
With the battery, your best bet is to desolder it, then replace it with a lithium coin battery.  You'll have to solder a diode between the positive side and the battery so the motherboard doesn't attempt to charge it.

With the softkicking thing, you need SKick345 from Aminet, and then you need an image of the A2000 3.1 rom, which is 40.63 (same as the 500).  Once you have those two, just read the instructions in the Skick file, and then run the program, select the 40.63 rom, turn off patching and you're all set.

Another thing you might want to do is get a null-modem cable and connect it between your A2000 and a PC with net access.  This allows you to download stuff from Aminet and transfer it across, until you buy a network card.  

[Rooster]

regarding the Skick345--

Had already downloaded it and was reading the docs on it (just here on my PC).  Thought about grabbing the null-modem (got one from the A500 days, lol) but didn't, becuase everything in the docs says you have to have a 2.0 ROM to start, and that it's used to boot back in the 1.3 or 3.x's..  Since it seems the 2.x ROM's were incompat. with 1.3's that games were written for?  Or something like that..  I'll send the file over and see what options/abilities it has just in case.

[adz]

@Rooster

Hi and welcome to a.org :-)

...SCSI hookup (time to dig out my old 6-disc scsi cd-rom changers...)...

Hmmm, what model changer? Never had much luck with changers myself, ended up giving them away, I'm curious as to what software you intend on using to control the changer.

Am curious about a slot that sits right next to the power supply.  Silkscreen says CN203.  Board rev. is 4.2..  I thought this is where the accel. card would've gone until I found an accel card in my system!  Now I'm wondering what this is, all by itself..  Only other thing I can think of is some type of additonal RAM slot or something?

Nope, thats the video slot.

[Rooster]

@ adz:

Wow, so the video card upgrade options go there, eh, and not to a slot by the traditional slots/brackets? (love those technical terms)

The SCSI as a Pioneer 6-disk changer..  Actually have 2 of em..  Used em for when I ran a BBS on the 500 (think it was GAP BBS, or at least I have alot of GAPBBS disks...) then eventually they moved to a PC for running WorldGroups/Major BBS.  

The driver lurks on my SupraDrive, which still hasn't turned up yet, though I might(HOPE) have a driver for it on floppy.. Got like 100 floppies to go through!  TO be fair, I believe the "driver" tricked the ami., Not certain anymore..  Just remember it worked, but not always, when it came to switching disks..  Always read disk#1 though.  Had other various SCSI cdrom's but all the rest have been pitched or donated to other buddies in years past.  

[SamuraiCrow]

@Rooster

To boot off of DF1: or anything other than a hard drive or df0: you'll need KickStart 2 or newer.

I wouldn't get too excited over that video slot unless you want to become an amateur video producer with a NewTek Video Toaster card.  Video cards that are worth their weight have their own DAC and will plug into a regular Zorro card slot (the DAC in an A2000 is only 12-bit color and most video applications will look more impressive on 24-bit video).

[adz]

@Rooster

Wow, so the video card upgrade options go there, eh, and not to a slot by the traditional slots/brackets? (love those technical terms)

You can also install a A2320 Amber Scan Doubler/Flicker Fixer board into the video slot so you can run the machine on a SVGA monitor. However, you can get a Zorro II based video card which is probably the better option.

The SCSI as a Pioneer 6-disk changer.. Actually have 2 of em.. Used em for when I ran a BBS on the 500 (think it was GAP BBS, or at least I have alot of GAPBBS disks...) then eventually they moved to a PC for running WorldGroups/Major BBS.

The driver lurks on my SupraDrive, which still hasn't turned up yet, though I might(HOPE) have a driver for it on floppy.. Got like 100 floppies to go through! TO be fair, I believe the "driver" tricked the ami., Not certain anymore.. Just remember it worked, but not always, when it came to switching disks.. Always read disk#1 though. Had other various SCSI cdrom's but all the rest have been pitched or donated to other buddies in years past.

I would be interested in getting my hands on said driver, PM me if you find it :-)

[Amiga4k]

I have both Pioner 6 bay and Nakamichi 7 bay changers.
All work flawlessly with the software that operates them. It's  a bit comical to watch the changers in action, assigning the individual CD's, the screen filling up with 28 CD Icons (just for the Nakamichi's).