A2386SX bridgeboard problems

[murple]

I bought the bridgeboard countzero was selling, see:
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=30396

I've been trying to get this damn thing to work... maybe countzero or someone else can help.

I put the board into my Amiga 2000. It was in there for about 2 days, I hadnt had time to install the software yet. Then last night, my computer began spontaneously crashing. Instead of booting, it gave me a red flashing screen, or sometimes it would boot and give me errors telling me that various system programs in C/ were not executable (!?!?). I was able to power it up and get to the boot menu (holding down both mouse buttons) and when I went into expansion board diagnostics and it said the bridgeboard was defective. I took it out and the Amiga is back to its normal working state, thank god.

Looking at the board, the lithium hack seems to have made the battery useless. Only one end of the battery (the side with the diode) is actually connected to anything. The other end has popped out and theres a cold solder joint where the battery should be connected. I dont see any tracings on the board there, so I hope the circuit board is intact. I'll have to see if I can find my soldering iron and try to repair that, although the lead on the battery doesnt seem like its quite long enough to go through the board. I dont think that this should be causing the problems though, because (in a normal full PC at least) the lack of a battery just means BIOS settings are reset to default every time power is turned off. Its something that needs fixing, but it shouldn't make the board nonfunctional.

I've pressed down on all the chips to make sure none are loose in their sockets. They all seem OK.

Does anyone know what kinds of things might cause the flashing red behavior and Amiga crashes this board seems to be related to? What are some useful diagnostics? I'm going to try testing it on my second A2000 because I dont want to risk it killing my main Amiga. I'd really like to get this thing working. Ive never had a bridgeboard before though and I'm not sure what kind of debugging steps give useful information.

I did some forum searches and I found a few posts where countzero said he thought this board was defective. I wish that had been mentioned in the post where he was selling it, as I probably wouldn't have dropped $160 on it then. However the listing of it for sale had some photos of it supposedly working, and he claims it worked for him after he ripped out some RAM ().

Anyone have any ideas, or did I get ripped off?

[countzero]

Hello, you are not ripped off. I stand by my board and if you think it's defective you can always send it back to me and I'll refund your money whenever you like.

now we've set this clear, I tested the board on an A3000. You might be experiencing zorro2 space problems. Do you have other cards installed ? The battery definitely won't kill the board, it was fine before I sent it your way.

[murple]

What do you mean "Zorro 2 space problems"? I have 2 Zorro cards installed, so that means I have PLENTY of free slots. This card needs to be in one of the Zorro slots which are in line with the ISA slots, which is where I put it. I have nothing else using the ISA or Zorro+ISA slots. I will try it in my other Amiga with no other cards installed, but I'm not sure why that would make much difference.

Maybe the battery was fine when you sent it, but when I got it, there is only one end connected. The hole where the other end should go has some solder on it, but it is a cold joint and the battery is not connected to it. That should be easy to fix though.

Why did your old posts say it was defective? Just because of the RAM that you took out?

[countzero]

It never said it was defective. This board ALWAYS showed up in the early config menu as working. However, I couldn't get it to work 1st due to incompatible driver disk I got off amiga hardware database (the download is for A2286 disk which has an incompatible janus.library), 2nd I insisted on using 4mb ZIP ram I was sure to be working, which turned out be defective (I verified this on my octagon board). Even with the faulty ram, it showed up as WORKING on the config menu. Though the janus.library didn't load properly, giving one long three short beeps. So I switched to 1mb ram, and everything was fine.

Now, I think you should learn some facts about the machine you're trying to use before you accuse people with ripping off ppl. Zorro2 bus has a limited memory space (8mb). All cards you install occupy a portion of this memory space, and anything over 8mb is unusable because of 68000 addressing limitations (Even if you have a 68020+ Zorro2 has this limitation). The faulty board notification in the early startup shows the bridgeboard is conflicting with some of your boards. Take your boards out and try again.

[murple]

The cards in my system are:

1 GVP G-Force 68030 accelerator/SCSI card, in the CPU slot. The manual specifically says it works fine with this bridgeboard.

1 OpalVision graphics card, in the video slot.

1 8MB RAM card. This is the only thing in the Zorro slots, until I added your card. I dont think that having 2 cards in there is going to max out the bus memory.

And I was referring to http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=30069 where it says "Commodore A2386SX Bridgeboard(this one may be defective)" and other posts where you say it just beeps.

If anybody has any idea how to try and troubleshoot this thing before I send it to the electronics recycler, I'd love to try and get it working.

[countzero]

you definitely have to take out the 8mb ram card. That alone fills up the whole zorro2 space ! Or configure it to 4mb.

[murple]

When I bought this computer, it had the 8MB Zorro card installed as well as several other Zorro cards which were all working. I removed the other cards because I didnt need them (stuff like serial and parallel interfaces) and was thinking of selling them on ebay. That makes me kind of skeptical that the 8MB Zorro RAM card means you can't use any other Zorro cards.

Like I said, I will try this in my other Amiga 2000 with no other cards. If it works in there, I will try taking the RAM card out of my main computer and put the busboard in there. If it shows up as broken in the other computer too, I'm just going to give up on it.

[countzero]

don't give up on it cause it's a good card. As I said before, I can refund your money whenever you like.

Serial and parallel interfaces take up only 64k on the zorro2 space, and they have a special location reserved for them. See amiga system memory map here. Your 8mb ram board takes up all the auto config space (20000-9FFFFF). Your IO boards are placed in secondary auto config space (E90000-EFFFFF). The bridgeboard occupies 2mb from main autoconfig space.

amiga hardware database

when installed, only 6 MB of the Zorro II address space is left for other expansion cards

you're definitely having a conflict with the ram card. Just take it off. It's slow as hell anyway when compared to fast ram on your GVP.

[Ilwrath]

I removed the other cards because I didnt need them (stuff like serial and parallel interfaces) and was thinking of selling them on ebay. That makes me kind of skeptical that the 8MB Zorro RAM card means you can't use any other Zorro cards.

Well, an interface card will probably only take 64kb address space and no additional RAM out of the memory map.  

I think what countzero is aiming at is he is thinking that the Z2 RAM on the 2386 is conflicting with the Z2 RAM on your 8MB board.  I'd say he's probably right, as there is only one 8MB RAM window on the Z2 bus.  If you added another Z2 RAM card, you'd be in the same boat.  (You can't just add 2 Z2 8MB RAM cards to get 16MB.  doesn't work that way.)

Now, why the Amiga used to boot, and then later didn't that I'm not sure about...  But a bus memory conflict could cause random reboots/crashes.

(HAH! and countzero edited his response and beat me to exactly what he was saying!  :lol:  that'll teach me for trying to speak on someone's behalf!)

[Zac67]

countzero's right: the A2386SX tries to allocate RAM space which is already used up by your 8 MB card. Different Z2 card not using RAM space but I/O space do not have that kind of problem (e.g. SCSI controllers w/o RAM).

Reduce the RAM on your Z2 RAM card to 6 or 4 MB to solve this problem. There's no other way to do it. Since you've got an accelerator card, you should populate and use its RAM instead - it's much faster anyway. ;-)

[murple]

Yeah the card was in there for at least 2 days with me using the Amiga normally, running all kinds of stuff. I was copying stuff from a different computer via disk to this Amiga last night, and in the middle of a copy, BOOM.

Come to think of it, I think the bridge board even showed up in the expansion board diagnostic as OK the other day.

Well, I'm still at work, so I'll see if it works tonight in a computer with no Zorro cards. If it works, cool. I'll see if I can repair the battery (I'm a bit worried because on the side where the battery clip isnt connected, the circuit board looks a little bit damaged/melted). If it doesn't work, I don't need a refund. I'll just throw it in the closet and consider it a lesson not to buy stuff from people on forums that I dont know. Hopefully it is just a RAM conflict and it'll work though.

[countzero]

You don't understand. You can't just bin it. I want it BACK I can't let you waste a good card !

[murple]

Well, lets see what happens when I test it out tonight. Hopefully you are right and I will get on here and post that I am stupid and the card works fine.

[BinoX]

I know that bridgeboards can sometimes be a pain in the ass to get working..
But countzero is a good guy and sells top rate stuff (bought many things from him)

If you can't get it to work, do send it back to him, then I can see if I can afford to buy it.. heh... it'd go nicely in one of my 2000s

[murple]

Tell you what, if I can't get it working I'll give it to you for $15 plus shipping and packaging... lets say $20 if you're in the US, $25 if you're overseas.