My ongoing adventures with my A2000.

[r0jaws]

Just a quick update (for those still interested) I have managed to get hold of 8x 1 Meg 30 Pin SIMMs for the GVP SCSI/ RAM board, Installed them, set the jumpers and POW 8 Megs of Fast RAM Power!


Sweet!  :-D

Runs a little faster now but also means I have a spare 2 Meg Memory Master Board which I'll put up on Amibay in due course.
There appears to be a conflict between the Memory Master and a populated GVP Board that precludes using them simultaneously, Oh Well, out she comes.



I'm still having trouble getting the 'accelerator' to run at 14Mhz, however the system does now boot to a CLI after the Red screen of death, so I am making progress (of a sort).
It'd be nice to be able to use this speed up board, however if it proves to be a dud, I still have the Agnus chip and I'll just put it out there to the community to see if anyone can have more luck with it that I can.

[r0jaws]

Ok, the Expansion board is officially dead, I tried numerous configurations and even managed to get a modified boot block running from a floppy to test it and it was unresponsive.
Its a shame but it will have to go back in it's box until I can find time to test each track and chip.
I know it would be cheaper to just get an accelerator and I would be able to keep my 2 Meg Agnus chip, but for novelties sake, and to keep a small piece of Amiga engineering alive I think it would be worth it.

[rkauer]

 r0jaws, the "accelerator" is not dead, as you can see (it works flawlessly in "original" mode).

 The problem is related with the hack itself (and this board is just a hack).

 Put a true accelerator inside the very nice A2000 you have and use the "accelerator" inside an A500 (or A1000).

__________


 For the problem with the RAM: the A2000 Zorro bus can only manage 8Mb. That's why you can't have more than this.

 To achieve more fast RAM, you need an accelerator with its own RAM and a better processor.

[r0jaws]

@rkauer

Cheers for that, I'm happy with the 8 Megs of Fast RAM and 2 Megs of Chip RAM at the moment, the Memory master uses ZIP RAM anyway, which is a little tricky to track down, so it's useful to know that there's not much point.

The 68000 Hack, as you mentioned, will now probably end up inside a 500, if I can track one down and persuade my wife to let me have another miggy in the house.
I'd like to see it running, just out of curiosity now, and to see if I can actually get it to work.
As you have mentioned it probably isn't 'dead' just that I am unable to get it to work in my 2000.

I'm actually very happy with the 2000 as it is now. I have 2 accelerated 1200's for more strenuous tasks, but this system is a firm favorite of mine and the kids. (Mainly because I'm happy to let them play on it without having palpitations at the thought like I do with my 1200's)  :-D

[wa9yoz]

Congrats on your new toy!...also congrats on the clear jpeg of the A-2000..my question is: what type of camera & setting did you use to post your A-2000 on the web?...just curious...thanks...Tony....radio amateur WA9YOZ..

[Tenacious]

I agree with rkauer. I've tried 3 68000 accelerators: a hack from aminet, ICD's AdSpeed, and Supra's Turbo28Mhz.

The hack from Aminet seems equivalent to your accelerator.  There were some chips to massage a few of the 68000's control lines and a switch to flip the clock.  There was no buffering.  The clock was doubled but the performance was NOT.  It made my A500 barely usable.

ICD's AdSpeed was a little better.  It had some buffering on the accelerator.  It worked with fast ram, gave a noticable improvement, and was fairly reliable by itself. It seemed to work with A570 for about a week.  I killed 2 A570s testing this configuration.  I don't remember getting it to work with any other SCSI expansion either (GVP or Supra).

Supra's Turbo28 was much faster and had twice the buffering as ICD. It seemed more reliable, too, though still incompatible with A570 which is picky about timing.  It is currently installed in an A2000 and running well with A2091 w/2Megs of fast and V7.0 roms, OS3.1.  This machine does take a long time to boot though, about 1 minute!

A 32-bit accelerator is the way to go if you need more than the allowed 8 megs of fast ram.

 

[r0jaws]

@Tenacious,

Spot on Post there mate. TBH I hadn't even heard that these hacks existed, but having googled around a bit and combined with your experience I don't think I'll bother pursuing it any further.
On that basis, I shall probably pop it on Amibay (In the Recycle bin most likely) for anyone that's interested.

[shameless plug]
If you'd like it why not pop along to Amibay and have a look yourself?[/shameless plug]

BTW I'm not actually affiliated with Amibay, just happen to think its a great resource.  ;-)

EDIT: For those who haven't made it there yet, here's a linky: Amibay
You have to register and PM a Mod to get access to the Recycle Bin (Free Miggy stuff) to make sure it doesn't get abused by traders.

@WA9YOZ.

I just got off a couple of lucky shots with my rather old Goodmans G-Shot Digital Camera. It's auto focus is pretty good and can usually be relied upon (with a little help sometimes). However I do usually fire off about 3-4 shots and then pick the best of the bunch. Depending on the lighting at the time really dictates  the flash, but I find it does bring out the internals really rather well.
Sorry I couldn't be more helpful.

[Tenacious]

This thread inspired me.  I powered up the A2000 mentioned above for the first time in a long while.  Yes, it took over a minute to boot.  SysInfo shows it running at 3-1/2 times normal with the Supra Turbo28 after it gets going though.  I'd like to get another Turbo28, grin.

I ran DistantSuns also after a long time (DS doesn't seem to like my main Amiga's 060).  What a great program, I've really missed it.  The whole experience was great.  I think I'm going to permanently setup more of the old machines for the kids so I can jump between them.

[redfox]

@r0jaws

Great pictures.  All the best with your A2000.

I still have my Amiga 2000HD, no accelerator, but it has some extra RAM, two hard drives, a CD-ROM drive and a flickerfixer card so I can use a regular CRT monitor.

My machine is about 19 years old and runs AmigaOS 3.1 :-D

---
redfox

[r0jaws]

Right Update Time.

It's been a while but I've finally managed to make some 'real' progress with the 2000.

First things first, a BIG thank you is due to Zetro of Amibay & EAB fame, he's helped me a load so far.

The Battery has finally been removed (and in good time too as it was on the verge of disintigration!)

Zetro did a lovely job desoldering it as you can see below;



He also took the opportunity to tidy up my Agnus board Hack's tinning and sealed the connections with hot glue.



Then he sold me a SCSI CDROM that I had been pestering the poor bugger about for the last month, which I have just successfully installed this evening using IDEFix '97 (unregistered);





I'm looking forward to being able to get some games across to the system now (hopefully running under WHDLoad)

I'm awaiting a 3.1 ROM, and hopefully that install should go smoothly, as I'm currently running a nice smooth fast 2.1 install I'm not sure how 3.1 will behave on an unaccelerated system such as this.

I upgraded the 50 Meg SCSI HDD to a lovely 500 Meg HDD, Partitioned her into 3 partitions, Workbench (80Meg), Work (300 Meg) and MS DOS (120 Meg).

The final partition is to be used by the KCS Power PC Board installed to run MS DOS 5.0 under emulation.

With a few false starts I managed to get this up and running too. (the aim is to run a few DOS games and programmes in the future)

Since the installation of my CD ROM, however, the viewable area of the emulator has shrunk itself to the top half of the screen, and takes about a minute and a half to start, whereas before it took mere seconds! (some further investigation will be called for I think)





Finally, The only real fly in the ointment is an unusual error on boot up.



It doesn't present any significant problems but I do wonder why it's there.

Any ideas anyone?

[Damion]

zkick sounds like some kind of ROM-kick tool, and it's looking for a ROM image that probably isn't there (and/or isn't needed with your current config).

Edit your startup-sequence or user-startup and comment out (or remove if unnecessary) the zkick entries.

--edit--

zkick exists on aminet, I suggest downloading it and checking the docs -- it probably isn't needed or needs to be modified.

[Eclipse]

Is that not a kickfile it's asking for?

[Damion]

Eclipse wrote:
Is that not a kickfile it's asking for?

Seems to be, and since he's already upgraded the kickstart (and again to 3.1) I don't think it's needed.

[r0jaws]

You're both right it isn't needed, It's a remenant of a backed up wb 2 installation (on prepping the disc the GVP software offered to copy a disc to the new bootable partition, so I grabbed the first disc I had)

It was easily fixed by editing it out of startup-sequence.

Thanks for the prompts gents.

[abbub]

What is that Agnus replacement.  Looks something like a Mini-megi, but different.  I assume it's the same sort of deal, a replacement Agnus that has an extra 1 MB of chip RAM attached to the board?

[Damion]

abbub wrote:
What is that Agnus replacement.  Looks something like a Mini-megi, but different.  I assume it's the same sort of deal, a replacement Agnus that has an extra 1 MB of chip RAM attached to the board?

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/chip2mb