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Author Topic: A4000 DENEB story  (Read 1779 times)

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Offline CRLTopic starter

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A4000 DENEB story
« on: January 05, 2009, 07:40:33 PM »
Hi All-
I got a new deneb card for my A4000 for Christmas.  Slapped it right in and plugged stuff in and fired up- but no go.  After trying many variations I got it to run for maybe 30 seconds (long enough to know I really wanted it!).  Got on Amiga.org to see if there was any buzz about such problems and read the subway file and the advice.  This got me to thinking about taking things back to square one, no speedup patches, no quaddoubbler, etc.  Now it runs for maybe a minute before crashing.  Long enough to discover that I had plugged in the two external ports backwards (Murphys Law = if a thing can be installed backwards it will be installed backwards)and fried those two ports as well as a memory stick I was testing with.

Suddenly I remembered from some long distant set of discussions that the zorro 3 bus had timing issues in early model A4000s, and it occurred to me that my symptoms might match timing error symptoms.  There is a "force zorro 2" jumper on the Deneb card so I set that and now everything works just as advertized.  Well, two of the ports are still fried, but a powered hub gets me in to the remaining port just fine.

I probably need to upgrade my Buster chip, but I have not seen those on sale anywhere.  Now I'm wondering if the problem I had with my Prometheus card last year (run 30 sec and crash) is the same issue.  My question to the group is- would using a zorro 2 graphics card maybe get me up with RTG?

One more real Amiga still going!
CRL
 

Offline Flashlab

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Re: A4000 DENEB story
« Reply #1 on: January 05, 2009, 07:56:37 PM »
I'm sorry for your accident with the cables plugged in the wrong way around, but it is clearly mentioned in the manual. So are the problems with some revisions of the Buster chip and several expansion cards.  :rtfm:

Anyway you can ask Amiga Repair Center or AmigaKit to see if they have any Buster revision 11 chips left for you.

Good luck!
Amiga 4000D Cyberstorm PPC 060@50 604@200 SCSI 130Mb Ram G-Rex Voodoo3 PicassoIV Paloma Ariadne Delfina Lite

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Offline CRLTopic starter

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Re: A4000 DENEB story
« Reply #2 on: January 05, 2009, 08:10:29 PM »
flashlab-
Yeah, my bad.  I read the manual, but as usual it didn't make sense until too late.  Now that I know what it is trying to tell me it is perfectly clear.
CRL
 

Offline Bennymee

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Re: A4000 DENEB story
« Reply #3 on: January 05, 2009, 10:07:18 PM »
does anybody know if there is some kind of review of the Deneb on the internet ?
Amiga 500, 1200, 4000, Amigaone, Morphos, CyberstormPPC, Blizzardppc, OS4.x
 

Offline cv643d

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Re: A4000 DENEB story
« Reply #4 on: January 05, 2009, 10:51:54 PM »
I plan to write one on my blog when I buy one, hopefully feb/mars this year.
Amiga articles
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Offline alexh

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Re: A4000 DENEB story
« Reply #5 on: January 05, 2009, 11:29:05 PM »
You can buy Buster rev11 from Vesalia for $40

http://www.vesalia.de/e_buster11.htm

Make sure that your Buster really is a rev7 before buying.
 

Offline Trev

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Re: A4000 DENEB story
« Reply #6 on: January 05, 2009, 11:51:59 PM »
@Bennymee

Search the forums for Deneb. Lots of folks have posted about their experiences. I haven't used mine much apart from removing the cute (but annoying after the 15th time) intros and flashing Kickstart with a few udpates.