BigRAM 2630 comming soon...

[gary2000]

It costs a little more than I expected, but I am just glad that it exists.  Can't wait until preorder.

[Matt_H]

Pre-orders are now open. My order is in!

[gary2000]

Preorder in!

[amigakit]

We will be opening preordering soon !

[Iggy]

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=1101271

The prototype board has some of the ugliest soldering I have seen in awhile.

[duga]

The prototype board has some of the ugliest soldering I have seen in awhile.

That's why it's a prototype.

[gary2000]

BIGRAM 2630 is not booting, with or without hard drive.

I see Indivision ECS splash screen, then a cycling of grey colors.  



I  have a rev.9 2630 and 3.1 kickstart.  I removed the buddha card and one  time the 3.1 splash screen appeared (corrupted).  The only other cards  are x-surf 100 and 2286 bridgeboard.


Has anyone received theirs and had a similar problem?

I'm just wondering if I missed something simple.

[guest11527]

BIGRAM 2630 is not booting, with or without hard drive.

In http://www.a1k.org, two types of problems were reported. Problem 1 is that the bigram does not work on overclocked cards. Apparently, there is a pretty popular hack that overclocks the 2630 with 30Mhz instead of 25Mhz by just cutting a wire and re-routing one pin. The BigRam does not like this.

The second problem reported is due to instable power supplies that generate too much ripple on the supply voltage that confuses the PLL on the bigram.

[Matt_H]

I am also having trouble and am working with Jens to figure it out. Current theory is the power supply. Going to try swapping it with another one sometime this weekend and will report back if there's any progress.

[gary2000]

Yes, the current theory seems to be the power supply's 100µF caps.  But, it would be nice to know for sure before replacing them though.

Note: my 2630 is not overclocked with 4 MB.

[gary2000]

I am also having trouble and am working with Jens to figure it out. Current theory is the power supply. Going to try swapping it with another one sometime this weekend and will report back if there's any progress.

I  temporarily switched to an ATX Power Supply with an adapter.  This  system booted with errors to a plain 3.1 workbench only, not my normal  setup.  

Fast ram showed up as 121 MB.  (112 bigram + 4 on the 2630 card) ??

I also have the original power supply apart, as I am leaning towards recapping.  

Any resolution?

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

I  temporarily switched to an ATX Power Supply with an adapter.  This  system booted with errors to a plain 3.1 workbench only, not my normal  setup.

This doesn't make any sense. Changing the power supply won't have any effect on your boot environment, unless you forgot to plug a drive in. How many HDD's does your system have? How many bootable partitions? Sure you didn't leave a 3.1 floppy in the drive by mistake?

[Matt_H]

@ gary2000

I've tested 2 A2000 PSUs with the same result - no boot. I haven't had time to crack them open and check the capacitors, but that's my next step.

I know we have a few people doing motherboard recapping - is anyone doing PSU recapping? I'd much rather pay for a pro to do this...

[gary2000]

This doesn't make any sense. Changing the power supply won't have any effect on your boot environment, unless you forgot to plug a drive in. How many HDD's does your system have? How many bootable partitions? Sure you didn't leave a 3.1 floppy in the drive by mistake?

Ha, ha..  No, I intentionally changed to another CF card.

I ordered new caps, because there's nothing else left to try.

[DStastny]

I recently received mine and also am having issues.   On cold boot the BigRAM 2630 is not recognized.  A reset and memory works fine but the floppy drives subsystem internal and external no longer work.  All disks show as NDOS and give seek errors if I attempt to reset.   The floppys work on cold boot but as soon as BigRam is recognized failure.  I have stripped machine to bare minimum to no success to get Bigram to work and have functioning floppies.

Anyone else see symptoms like this?

[DStastny]

For any that are interested.  

 I found that my issue with BigRAM 2630 and my floppy drives not working was caused by the CloanTo 3.x ROM.   I bought a 3.1 ROM (Thanks AmigaOnTheLake) and floppies drives started to work.   I suspect some incompatibility with the 32 bit RAM and 3.X.   Still have some gurus on boot-up occasionally(Power Supply???) but seems stable once machine is running.

Doug