About six years ago I bought this wonderful A4000 computer which came
with all the original packaging and was equipped with 90s HDD and 3.1
ROM upgrade. Not much else. Standard red Varta battery was still in place,
so it was my first step to remove it. Before I proceded, ofcourse it had to be
powered on, just for the heck of it. After all, it had been powered when
seller took picture of it. Well, it did power on, but with black screen. So I
was little disappointed at that stage, but after removing bits and pieces,
such as Cd-drive and HDD, it did show signs of life. Soo, fast forward
couple years from that, I bought Indivision AGA to put over Lisa chip and
even BigRamPlus card coupled with X-Surf100 networking device, in hope
to visit WonderfulWideWeb with my Amiga. Well, it wasn't easy for me to
setup all of these networking stacks and all, but eventually it went online,
but boy was it slow to load all these images on websites. Poor Motorola
68040 and AGA wasn't meant to muster today's hires Internet world.
After some playing around with it I noticed that real time clock started act-
ing funny, first it quit completely. After first repairs it didn't hold time when
internal IDE drive was in use. It made reset when HDD was connected.
Odd things can happen with hardware when affected with leaked battery
acid. Many times I took out motherboard, one for a full recap, another to
chase broken traces around RTC circuitry. Even replaced Ricoh clock chip
and one logic chip with ebayed stuff. Well, long story short I gave up on it
and used newly aquired FastATA card instead, so clock remained in
memory. Ofcourse some IDE speedup happened too.
After a while came new OS upgrade from Hyperion, 3.1.4. That went into
A4000. Well, problems started immediataly after I installed ROMs and soft-
ware. It had this strange crash, after loading SetPatch line on startup. Of-
course I started to blame new software for that and posted a topic or two
about it. I found out, that when CPU cache was enabled, machine did crash
every time. When disabled it was still usable. So went a year or even two
without using caches. I even bought A3660 card to rule out faulty CPU card
(which I recapped too). Well after installing new CPU card problem re-
mained. That was a REAL bummer as I couldn't use full potential of my
Amiga. Finally I asked hese (who made that very fine A4000+ Alice mother-
board)to help me with this. He agreed, so out went motherboard again and
to post office. Week or so later hese replied that he repaired my RTC circuit
with original Ricoh chip and corrected my amateur repairs to look factory
correct. But to my surprice he noted that he couldn't repeat my CPU cache
crash. He stated all is fine with my machine. I was stunned . So, what can
you do, I accepted the fact and after receiving motherboard back and as-
semblying everything it DID crash on me. That was a "slap in a face" so to
speak. When I decided to install all the software on clean CF HD card, it
booted fine even after SetPatch command was run with caches on. So in-
deed it showed that it maybe wasn't hardware to blame afterall. Some time
later I went on to install 3.1.4.1 update and then it started all over again.
These CPU cache crashes. I felt frustrated, so I went on and used machine
with newly bought ZZ9000 card and beautiful Workbench withou caches
on.
Many months later I had that crazy idea to run antivirus program which
came in some BestWB package if I remember correctly. And sure enough,
I had many system files infected with a Happy New Year 96 virus. So I read
about it online and somewhere there was a mention that it corrupts "a1"
register where dos.library normally resides, if I understood correctly. Well,
after cleaning files I thought heck, let's try those caches enabled. Fingers
crossed booted to Workbench, with no errors or crashes! Well well, that
was a lesson learned!
Hope this story helps someone sometime.
https://forum.amiga.org/gallery/5165_14_02_22_6_47_46.jpeghttps://forum.amiga.org/gallery/5165_14_02_22_6_55_05.jpeghttps://forum.amiga.org/gallery/5165_14_02_22_6_55_24.jpeghttps://forum.amiga.org/gallery/5165_14_02_22_6_58_40.jpeg
