I have just acquired a
G-Force 030 (Impact A2000-030 Combo Series II) 40MHz accelerator for the A2000, which has 4MB 32-bit RAM soldered on the board and 4MB more in one SIMM slot. The Amiga (mobo rev 6.4) is recognizing the CPU (it seems...) and FPU but is not seeing any of the on-board RAM. This was an eBay auction purchase.
I also have a
GVP Impact A2000-HC+8 Series II card which has 8MB 16-bit FAST RAM on board and serves as the system's SCSI interface. (And, I also have a first rev X-Surf and an ASDG Dual Serial board installed in the slots.)
Both boards (from different sellers, years apart) have identically marked ROMs:
C 1992 GVP
V4.5
DF24
::: PART 1:Before I installed the 030 board with its 8MB 32-bit FAST RAM, the system booted fine (3.1 ROM, AmigaDOS 3.1) and the 8MB FAST is recognized. I want to run the 030's 32-bit RAM in extended space, above Zorro space, and I intend to run a switch to the jumper that entirely disables the 030 board, for cycle-exact demos, so I want to keep booting off of the HC+8 and keep RAM on it. I have set the 030 board's jumpers accordingly:
- J12 to open for all on-board RAM in extended space
- J14 to closed to indicate no SCSI drive connected (to the 030 board)
- J9 to open to disable the autoboot ROM on the integrated SCSI controller
So, with everything in place, I boot the system and get to Workbench and I see only ~8MB FAST in the title bar (+ 1MB CHIP). (At this point I have not added GVPCpuCtrl to s-s.) Things do not feel faster. SysInfo v3.24 identifies the 68030 and 68020, but running the SPEED test shows the system to be only 1.10 times faster than the B2000 68000 7MHz... And after running the test, SysInfo shows the clockspeed to be 16.80MHz (not 40MHz, as the board should be).
SysInfo reports 1MB CHIP and 8.0MB "FAST RAM PUBLIC KICK 24BitDMA" at $00200000 - $009FFFFF, only.
I then downloaded the accompanying software from AHDB (guessing at which is the most recent) and got GVPCpuCtrl into the s-s as "gvpcpuctrl FASTROM" and I get an error something very close to "Not enough 32-bit FAST RAM to store ROM Image."
::: PART 2:Trying to quickly determine if the 030 board is fried, to deal with eBay return, I removed the GVP HC+8 and booted WB off the GVP install floppy and I saw 1MB CHIP, 0 FAST RAM in Workbench.
I then closed jumper J12 to put the 030's RAM in Zorro space, rebooted, and I see 1MB CHIP and 4MB FAST (I removed the additional 4MB SIMM from the 030 board, to simplify things) -- all the RAM is there.
I downloaded a more recent ver of SysInfo on an ADF and booted it (the system feels very fast now) and it shows things as they should be, it seems: 7.42x B2000 68000 7MHz speed (1.12x A3000 68030 25MHz speed), and the clockspeed indicated is now 36.30.
(I had, earlier, set the jumpers on the HC+8 to 6MB rather than the full on-board 8MB, and booted up and saw 6MB FAST total. I then closed J12 to try and go to Zorro space on the 030 board, and in this config, the system just hung -- I know there's only 8MB addressable in Zorro space - but I wanted to see what it did.)
........So, is it unexpected that GVP's HC+8 and G-Force 030 would be incompatible in this way?
I definitely want to be able to drop back to 68000 mode (switch to the disable jumper), so I don't want to rely on the 030's SCSI controller and I want 16-bit FAST RAM in the system.
Any advice here? It seems the 030 board is not dead, but the problem lies with the HC+8 or some other situation in place here.
MANY thanks.
bp
