ACA500 black screen

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Don't Panic. Please wash hands.

    turrican9 :

    Amazing effort, thank you very much !
    Unfortunately, same problem with these 2 ADF too... I assume it comes from my disk drive then, because I tried with several other brand new disks...


    Maybe I will have to try with another disk drive, or buy a GOTEK and give a go with it !

    Quote from turrican9

    just for the heck of it, did you try your aca500 with another A500 and PSU?

    No I didn't, but my PSU is quite powerful and stable (4.5A for the 5V), and has no problem with my ACA500+ so far.
    I ordered a Gotek, so I'll let you know if your ADF files are eventually OK or not ! ;)

    Hi Jens an turrican9 !

    Well, I tried with a GOTEK ! This time, no "Recovery image checksum error", so I suppose my disk drive was faulty...
    So turrican9, thank you very much for your efforts ! And sorry for the inconvenience !

    BUT... at the end I got another error message: "Unexpected flash chip ID (11/11). Jumper J2 set ?"


    8|

    Well, according to the documentation, J2 has these functions:


    (8. says flashrom is not available when J2 is set. Do you have a jumper set at J2 currently?)


    J2 switches off the majority of the ACA500 resources in order to create compatibility with software
    that normally does not like accelerators. When closed, the following changes are made:
    1. trapdoor space is not visiable at 0x40.0000
    2. fastmem is not available at 0x80.0000
    3. 0xc0.0000 will contain the actual trapdoor memory expansion (if available)
    4. 0xf8.0000 will only show the physical kickstart ROM, never Maprom area
    5. Maprom-mirror at 0xa8.0000 is not visible
    6. VBR move feature is not available
    7. IDE/CF cards, clockport and expansion ports are disabled
    8. any access to the flashrom is disabled, so flashing is impossible
    9. all IRQs from the CF/IDE conroller are disabled by hardware
    10. Reading ACA500 registers returns garbage, not the actual contents of the registers
    11. the ACA500 comes up in lock state 3, disabling all ACA500 register access

    Quote from turrican9

    I would assume Jens could answer on this. Maybe the flash chip is broken or something?

    Yeah, maybe.. or a bad contact in the socket, or a bad trace related to it, or.... don't know !

    I'll try to find someone with a PLCC32 programmer, maybe the chip will accept to be flashed this way ;)

    Well, big change here ! ;)

    Believe it or not, my ACA500 is working again !
    I was about to order a chip programmer to flash the 29F040 ROM, but I wanted to try several options first.
    The error message (Unexpected flash chip ID) led me to think that the chip had a recognition problem (very smart deduction isn't it ^^), so I extracted it from its socket, cleaned the pins and the socket itself, and plugged the chip back... BUT without pushing it too deep into the socket, just levelled it with the top of the socket (before, it was very deep into the socket !).
    A bit like in this video: "PLCC32 extracting and seating"


    And bang, the ACA500 is alive again :saint:

    Hope it will stay alive for a long time now...

    Thank you very much for your help, both of you ! Much appreciated !

    Great news! Glad you got it working again! I know I love my ACA500. Have it paired with a fully unlocked ACA1221. Very nice setup. I also have the ACA500 plus. The plus is doing fine on it's own for whdload