Posts by Jens

Quote from spacebiscuit

Thanks - so likely my best bet is an IDE to compact flash adapter then to be able to boot from a virtual hard drive?

Yes - we have such an adapter in our portfolio, and I recommend that over any other adapter for it's buffering and mechanical layout: It's pretty much impossible to install it the wrong way.

Quote from diegoarevalo

I have a doubt, is there a way to house an ACA1234 inside the A600. I can't think of how it can be placed inside.

It's going to be a tight fit, and the HD cradle needs to go (as with pretty much any accelerator).

Shipping and workshop are closed from July 1st to July 15th, 2022. The last shipments have been made on July 1st. If a payment arrives during our summer break, the corresponding parcel will be shipped on or after July 18th, 2022. Support in this support forum will continue, but may not get the quick response times that you're used to.

With the end of Q2/2022, we had to increase prices to cover ever-increasing cost. To ease the pain a bit, use cupon code HOLIDAY22 for a 2.2% discount on shopping carts over 40,- EUR, valid until the end of our summer break. This is especially interesting for the ACA1234-50, which got the lowest price increase. Further, as license codes are calculated from retail prices, the license codes got cheaper, against the general trend.

Owners of the ACA1234, ACA500plus and Buddha might want to check our WIki for software updates: All installers got a nice update and are now OS3.2-aware. Installing a CD drive with the Buddha is now part of our automatic installer.

The board outline is identical with the previous version, but the socket arrangement is different. In the A600 with A604n, you'll need lower-profile pin adapters. When you're ordering, please send an eMail with the order ID, so we can include a free set of low-profile headers with the shipment.

The pinout is the same as for the V2 and V1 versions, and it's documented in our Wiki.

Please do read the Wiki documentation. The "basic concepts" part will hopefully make the difference between an Amiga screen mode and a VGA mode clear.

Für spätere Bearbeitung wären die order IDs ganz praktisch.

Creating the rescue disk is also a menu item in the config tool.

I already have a non-assembled prototype PCB, but I goofed up on the dimensions (distance of chips on the A600 main board), so the prototype will only be good for functional, not mechanical verification.

"The deal" is with my wife and family: No work during holidays. Luckily, the unit arrived at customs on Friday, and I have picked it up Friday morning. Soo.. technically, it wasn't holidays yet

Your card does not necessarily need the CPLD update - the memory bug is already fixed in yours, and the ACAtool should show that you have CPLD V2. The V3 version will only add iCache in chip ram, which is only required in corner cases, and in addition, requires soldering a wire to the board.

Flash updates are easy to install, just download the archives and follow the instructions. These don't require the V3 CPLD.

I'm happy to send you a JTAG cable, but the soldering job for the additional wire is something we can't do remotely. Best I can offer is to include the blue wire, cut to exact required length. If you pay for shipping, we can also do all the updates here - that would be the safest thing. Please mind our summer holidays: We won't be able to accept any parcel in the coming two weeks (see news item), so you should wait until mid-july with shipping the board back, should you take the offer of having the updates done here.

Looks like you have one of those rare setups where this happens. I've published a tool that re-launches the FPGA in this thread. I actually didn't know that the flash tool itself does the same when using "info".

I can only fix this if I can reproduce it. So far, all computers that show this behaviour are outside the EU, and owners were not willing to ship it here.

Just to collect some data and hopefully find a common denominator for these rare cases: Can you describe your setup, including everything that is connected to this computer? Please follow every single cable, including audio, video, power supply, mass-storage and input devices.

Just look at the white LED: If it blinks on startup and then stays on, you should be able to use it. If it stays off, chances are high that the CPLD has a latch-up.

Service on RapidRoad has ended over a year ago. We do not repair them any more due to the cap on losses that I've put on this project.

If the CD drive is the only one on that cable, you should set it to "master".

Running a memory test program isn't equivalent to a real-world test, but it will of course test if memory access is working correctly.

Please note that you're not testing the memory itself if you're overclocking. The 80MHz pace is a "relaxed sunday walk" for the 166MHz-rated SD-Ram, and the local 3.3V regulation will provide much lower ripple to the 3.3V parts of the card than the power supply produces. Before this fails, a lot of other things have failed.

What you are testing when overclocking is the CPU's ability to take over and provide data at the right time. This timing shifts with remperature and 5V power supply level. So your goal is not to give the memory a workout, as that's safely running at less than 50% of it's rated speed. You want to give the CPU a workout, so it heats up as much as possible - this in turn will break communication with memory, if the CPU shifts timing too far.

Jens

Quote from Coffeepockets

So my question then is: if I only intend to use my Amiga for video toaster and graphics editing, will I be able to get by without the fpu or am I shooting myself in the foot here?

Yes. The FPU is mostly used by specialized libraries. Should you get a "Line F exception" at some point in the future, it's because of the missing FPU. In that case, you can just exchange the offending library for one that doesn't require an FPU - and you probably won't feel any speed difference (unless you're rendering).

To my knowledge, the Toaster software does not make use of an FPU at all, so chances are high that it's been dead weight in your system for all these years.

Quote from Coffeepockets

A2091 (2) each with 2mb ram, one controlling 5gb HD and CD rom, the other simply serving as a mounting point for the PAR dedicated HD and providing additional ram.

Ram on these controllers is rather slow and will have a very low priority anyway. Sicne it'll consume energy and produce heat, you should remove the memory chips on these controllers next time you have the machine open. It's always a good idea to remove heat sources in a heavily-loaded system.

One thing you have surely noticed is that the overall system speed has gone up with installation of the BigRam2630. That's mainly because the computer will use the fastest memory first - and the BigRam2630 is considerably faster than any of the memory you've had in your system before.

Jens

We've discussed this internally: In the device does not load at boot-time, then a device from harddrive won't load either, because it does not find any connected device,

You should instead try to check jumper settings of connected devices. Could it be that the CD drive is jumpered to "slave" and there is no "master" on that cable?

Did you try the new installer that was released last week?

Yes, that's the correct address. You'll only pay for a successful repair, and we'll notify you if it gets more expensive than that. YOu can either pay with a wire transfer or PayPal.

Please ship today, as we'll be on holidays the first two weeks of July. I don't want the parcel to arrive when nobody is here to do the customs paperwork.

We're VoEC registered in Norway, so customs *into* the country are a breeze. Coming into Germany, it'll be some paperwork for us, as we need to complete a special form for goods that only enter the country for a repair. You need to *clearly* identify this as "return goods", declared as "zero value" because it is defective.

Exchanging the CPLD is 61.51 EUR incl. materials and 25% VoEC, plus shipping (please check your last invoice for details, I don't know off the top of my head).

The user port CIA is also the one that controls the video bank. We've had a case from a different customer who was working on the MK2 board while powered on (attempted to apply Luma fix if I remember right). The fault was similar to yours, and the repair was to exchange the Xilinx CPLD on the board. Although this is a paid repair, it's still a lot cheaper than a new board. This of course depends on where on the planet you are and what your shipping options to Germany are.

First of all, do NOT operate the board on the conductive antistatic bubble foil. It is really conductive and will affect function of the board.

What you see on screen is already a sign of "a lot of things working": The border/background colours and colour RAM have been initialized, so the CPU is running. You may even be able to POKE 53280,0 (blind-typing) and see the border colour turn black - please try.