Here is mine.
Firstly, I want to apologise to my customers who are having these problems with a couple of these products on this forum.
It does appear early ACA500+'s work fine but recent ones are not working, and the network card is also not happy on the Zorro slot. I am not saying it is the ACA500+ or network card at fault because they are quality products and the ACA500+ is designed as described on site to only fit on the side of the A500 directly. However as our tests went very well with earlier revision ACA500+ boards I promoted this product as it solves a lot of users wants and needs in one small high quality package. Sadly this was a mistake and I take full responsibility and will arrange returns of the Zorro board products if customers are unhappy and do not want to look at the vast range of alternatives available for storage/ram and acceleration.
It is key to understand what we tried to achieve with our Zorro board. We have a lowish cost ATX psu adaptor but for the extra cost of 3 Zorro connectors (£5 each) we had a way to have the A500 86 pin edge connector reproduced internally with as short a distance as possible, nothing electrically changed but better than a ribbon cable, plus a way of using an internal SFX PSU to power it all and a nice switch on the front of the machine.
The extra 100 Pin Zorro socket is based on a very simple design that has been around on Aminet and used successfully by the hacking community for many years and is used to great effect to allow "Most" Zorro2 cards to work. We never expected all to work but hopefully enough, a list will be available soon. For example having a 68030/Ram/IDE board inside the machine (A500 68k socket based) and in the 100 pin slot a graphics card or my Ariadne2 network card both working without any problems. It is not perfect and it is missing the bus arbitration and other circuitry from the big box Amiga's and what we had on our A500 Bus board in the early 90's, but for one Zorro card it is usally fine.
My problem has been as Jens put it, his emotional responses to something like this, never have I blamed his products for not working and only seeked advice from the seasoned developer that he is. However, he has been less than complimentary to Rob who developed the original board before this and the boards for my system. These boards that I am happy with based on the functionality they provide at their low cost (for this market and order size).
Jens asked for a Zorro board, sadly I missed the original request but sent within a few days, then he apparantly required a full case to be able to do the testing so I sent a full case a week or two later. After waiting nearly a month I asked how things were going but was told he was busy on other projects and will get to it later.
It is true I asked him to return the case a couple of days ago, as it was meant to apparantly help his work and afterwards he could have kept it. With the response from Jens I decided this was not helping either of us so I said he can keep the system and wished him luck for the future and left it at that.
To be clear I have sent a small number of these systems out to other key hardware developers and released ALL design for the case and the schematics for the boards to the community to work with and improve on and have been pleaasantly surprised with the warm response I got and new and modified products in development for the case.
Finally, if you as a customer of mine feel let down by my product, contact me and I will either refund the Zorro board cost upon return or swap for the PSU adaptor board with partial refund. I have obviously learned from this and I will be soon releasing a list of products that are known to work and will put this on my web site in time for the next batch of cases which are a surprisingly under large demand. Should the issues above be fixable then I look forward to seeing people using these wonderful products in my setup.
Again I wish Jens all the best with his fine products and warm wishes to this community.
Steve Jones
iMica ltd
Checkmate 1500 Plus designer.
