Posts by jvidia

Update:

PSU re-caped and after a long time being ON (with a good heat build in it) the problem never occurred again!!

Soft and hard restart shows no problem with the Aux card.

My ACA500 Plus is running fine now!

Thank you Jens.

Quote from Jens

...

These PSUs are quite old - you might want to re-cap them ...

Caps arrived .... tomorrow I'll re-cap it and begin testing again

Hi Jens.

Just noticed that my oldest PSU is rated with 2.5 amps on the 5v line.

Is it enough to drive the ACA500 Plus?

I ask this because my newer A500 PSU is rated 4.5 amps on the 5v line.

Both have 1 amp @ 12v and 0.1 amp @ -12v

Cheers,

Jorge

Quote from Jens

A hotter PSU will change the available capacitance on the big electrolytic caps. Depending on their inner construction, it can go up or down, and this heavily depends on the frequency that the switchmode PSU is using, so I would not dare any prediction other than "behaviour is different at different temperatures".

And you are right .... after my 1st PSU got hotter, in every reboot the Aux Card problem returned!!

Immediately switched to the 2nd "cold" PSU and no more problem .... back to 1st PSU still hot and again .... guess? no Aux Card !!!

I'm going to recap the 1st PSU.

The 2nd PSU is newer and for now will stay untouched.

Thank you both Tobias/Jens!

OK .... news ... tested with the other A500 PSU that I have around and no problem.

It seems to work ok.

Aux card recognized on boot and when inserted after booting into WB 3.1.

Tested again with the 1st PSU and no problem too!

In my mind the PSU factor could be the cause because they are old and no recap was made until today, but now I'm lost with this test with the 1st PSU.

Can the problem occur only when the PSU is hotter? Because this test was made with both PSU cold.

A hotter PSU will decrease its efficiency?

Also the Amiga is cold.

I'm going to let them ON and let some heat to build up on both the PSU and the Amiga and if it fails again I'll switch PSU's.

Yesterday when I had the problems both the PSU and the Amiga were running for some time and were hot.

I'll let you know for what happens ....

Tobias, I'm using the original A500 PSU but I have another A500 PSU and I'm going to try it too to see if it solves it.

Jens, I doubt the cards are fake because I bought them from Amazon.es and they were sold/shipped by Amazon it self not from a 3rd party seller. (https://www.amazon.es/dp/B00FQ…721_189395781_TE_SCE_dp_2).

I don't have any card to test atm.

Hi Jens!

I bought from you in 21-10-2019 ( order number 64886 ) one ACA500 Plus.

It has very little use and I'm playing more now with it because this week I started my summer vacations.

Today the Aux Card started to behave weirdly and 90% of the time did not work.

Examples of this weird behaviors:

-> with the WB 3.1 already booted, when I plug in the Aux Card two things can happen:

1) the white aux card led does not light up and the CFAUX icon does not appear on the workbench desktop;

2) the white aux card led does light up and the Amiga power led starts to blink and nothing happens to;

-> booting into WB 3.1 with only the Boot card inserted, it boots in 9 seconds. Booting into WB 3.1 with both cards inserted the boot time jumps to 43 seconds!

-> when booting into WB 3.1 with both cards inserted, the Aux Card is 90% of the times not detected!

This is not normal and it did not behave like this before.

Some details of my system:

- the ACA500 ROM is almost since day 1 on the last version 0.135 ( was shipped to me with 0.129 if I'm not wrong )

- the slot of the Aux card has all the pins straight ... nothing is damaged there

- yes the CF Aux Card is enabled in my profiles

- tests done with the CPU @ 14Mhz

- I use 2 brand new Sandisk Ultra 16GB CF Cards

- I switched the CF cards and the same occurs ( installed WB 3.1 on the CF card that was the Aux card, and the one that was the Boot card was formated in FAT32 to be now the Aux card )

- I'm using one Amiga 500, revision 5, with upgraded ECS Denise and ECS Agnus 8372A

Please tell me what to do?

RMA to you or do you know some more tests to do?

Thanks Jorge.

Hi Jens!

Hope your having a happy new year!

I looked around and couldn't find this info ... where can I see the change log of the ACA500Plus firmware versions? Mainly the menu system versions?!

And is there a place to download the previous versions?

I ask this because my ACA500Plus came with the menu system v0.129 and I updated it yesterday to the last v0.135 and I'm experiencing things that I did not noticed with the v0.129 and would like to flash it again to check them.

2 examples:

• some failed boot's after CTRL+Amiga+Amiga (even at 14Mhz): I power the Amiga up, boot using for instance with 1.3 or 3.1 and all is ok. After a soft reboot (CTRL+Amiga+Amiga) sometimes it hangs booting again with no error code in DisMo!

• running a boot option from the "F3 - Standard A500 Profile Menu" and after it reentering the menu system: I noticed that my Profile #1 shows some values from that previous boot! For instance the ROM option displays 1.3, when I previously had saved in Profile #1 the ROM=3.1 ( only Profile #1 seems affected losing some values ). Also noticed that navigating to Profile #2 and back again to Profile #1 some values like the ROM returns to the saved values but other values don't any more.

Can you help?

Cheers,

Jorge

I totally understand Jens

Thought you only had a few parts

Yes i see it!

This is great so I can buy all in the same place.

Today I'll submit my order of it + one beautiful ACA500Plus

Thank you Jens!

EDIT: order submited!

Please send me a newer Agnus from 1991 or later

Thank you again Jens.

Quote from Jens

There's a menu item in the expert menu "force PAL/NTSC".

Thanks for the clarification!

Jens, don't you have the Agnus 8372A for sale on you shop?

Jens, can you explain this part when you said:

"make the required changes for letting it start in PAL mode (it will launch in NTSC mode on a Rev.5 board if you just insert it)."

Isn't the IC 8372A PAL/NTSC ??

What changes are you talking about?

jens, i just noticed that my A500 is a rev 5.0 with the fat agnus 8371.

I have an 512kb expansion in the trap door.

Question... with the ACA500Plus I'll get 512Kb of chip ram or 1mb ?

If I'll only get 512kb, upgrading to agnus 8372a will get me to 1mb of chip ram?

Will WHDLOAD work with only 512kb of chip ram?

Thanks.

what's the total space occupied by the WB 3.1 on the boot CF after installation?

1st thank you Jens for those great details!

As too CF cards read speeds ... what's the maximum read / write speed limit of the ACA500+?

What I want to know is what's the speed limit beyond there is no benefit on buying a faster CF card to use in the ACA500+!

Thanks,

Jorge

Hi folks.

I'm a newcomer on the edge to take the plunge and purchase one ACA500+

As always I try to read as most as possible before I buy something and this is no exception.

One thing I cant find information is about the ideal size of the CF cards to get to use in the ACA500+ ?

By this I mean, what is the maximum size that the ACA500+ can handle to create partitions without leaving card space unused?

I think I've seen someone saying that 4GB is the maximum card size that ACA500+ will fully use. Is it true?

I'm thinking to get some Transcend 4GB 300x cards. Are those fully compatible and good for this purpose?

Getting larger ones is in any means better?

Thanks!

Jorge