Cooling off from the Amiga
Wow, this weekend have been one of the most intense Amiga weekends in a long time from a personal view.
Amiga Friday
Last Friday I went to pick up my Deneb USB2 card for my Amiga 4000. I was actually expecting to have it fully installed and running in my trusty A4000 in one hour, top two hour. I mean it is only a silly USB card (it is more than that as you will see in the future Deneb Amiga USB card review).
Things did not work out as well as I had hoped. The Deneb Amiga USB card acted weird, it was functioning but not as I had been promised by the seducing sales pages for the card on the few online Amiga dealers still left. Well at least the USB optical mouse worked in Workbench 3.1 (untill removed), as amusing as it was it kept me occupied the rest of the Friday night.
Amiga Saturday
Saturday and I assumed my seriously reused Workbench 3.1 installation was destroying the cool little Deneb USB Amiga card to function as it should.
Thanks to having a Compact Flash card as an Amiga harddrive in my system I could very easy mount it on my PC and install Workbench 3.1 from scratch under WinUAE – The Amiga emulator.
With a fresh Workbench installation upgraded to 3.9, suddenly the USB card worked superb, at least the USB mouse could now be hot plugged and the system would detect the mouse again!
More head scratching resulted in FAT-formatted USB memory sticks showed up on the desktop.
Then suddenly the card stopped working.
A quick post on amiga.org and an hour later the solution to the problem arrived, flash the firmware of the Deneb card with a newer firmware. Yes it worked, but there where still lots of things left to do before I pushed the little USB card to the max.
Off I went to DealExtreme where I ordered a 16-bit USB soundcard and a USB-NIC Ethernet for about 9 dollars and the Saturday become Sunday.
Amiga Sunday
Now I decided to leave the Deneb card alone, the little card turned out not to be so easy to configure so I needed to relax. I played some modules in DeliTracker and felt energized, time for another Sunday special classic revisited: The installation of the CyberStormPPC and CyberVisionPPC card.
Yes the CSPPC and CVPPC is a badass combo, but it can be a nightmare installing the combo as I experienced before.
It is quite funny actually, the CyberVisionPPC card comes with an installation disk, but if I used it to install CyberGraphX v3 on my A4000, the graphics card would not work. What greeted me after a post graphics board driver installation instead of the rock-solid CVPPC screen was instead an empty black screen. Thanks to the DCE scandoubler it was easy to boot without startup-sequence and remove the monitor device for the CyberVisionPPC card so I could debug the installation.
What was irritating though was that I had the EXACT same problems years ago when installing this system for the first time and I forgot the solution to the problem.
Ah, must be installation of CyberGraphX v4 I thought, CGFX v3 is an older version of the RTG-system. I actually have an original CD of CGFX4 so I thought why not just copy the contents of the CD to a USB stick and install that on my A4000 since I lack a CD-rom.
Nope, did not work. CGFX4 insists on being installed from the CD-rom. How about making an ISO and mounting it on the Amiga?
ISO created with Nero, ops did not work, there went 40 minutes.
So finally I decided to find an old IDE CD-rom, download IDEfix97 drivers and run the installation of a real CD drive. Guess what?
IDEfix crashed my system when detecting CD-rom –system crawls to halt-, exactly the same problem I got years ago. How did I fix it? I don’t remember. Maybe it is not compatible with Workbench 3.9 when running PPC cards? Maybe IDEfix97 does not work when the battery is removed from the motherboard?
But I did find out how to get the CyberVisionPPC card running by running through my old inbox and finding some suggestions from a friend.
1. First, you need to flash your CyberStormPPC card with the latest firmware.
2. Then you need to install CyberGraphX v4 on your system. Without reboot you then need to install the latest update to the CyberGraphX v4 (no a fresh v4 install wont work I think).
3. Then you can enjoy one of the fastest 2D graphics cards on the Amiga.
Wow, how easy (not)!
Having entered a cool down period from anything vintage Amiga, I think when I get the sound card and NIC from Hong Kong 3 weeks from now then I am in a position again to mess around with the Amiga 4000 again 
