Earlier this week I got the go ahead and Monday this week I got on a small trip to the outside of Stockholm to pick up an A4000 sans keyboard and mouse and a 1084 monitor.

Stockholm, Sweden – the land of the second hand Amiga fourthousands. Man this is probably the tenth A4000 I pick up in 15 years time lol.

Anyway I met a great Amiga dude who ran an old elite BBS back in the day, he still kept one of his A4000 and some other Amiga gear so it was nice to see someone else keeping it real  in these stormy times of polished Apple goods and brutal x86 performance even though time marches a head and our cell phones are more advanced than the triple A chipset would have ever been.

Long live Amiga!

It is always interesting to pick up second hand Amiga 4000 systems, you NEVER know what you will get. This A4000 was advertised that it came with a network card but otherwise just a basic 030 based A4000 with a harddrive and CD-rom, nothing fancy.

The case was in great condition, no yellowing at all. Floppy drive is a 880KB unit (a proper half height unit). Inside, there were no Zorro cards, just your standard C= 030 CPU board, hey, what about the NIC?

Well, in reality the NIC was just your basic 1 dollar ISA Realtech Taiwan clone Ethernet card, no it wont work in Workbench, no it will NEVER work in Workbench, I wonder how many worldwide gets confused with the ISA slots in the Amiga thinking they can run any kind of PC ISA-card in Workbench, ah too bad, you loose sometimes and win sometimes

There were some surprises though, under the CPU board two 3.1 chips where hidden, I expected to find 3.0 chips.

And finally the real mystery, motherboard was missing one SIMM-slot. And the SIMM slots had been replaced with better quality ones (the stock all plastic SIMM slots SUCK big time!). So I assumed that whoever replaced the SIMM slots did not bother with the last one because a leaked battery had rendered it useless. But by judging the area around the missing battery (the previous owner had thankfully removed it before leaking to much) it was visually in fine condition, actually the motherboard was way cleaner than I would expect a second hand A4000 motherboard to be which was kinda cool.

Anyway, when I tried it at home I could not resist measuring it with my Watt meter (yes I know they are not accurate bla bla bla bla). It was measured at 51 watt with a harddrive spinning idle at Workbench (FYI my old badass maxed to the roof A4000 060/233PPC with CVPPC, loaded was around 90-100 watt).

And then we have the Commodore 1084 monitor. IMHO the 1084 is a classic, but to be honest with you I actually hate these things, too small, not so stable picture and not that crystal clear (but hey it does have that fuzzy CRT look that makes games look awesome).

I have got the impression some people really like these monitors, so I am planning to get rid of it asap.

Guess how much watt the monitor consumed?

Yeah, you guessed right, 71 watt. Talk about energy efficient monitor (not).

I though about having the 1084 monitor around to play Saturn games in TATE mode, but I can just as well play them on my 52” LCD instead, the picture will be larger than on the 1084 even though I will have 35 cm black borders on the sides (!).

Oh, and my 52” LCD consumes 82 watt in ECO mode (really dark), 150 watt in ECO light (bright) mode and 200 watt in standard mode (very bright).

This version only works in the Amiga 4000 desktop and in the CD32. I guess not many will buy it to mount it in the CD32 but it is a nice bonus (never say never).

For Amiga 4000T owners (the genuine C=/Escom tower) you are at the moment out of luck, Jens have flagged he may do a special A4000T version of the scandoubler if enough users wants one, but as of now nor this or the A1200 variant will fit the Amiga 4000 tower.

My Amiga 4000 feels really complete right now, but I am considering selling the PPC board and replacing it with a solid Phase 5 CyberStormMK2 060 board instead together with a Phase 5 CyberVision 64 3D card.

I guess you should really get one of the cards if you miss being able to run a modern monitor on you big box A4000. The price is a bit steep but considering you can run 1024×768 with the superb HighGFX drivers you can almost view the Indivision AGA scandoubler as a kind of budget graphics card. Recommended, two thumbs up (even though its missing a clock port )!

I am slowly crawling back up where I was back in November 2009 and I realized I have not done anything with my Amiga systems for quite a few months.

So last week I decided to check out my A1200 with the Apollo 1260, it suddenly stopped working when I played some Indy Heat on my 52” LCD, not the first time the Apollo time refused to work. Actually happens a lot. I thought about ripping the 060 chip of the turbo and throwing the f”n card in the trash once for all, but stopped once I realized that once it WAS working then it worked fine, so it was probably some kind of contact issue with the components on the board. I let the Amiga 1200 sit in the closet for 6 weeks and then I tried it again, no go. I put some pressure on some chips, and then it worked. Nice, I have a 060 again. Let’s hope it stays working now.

While fixing up my A1200 I noticed how nice it was to have a quality scandoubler/flickerfixer in an Amiga so I finally decided to sell my internal DCE scandoubler I have been running in my Amiga 4000 for the last four years in order to purchase an Indivison AGA for the A4000. Off course you can expect a review here once I get it, but I guess I already know what to say right now, get one before they sell out in case you do not want to pay double or triple for what it costs now.

And yeah… I should, really, and I mean really, really, really configure that Deneb USB Zorro  card so that I can write a review of it here, trust me, it is coming this spring, only on the one, the only, the Vintage Amiga Hardware Blog.

So during my X-mas vacation I finally got some time to put in to my A1200T power Amiga build that I oh so optimistically wrote about back in September.

Now, this is not a system I am going to keep since I have not got any space left for more towers at home, once it is finished I am going to auction it off. In Part 1 I mentioned my BPPC and Bvision, but now I am thinking of selling them individually because I can think up 100 things that can go wrong if you ship such a complex setup around the world.

The Amiga 1200 tower hardware:

-A1200 motherboard
-Gift-Top tower
-MicroniK Zorro 2 bus-board
-Swedish made PC-keyboard adapter
-IDEfix

Ah…  not so impressive?

Exactly, it is going to be a barebones system, I will let the buyer decide what CPU to run or what graphics board to run (Zorro graphics in Zorro 2 wont be fun though if you want high-resolution with 16-32 bit screens, but fully workable).

I am already thinking of the pitch lines:

“Have you ever dreamed of an Amiga 2000 in a tower, or an Amiga 2000 in a tower with the AGA chipset?”

So what have kept this build on hold?

I mean last post in this series was posted on October 25th 2009, and now it is 31 December.

The pathetic 2.5” 20 cm IDE cable

Guess what…

It was a pathetic 20 cm 2.5” IDE cable that I stupidly ordered from eBay without reading that delivering times of the ordered product could be up to two months! (yes, that is right, 2 months). So finally after two months, this fine little cable showed up, sure it was cheap, but I guess I will pay 10 times more and get it in 2 days instead if I ever would need such a pathetic cable again.

With the pathetic 20 cm 2.5” IDE cable in my hands I was able to mount the IDEfix 4 IDE device buffered interface to the A1200 motherboard. The IDEfix was then hot glued to the bottom of the case, but you can still remove the IDEfix since it attaches with Velcro to the bottom plastic plate hot glued to the case (yes, this is how they are supposed to be mounted in towers).

Once upon a time these buffered IDE interfaces where all the rage with Amiga users, without them you could destroy your Amiga (the ads said). Please, if anyone who have been running more than one 3.5” device of the internal IDE port in an A600 and A1200 have broken your Amiga by doing so, please step forward – you will become instant world famous in the Amiga world (we need celebrities too you know).

The Amiga 880kb DD floppy drive

I did not know if I had a spare floppy drive with faceplate compatible with the Amiga, but sure I did have one in the closet, with just a slightly off tone color compared to the case.

Digging into another box I found a floppy cable from some old PC I threw away years ago. 10 minutes later I was scratching my head, where the f”k do I find a floppy to test?

These days, finding an Amiga compatible floppy is more difficult than finding an Amiga floppy drive IMHO. Sure I had 30 DD disks but none of them worked, until I found that golden disks that you should never loose, the HDtoolbox HD installation Amiga disk. Amazing, the floppy drive worked great.

The Amiga PC-keyboard adapter

I actually did mess around a bit with this project back in November when I got the keyboard adapter for it. It is a Swedish made “PK” something AT-keyboard adapter for DIN-plug keyboards, if you remember PS2 keyboards (no “Mr 15 year old” who grew up with Tekken, I did not mean a “Playstation 2 keyboard”), they had a round small plug. DIN is the same but the plug is bigger, according to universal laws applied in America, anything bigger is better, so I am wondering why this standard disappeared over the years? Any fans in the user base of this blog know the truth, please comment.

The PK Amiga keyboard adapter fits over the square chip to the left of the white keyboard cable slot, at least it should. My KB-adapter did not want to stick to the chip no matter how hard I pressed it.

Yes, I guess you already guessed it – hot glue (the answer to all your vintage computar problems). If I was a bit more professional vintage computer blogger I would probably have sanded down the socket a bit, but since time you have that you can invest in any kind of hobby is reduced to /dev/null when you reach upper twenties or lower thirties corners need to be cut while keeping the higha quality of result.

This nice tower already have a round hole made for a DIN style connector on the back so mounting it to the tower was x-tremely easy. Finding an old DIN-style keyboard was not a problem. I am still not a fan of the Win95 key (nowdays called the “Windows key”) on a keyboard so I stocked up on a couple of old school keyboards with no Windows keys and they typically have the bigger more professional DIN plug.

Part 3: the story continues

I know you are already looking forward to it.

For the third part I am going to mount the MicroniK Zorro 2 bus board in the tower. I will need to solder a power cable for the bus board because it uses its own connector standard and will not take a PC AT-PSU without some work.

See you then

Update:

And guess what, the MicroniK board was sold, so now it is just the tower case with the motherboard left, still thinking of finish it and sell it off just without the Zorro board. Let us hope some free time will magically arrive at my Amiga underground bunker full to the roof of vintage Amiga hardware and Amiga 3500 prototypes.

So it was with great anticipation I awaited the days between x-mas and New Years Eve because there would be a 99% chance no work would turn up, and I was right.

First task was to configure my A1200 desktop which have never really fully worked each time I decided to run it. My Amiga 1200 consists of an A1200 in regular desktop, a 1.86 MB MicroniK floppy drive (that is running with X-copy 24/7, not really ), and an Indivision scandoubler/flickerfixer and finally an Apollo 1240 accelerator upgraded to 060 with 32 MB Fast memory.

The Apollo 1260/1240 problems in a desktop A1200

So it turns out the problem is the Apollo 1260 (or 1240), no do not get me wrong, the Apollo 1260 is actually a very nice turbo card. It might be a bit picky with motherboard revisions, such as this 1D.4, but there are guides on the net explaining how you can modify such an A1200 motherboard to fully work with the Apollo.

Back to the problem, sometimes (or mostly, everytime) I power on the A1200 after I let it sit for a month or two without having been used I got a black screen of death, but caps lock on the keyboard would lit the little LED in the key, so the computer was working but something was broken. If I removed the Apollo 1260, everything worked as it should be. So the problem was found to be the accelerator. Well, it turns out that when you put the trap door cover on, the trap door pushes up on the SIMM-slot or the SIMM on the Apollo and then the computer wont boot. Sometimes by rocking the card a bit problem was solved, but it would appear again next time.

So by running with no trap door my A1200 was as reliable as it usually is with one important difference, it started whenever I switched power button on WITH the Apollo 1260 left hanging from the A1200 edge slot. Solution to the problem is to dremel the trap door cover so there is no cover over the SIMM-slot. Whenever I get time, that’s exactly what I am going to do and my A1200 will stop looking like an ugly Frankenstein-Amiga without cover or trap door.

The HighGFX/Indivision combo

It has been a while since I have been running a non graphics card expanded Amiga but I have to say the experience was not at all bad. As you all know with the HighGFX drivers and an Indivision scandoubler you can run 1024×768, in combination with a 060 and an 8 color desktop Workbench becomes a joy to use. You can stop dreaming of a graphics card in the Amiga 1200 desktop now, the reality is here, cool, simple GFX-board for the A1200 (so the BVision can be run in the A1200 desktop, but be sure to post pictures when you created your Bvision setup with zero fans ).

So you wont be able to run a 32-bit background image or PNG-icons anymore, good that I find the original C= icons and the MWB icons the best looking icon-sets on the classic Amiga then

Compact Flash = best harddrive ewar!

Anyways, from the screenmodes of the Amiga 1200 to the storage solution. I am always shocked when I get in contact with people who still run after a 2.5” harddrive to mount in their A1200 and just roll their eyes with confusion when I mention CF-cards. This Compact Flash card I mounted with a 2.5” CF to IDE converter in my Amiga simply destroys any 2.5” IDE harddrive in speed!

Ok, so it might be a bit slower when writing, or when deleting files from the CF-card, but loading data from the CF-card is so fast that I will never ever, forever, again run an IDE-harddrive on any of my personal Amiga computers again (unless in emergency or setup). No, you will not destroy the CF-card by reading and writing to much data from it, and yes, it is totally 100% silent and produces minimal heat. Best of all, remove the CF-card from the A1200 and mount it on your PC in WinUAE if you want to transfer files or backup your system. Do not forget to Google the maxtransfer settings for the CF-card before formatting it though, it will eliminate you MUCH trouble if you take your time to do that first (believe me)!

The solution to your Amiga problems?

So, you can only guess how it feels running Workbench 3.1 on a A1200 with 060 clocked at 50 MHz (soon 80 MHz) running super-fast CF-card booting the Amiga in 3 seconds to a crisp and clear high-resolution Workbench on your TFT screen: maybe you don’t need much more than this to satisfy your Amiga lust after all?

I will leave that question up for answer until next vacation between x-mas and New Years Eve 2010, see you then

Can you spot the fault on this CyberStormPPC Amiga 3000/4000 accelerator?

Amiga 4000 desktop in a cardboard box

My spare Amiga 4000 have now found a new owner somewhere else in Europe. I wish the new owner good luck with the machine and many years of happy usage.

For this to succeed I need a PC-keyboard adapter, so if any of my loyal readers happen to have a PC-keyboard adapter for an A1200 they want to sell just contact me and we can work out a deal.

Anyway, today I managed to fit an A1200 motherboard inside the tower case and the connected the BlizzardPPC card and tried to boot which was a success. Kickstart 3.0 boot screen showed up.

Next step is to install Workbench 3.0 on a IDE harddrive and connect the harddrive to an old IDE-fix, I did not have a 2.5” IDE female to female cable though so I could not go any further.

These 2.5” IDE cables (female to female) are becoming quite a bit rare to find locally it seems, and if you do find one it is either to short but always too expensive.

Thanks to the wonders of Hong Kong, Paypal and eBay, one 15 cm 2.5” female to female IDE cable is on its way to Vintage Amiga Hardware blog underground bunker in Stockholm Sweden, for the cheap sum of only 3.5 euro!

See you in part 2

Gift Top Tower system for Amiga 1200, this is a custom tower for A1200 made in Poland. A very nice Amiga tower case IMHO.

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

Deneb USB 2.0 Zorro card for Amiga computers

I received a Deneb USB 2.0 card for my Amiga 4000 today. I thought I would write a short review today after an hour of playing with it or so, however I have forgotten that back when “computers used to be fun”, plug and play did not exist

Please, do not tell anyone I have just spent 5 hours (no joke) understanding, configuring and learning about an USB card, people might think I am crazy and that reputation would easily hurt my professional career in the IT industry.

I can at least tell you that it is very nice to be able to flash the Deneb with the “noclick” module so the floppy drive becomes silent, ahhhh

Deneb USB card mounted inside my Amiga 4000

Seriously though, once I get to understand how to configure this card to my likening and make it compatible with the USB devices I have I will post a cool review of the Deneb USB 2.0 card for the only classic vintage Amiga hardware here on Vintage Amiga Hardware Blog.