Its called Amiga life when you power up your Amiga computer and you are greeted with an unexplainable error.
Diagrom was frozen too
You can have the most stable system ever, but that day will eventually come when something will break – either you did it yourself or something happened by itself.
That happened to me recently, my trusty A4000TX stopped working, showing a frozen screen on boot.
What had happened? I suspected it was because I removed a Zorro card with the PSU ATX stand by power not shut off, it should not, but could have. Nobody knows for sure.
After tearing down the system to bare minimum I consulted the creator of the A4000TX.
Suggestion was to remove Lisa, Alice and the VideoDAC and test them on an other Amiga (paid off to have a second A4000TX with sockets this time!).
Another suggestion was to run Diagrom with serial port output. Surprisingly the Amiga was fully working (except graphics output) in serial output!
All chips worked fine on my secondary A4000TX (that had sockets for the chips)! What else to do? Put all three chips back again and send it off for a grand inspection at someone more knowledgeable.
While desoldering the Alice chip one solder pad lifted off the PCB. Now one problem grew into a larger problem…
Always good to have spare parts at home, I scraped off the slot pad from a cheap PCIe card and super glued it to the broken pad space on the A4000TX – Then I made sure it made contact to the traces by soldering wires to it from traces.
And guess what!? After soldering all the three chips back to the A4000TX it works fine again!
The ZZ9000AX Amiga sound card for the ZZ9000 graphics card
There is a sound card for the ZZ9000 Amiga graphics card called the ZZ9000AX. It is a small soundcard that is attached directly to the ZZ9000 Amiga Zorro slot graphics card.
I had some problems with the ZZ9000AX
Keep in mind that I am running the card on an unofficial Amiga motherboard (A4000TX). So the reason for me having problems might be because of that and not the fault of the soundcard.
I got A ZZ9000AX last year but had massive problems getting it running well. The ZZ9000AX seemed to be picking up noise off the bus and had a disturbingly loud background buzz that never stopped. Paula sound is passed through the ZZ9000AX from the ZZ9000 through a three wire cable.
When Paula output was passed through the ZZ9000AX it just sounded horrible. Sometimes distorted, sometimes just totally blurred in background noise. Sound output so far from the regular crystal clear Amiga sound output I was used to.
I contacted MNT about the problem and I was sent a replacement card from MNT – But it did not fix the problems, just introduced different sounding problems. As I was running it in my A4000TX which is a non standard Amiga model (with no public schematics) it is difficult to say where the problem lies. There might be some kind of difference between an A4000D CR (that the A4000TX is based on) and an A4000TX that introduces these problems into the audio output.
I am going to test my card on my other Zorro 3 machines in the future to find out if it is the fault of the A4000TX or not (will update this text). But the card was sadly unusable for me in my A4000TX.
Finding a solution
ZZ9000AX with external to internal cable
Playing around with the card I noticed that if I removed the three wire cable that connected Paula audio output into the ZZ9000AX (you can see it attached to the card above) the card was beautifully silent, no bus noise, no irritating static and no weird noises. Playing MP3s worked fine as they where being played on the ZZ9000AX and not on the Paula.
The A4000TX is a clone of the Amiga 4000CR and shares the same features, one which is a input header on the motherboard originally meant for CD audo to be merged with Paula output.
So I got an idea to remove the three cable wire that connects the ZZ9000AX to the ZZ9000 altogether and route the output from the ZZ9000AX into the input header on the motherboard instead.
That means that the output of the soundcard was mixed into the sound jack of the A4000TX.
Cable in detail, it is just a simple cable, nothing special to be honest
I created this little cable just to prove if it could work. I will make a nicer looking cable in the future. The A4000D and the A4000TX (that is based on the A4000D CR) has a audio in input on the motherboard, likely for CD-ROM input or for AV purposes.
It is connected to line in on the A4000TX motherboard so it gets mixed into the output for the sound socket.
You can see the cable connected to the audio input header on the image above. It is a messy setup, but the system is in a state of work in progress at the moment.
The cable is just a nasty quick hack, I will do something better here in the future
Here is the backside of the A4000TX and how I route the cables to the internal audio input. No doubt I will create a more neat solution in the future, but for now this will do.
Does the fix work?
Yes it does, I have configured AmigaAMP to use the MHI drivers for MP3 playback. Both MHI and AHI works fine. There is no bus noise and no ringing noises in the background. The sound output is dead silent when the Amiga is not producing any sound – Just as it was meant to be and how I expect it to be. And best of all, playing modules in an module player sounds crystal clear. Playing MP3s on my Amiga sounds just as they do on my PC now!
There is just one little problem
There is one disadvantage of this setup, and that is that the audio input header on the Amiga 4000 motherboard lowers the noise a bit compared to Paula output. I have not found a fix for this yet. One fix would be to run a separate mixer that mixes ZZ9000AX and Paula audio into one, however that just sounds too messy, so I will stick with this solution and just increase the audio level a bit whenever I run something on the ZZ9000AX card.
