Just returned from my travels with a big box of Amiga kit which to be honest has caused me to rethink loads of what I was going to do here over the next month or so. Following winning the PicassoIV along with loads of other bits and pieces, I thought I would really only be putting this into storage until maybe my other card failed. I never really studied the auction that much, as I was too preoccupied with the Picasso. Anyway, the seller had broken up two A4000s for a friend and was selling the bits inside. They admitted that they didn't really understand the Amiga, and had already decided to dump the casings and motherboards, but sell off the bits. I was too late for the other bits but retrieved more than I had bargained for really... I had already been looking at whether I could use the A3640 on the A4000t and was dismayed that the card was the Rev 3.0 which made it useless. I need not have worried cus inside another bag I found a Cyberstorm MkII populated with 64MB RAM plus the MK II SCSI controller.. Whoo hoo.. Added to this was the Catweasel MK II plus module and I was starting to go all faint. My goodness. I soon realised that I had the basic components necessary to get the 4000T back on the road... Thing is these people thought that the cards were only worth a few quid, and were surprised at the value they went for. No doubt they too had realised some of the content. This is not a complete list of what was inside the box, as I haven`t really looked at it all yet.. Loads of cables, port connectors etc to wade through. A3640 Rev 3.0 ( sadly ) A2386SX Bridge Board A4000 Daughter Board Rev B x 2 Catweasel Z-II Mk 2 Picasso IV Graphics Card Version 1.2 Oktagon 2008 SCSI Card Cyberstorm MkII with 64MB RAM Cyberstorm Mk II SCSI Module Phase 5 MkII SCSI Controller 2 PSUs A4000 Internal Floppy Drive A4000 Keyboard CDs CLOANTO Amiga Forever 5.0 Cables 9 sticks of RAM Install Picasso IV SCSI Tool Kit IDE-Fix PS: As ever they were lovely people, with a house full of electrical gear. Mostly MAC plus some real interesting stuff including microscopes. I loved his reel-to-reel tape recorder. He also had a Husky Hunter... Great times...
Saturday morning and the ritual of setting up the workbench to continue the photography. Takes me a while to move out of the way my beloved A500 with GVP sidecar and 1084 monitor, not least because they are housed in a special workstation. I then erect my screen to the rear and set up the lights. All this done I then parade the items one at a time to the workspace to take the pics. The camera I use is an Epson PC 850Z which on highest quality can manage only 11 to 15 pictures. So you can see the whole process does take a while. Good camera all the same especially the macro lense. And today it was the turn of the Compaq Portable, Sega Mega CD, Enterprise, OpalVision card and the Atari 600XL. I had to call a halt to proceedings cus I had to travel to pick up the A4000 stash as described above. I have now completed the computers stored in the lounge, I now have to plough through the stuff in the small bedroom, which is currently preventing me from getting on the Amiga in there. This second part is the bigger challenge cus it involves a load of small items, games, magazines, software and the like. I often miss bits and pieces, like the Atari portable which is sitting in the hallway. I have determined that I will hold back on the update until I receive two items. These being the Atari 800 and the IMB PS/2 [ see below ]. There seems little point waiting to the next update to add these. I can then transfer them to the vault.Teaser
Strange that I would be keen to add an IBM to the collection especially as it runs the dreaded Microsoft Windows 3.1. The thing is I love comparing dates of machines and OSs just to see what was going on , on or around the same time of various machines. It never fails to amaze me just to see how crap Windows was in these days compared to the Acorn or Amiga software of the date. The IBM range is the closest to the computers of its day cus the OS was in many ways designed with the architecture in mind. For those interested here is some blurb.... The IBM Personal System/1 designed for home use. Cost ranged from $999 to $1999, and made its debut on June 26th 1990. Powered by an Intel 80286 micro-processor and with either 512K or a massive 1MB of memory. Drives were either 1.44MB diskette or 30MB hard disk. The unit also boast a built in 2400-bits-per-second modem. The machine was ultimately succeeded by the Aptiva range.
Some years ago I put an advert on Amibench for a Cyberstorm. I gotta say I never really expected to get one but it was worth a try. Nobody offered a Cyberstorm, but I did receive an invite to buy a fully working A4000T. Trouble was the computer was the other end of the country. Anyway, after a month of deliberating I decided to venture north and buy the A4000T. The unit cost me a massive £725. The machine was the specification below... The A4000T Specification Central Processing Unit: MC68060 49.9 MHz (rev 1) 1 WarpUP Processor(s): PPC 604e 200 MHz (rev 2.4), 66 MHz busclock Floating Point Unit: 68060fpu 49.9 MHz Memory Management Unit: 68060mmu running Custom graphics chip: AGA Lisa 4203 (rev 0) Custom animation chip: AGA PAL Alice 8374 2M (rev 3-4) Other custom chip(s): Paula 8364 (rev 0), Ramsey (rev 15), Gary (rev 0) Graphics system: Picasso96 Graphics board(s): Picasso IV [Paloma Concierto] Soundcard(s): Concierto Hardware Clock: clock + battmem found, sunday 21-apr-2002 18:38:28 Max. Chipmem available: 2048 K Max. Fastmem available: 130048 K ROM chip version: 45.20 (Kickstart 3.9) Workbench version: 45.3 (Workbench 3.9) SetPatch version: 44.38 Expansion board(s): 5001/6: individual Computers/VMC HyperCOM Z4 (@$00E90000 64k) 4626/23: individual Computers X-Surf (@$00EA0000 64k) 2167/24: Village Tronic Picasso IV (@$40000000 32M) 8512/100: Phase 5 Digital Products CyberStorm PPC/MK III SCSI (@$00F01060 128k) Cyberstorm PPC serial #: DCC0270 Impressive to say the least... I did play with the computer before I came home that Sunday, and I was ever so slightly excited at the prospect of using this computer... DISASTER. Having set up the computer I tentatively switched her on... Nothing. Nothing that is, other than this nasty burning smell. I was gutted. Turned out that the fan to the PPC had failed and the Cyberstorm was frazzled. I spent a good while on the forum trying to establish cause of death, but concluded that my dream was over. Since that date I have acquired another ( brand new ) A4000T case to house the motherboard in, and have got hold of a Cyberstorm MkII as a modest replacement. The 4000T was all SCSI so I was so pleased yesterday to get the SCSI module for the MkII. Not the Cyberstorm PPC that I had dreamed of, but I guess a good lesson that old stuff doesn`t last for ever. Shame that. Anyway, I have never really understood just how the A4000T ribbons work. There really are quite a lot. The A4000T has seperate hard disk, sound and video cards which connect to the motherboard. There is also SCSI on the motherboard. Thing is the Cyberstorm has one ribbon that goes to a CD drive and I can`t see why. Even more puzzling is this four way splitter that connects to the floppy drive... Cus there is a modified ribbon that I can`t find a home for. See images below. I have always thought, just maybe, if I could connect this back up, the computer would work again... A big maybe.Puzzling Ribbon
Never one to resist having a play I decided to rip that damaged battery from the A2386SX bridgeboard and see if the old beauty was still working. For those that don`t know, the A2386SX is a Zorro II card that emulates a PC 386 at various speeds from 16Mhz, 20Mhz and 25Mhz. The card will work much slower than the actual PC it emulates. Normally these boards are hooked up to a 5.25" floppy drive. I have seen Amigas running as PCs in this way ( strange concept ) With this card you can actually use the Amiga internal floppy drives as floppy drives Anyway I dragged out my favourite A2000 and very quickly slotted in the card. I removed the deadly battery first I then zoomed into the Amiga download area and got the software which I uncrunched onto disk along with SysInfo to check the card was working... The link to that software is here...CBM-PCInstall.DMS
Anyway, a few steps forward from...
' write DMS work:dms_stuff/CBM-PCInstall.dms TO DF0: '
And I had the disks in my hand... PCInstall and the SYSINFO TOOL With card installed I booted up and all went fine. SYSINFO recognised the Zorro II card but no serial number. No problem. I ran the software but it became apparent that I needed to get a hardware guide from somewhere. I may even have one in the vault. And so starts yet another project... Thats the way it is here... Do take a look at the pictures below. And note the A500 tucked in on the left. All very cramped on the Amiga Workbench.Check out this link....
A2386SX Bridgeboard at http://amiga.resource.cx/photos/a2386sx
WHAT I READ: IBM AT emulation 80386 SX @ 16 / 20 / 25 MHz (32 bit internally, 16 bit external bus) Optional 80387 FPU Sixteen ZIP sockets accept up to 8 MB RAM 1 MB factory installed Supports 256k×4 or 1M×4 page mode ZIPs, 80-120 ns or faster Accepts ZIPs in groups of four 64 kB AT compatible BIOS upgrading the BIOS and fitting a ZIP to SIMM converter makes possible to use 16 MB RAM 128 kB dual-port RAM for data exchange between the BridgeBoard and the Amiga can use a PC hard disk, virtual drives on Amiga partitions (hardfiles), you can even have an Amiga partition on the PC hard drive PC floppy drives can be used in an internal bay, Amiga floppy drives can be used as PC only or shared, external Amiga drives can be connected directly to DB23 floppy connector of the BridgeBoard Only two floppy drives are accessible by the BridgeBoard the Amiga supports MDA (monochrome) and CGA modes through the native display (CGA 640x200x2 or 320x200x4 modes) - you can toggle between Amiga and PC screens with an ISA VGA board a separate monitor is needed The card uses the Amiga's serial or parallel ports for printing For modems it can only use an internal ISA modem or serial card PC beeper on board When installed, only 6 MB of the Zorro II address space is left for other expansion cardsA2000 with A2386SX Bridgeboard
OK... I admit I gave into the darkside and hooked up an XP machine with broadband... Deep sigh ..... OK Not something I wanted to do. I have struggled longer than most to retain the old dial up and an outdated MS product in the form of Win98, as a primary support to the Amiga. I knew that XP wouldn`t be the same, and I knew it would try to seduce me into staying on the darkside, forcing the Amiga and retro into the pit of doom. Well for a month the sweets in the shop were very nice indeed. Life was speedy and internet browsing became less of a grind. Tesco was easily accessible, as was my website and hosting company. I even treated myself to an online game.... But then.... I became ever more drawn into the cycle of purchasing new kit... first came the memory stick, then the wireless cards and another game. Soon I was looking into an external hard drive to house all your internet downloads.. Even worse I started to think of a bigger better machine... Along with the shopping there was tossed into the trolley mags on Vista and Wireless networks. The possibilities seemed endless. I had entered into the modern arena.... But stop.... Who was driving who... Was I happy ? No !! And why.. Cus you could see that there was never going to be an end to it. Just when you thought you were happy another gadget would appear, and another great deal... scuzz sat quiet... reflecting. I had played that stupid moronic game on the laptop to death.. And there was no story, just mindless levelling up that was going to take an eternity.. And then when your hooked you need to buy more credits to continue. Took me just one month to drain everything of worth out of seven years of isolation from all things modern about computing. And when I looked hard into its demanding eyes I saw an ice cold world of ' nothing '. Totally without heart. I dragged myself from its grasp and again I was free... Free to joy in real computing. To the Amiga Room.. My ' Sanctuary '. Well the blessed monks calmed my spirit and I returned to the true faith. No false gods here demanding mindless obedience. I appreciate that stepping off the conveyor you do get left behind... But when I look ahead at all the sheep mindlessly playing to the MS tune I can`t help but feel that there is no peace for any true computer lover on that road, cus you truly live from one best next thing to the next. The skill of the merchants has always been to make the loop impossible to get out of. Well you can get out the loop, but you have to make sacrifices. And so I stand here with the unloved, disregarded and forgotten and play to my tune ' Lets go Round Again '. Happy.
If you can only see this CONTENT window
then click the image above for the full site
Last updated 4th February 2007
Chandraise Kingdom
