A steady "blink-blink-blink-blink-blink-...". Just like when you turn on the emergency blinkers on a car.

Rebuilding my IBM Aptiva K6-2-333mhz.
Put in a NEW IBM Deskstar 20gb. 72,000 RPM Hard-drive. ( Silent ).
And Reinstalled Win98se.

This computer was designed for Win95 so Win98 had all the drivers and installation was a breeze.
Quick.

Wow, that's love right there. 😀

Been finagling with an old 4 GB SCSI hard drive and learning more of the quirks of my Power Mac 9600 as of late.

That hard drive initially came with my Amiga 2000, but I figured I could try setting it up as a Mac drive instead since that A2000's still out of commission. Decided to install Mac OS 7.6.1 on it for comparison's sake to the usual Mac OS 9.1 on that Power Mac 9600, and also made one of my Zip 100 disks a bootable 7.6.1 volume as a fallback.

Well, turns out that just leaving this drive connected to the internal SCSI bus is enough to override the SATA drive I had installed, like it doesn't even get to the PCI drive controllers while checking for the manually-set Startup Disk in PRAM. Had to disconnect it.

The other thing I wanted to test in the midst of all this was that Emplant board I recently acquired, but I can't seem to verify that the SCSI interface on it is doing its job or not, making its use for boot drives a total hassle. On top of that, the manual says nothing whatsoever about what all the jumpers on the board itself do, only going over the software (which would most likely be replaced with the Fusion emulator instead, being a more modern version by the same developer).

brostenen wrote:

Yeah. They are insanely expensive in the US. And those are mostly NTSC models. What you want, are the PAL models, then you have […]
Show full quote

Yeah. They are insanely expensive in the US. And those are mostly NTSC models. What you want, are the PAL models, then you have this issue of scandoubler that you need to purchase or get an SCART to HDMI converter that actually works.

As an example. Then there is an Amiga500 for sale locally. The price are 600 Danish Kroners. That is 93/94 US Dollars.
https://www.dba.dk/amiga-500-andet-god-1mb/id-1045807878/
It comes with two joysticks, power supply and a mouse. Fair condition. Only negative thing, is that the case have
been fixed after a gotek has been installed previously. I have no clue on what shipping will be from DK to US.

With the A4000, it doesn't matter where you get it because there's an NTSC/PAL jumper right on the board, should the Early Boot Menu (hold both mouse buttons on startup) not suffice for switching. I may replace the lock switch on the front with a switch connected to that jumper.

Dunno about the A1200, but it doesn't seem like it has a suitable region jumper from the boards I've looked over. A500 is a bit of a pain on Revision 5 boards like mine because pin 41 on Agnus is always grounded (and one of the traces making this connection is right under the socket), meaning you have to tape pin 41 with an 8372A swap if you want PAL mode on boot (and good luck trying to solder a thin wire to the pin that won't block off anything in the socket for making a switch). A2000 usually has the jumper traces next to the Agnus socket, so adding a switch is easy.

Also worth noting is that running PAL mode all the time isn't always desirable; some games are developed with NTSC timings in mind. (Word is that this encompasses pretty much all Cinemaware releases, and possibly a good deal of Psygnosis ones as well.) This is an American computer, after all!

But I've already run into weirdness like Speedball 2 failing to get past "NOW LOADING" in NTSC mode despite not using the extra PAL lines, or games like Exile and Gloom using the extra PAL lines for the HUD, thus becoming very difficult to play in NTSC mode. This is why the whole community seems to insist on PAL systems.

That A500 you linked is a good enough deal to think about importing, but alas, I already got one. Besides, my priority right now is fixing up that A4000's audio channel problem (dual mono with both RCA jacks playing the same thing, channels 2 and 3 in ProTracker totally silent), as that's the only thing really holding it back at the moment.

Been moving the entire content of the CF card to an SD card, for my Amiga600. I am having trouble connecting two IDE devices on that IDE adaptor that I got yesterday. After multiple tries, I decided to use FS-UAE on my Linux machine. Worked like a breeze this way. I only encountered a small issue. The Dopus installation (version4) would not start after I had moved the data. It was bitching about disk activity not been finished, threw an error code and asked me to reboot the system. The solution was straight forward, as I just installed it in the same drawer again. Now I have a SD card installed, that does not conflict with the HDD-Led at all. 😀

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Been finagling with an old 4 GB SCSI hard drive and learning more of the quirks of my Power Mac 9600 as of late. […]
Show full quote

Been finagling with an old 4 GB SCSI hard drive and learning more of the quirks of my Power Mac 9600 as of late.

That hard drive initially came with my Amiga 2000, but I figured I could try setting it up as a Mac drive instead since that A2000's still out of commission. Decided to install Mac OS 7.6.1 on it for comparison's sake to the usual Mac OS 9.1 on that Power Mac 9600, and also made one of my Zip 100 disks a bootable 7.6.1 volume as a fallback.

Well, turns out that just leaving this drive connected to the internal SCSI bus is enough to override the SATA drive I had installed, like it doesn't even get to the PCI drive controllers while checking for the manually-set Startup Disk in PRAM. Had to disconnect it.

The other thing I wanted to test in the midst of all this was that Emplant board I recently acquired, but I can't seem to verify that the SCSI interface on it is doing its job or not, making its use for boot drives a total hassle. On top of that, the manual says nothing whatsoever about what all the jumpers on the board itself do, only going over the software (which would most likely be replaced with the Fusion emulator instead, being a more modern version by the same developer).

brostenen wrote:

Yeah. They are insanely expensive in the US. And those are mostly NTSC models. What you want, are the PAL models, then you have […]
Show full quote

Yeah. They are insanely expensive in the US. And those are mostly NTSC models. What you want, are the PAL models, then you have this issue of scandoubler that you need to purchase or get an SCART to HDMI converter that actually works.

As an example. Then there is an Amiga500 for sale locally. The price are 600 Danish Kroners. That is 93/94 US Dollars.
https://www.dba.dk/amiga-500-andet-god-1mb/id-1045807878/
It comes with two joysticks, power supply and a mouse. Fair condition. Only negative thing, is that the case have
been fixed after a gotek has been installed previously. I have no clue on what shipping will be from DK to US.

With the A4000, it doesn't matter where you get it because there's an NTSC/PAL jumper right on the board, should the Early Boot Menu (hold both mouse buttons on startup) not suffice for switching. I may replace the lock switch on the front with a switch connected to that jumper.

Dunno about the A1200, but it doesn't seem like it has a suitable region jumper from the boards I've looked over. A500 is a bit of a pain on Revision 5 boards like mine because pin 41 on Agnus is always grounded (and one of the traces making this connection is right under the socket), meaning you have to tape pin 41 with an 8372A swap if you want PAL mode on boot (and good luck trying to solder a thin wire to the pin that won't block off anything in the socket for making a switch). A2000 usually has the jumper traces next to the Agnus socket, so adding a switch is easy.

Also worth noting is that running PAL mode all the time isn't always desirable; some games are developed with NTSC timings in mind. (Word is that this encompasses pretty much all Cinemaware releases, and possibly a good deal of Psygnosis ones as well.) This is an American computer, after all!

But I've already run into weirdness like Speedball 2 failing to get past "NOW LOADING" in NTSC mode despite not using the extra PAL lines, or games like Exile and Gloom using the extra PAL lines for the HUD, thus becoming very difficult to play in NTSC mode. This is why the whole community seems to insist on PAL systems.

That A500 you linked is a good enough deal to think about importing, but alas, I already got one. Besides, my priority right now is fixing up that A4000's audio channel problem (dual mono with both RCA jacks playing the same thing, channels 2 and 3 in ProTracker totally silent), as that's the only thing really holding it back at the moment.

Ahhhh.... The thing about NTSC/PAL jumpers. I was not aware that they had implemented that on Amiga's as well. I know it is on the Commodore64. Regarding the sound channel issue. There are not something like common ground or the hardware part, in some wierd way, fusing or combining some signals between the left and right audio? I remember something about it, being different on other models, than the usual Amiga design. This is just a vague memory that I have from back in the 90's. I have forgotten most, during an absent from the Amiga scene, from 2006 to 2017.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

With the A4000, it doesn't matter where you get it because there's an NTSC/PAL jumper right on the board, should the Early Boot Menu (hold both mouse buttons on startup) not suffice for switching. I may replace the lock switch on the front with a switch connected to that jumper.

Actually, to switch the hardware from PAL to NTSC or vice versa, you also need to replace the crystal oscillator. It's not enough to just change the jumper, as the system then runs at the wrong clock speed.

derSammler wrote:

NamelessPlayer wrote:

With the A4000, it doesn't matter where you get it because there's an NTSC/PAL jumper right on the board, should the Early Boot Menu (hold both mouse buttons on startup) not suffice for switching. I may replace the lock switch on the front with a switch connected to that jumper.

Actually, to switch the hardware from PAL to NTSC or vice versa, you also need to replace the crystal oscillator. It's not enough to just change the jumper, as the system then runs at the wrong clock speed.

Ohh.... So you do need a dedicated PAL for PAL games and the same with NTSC. If you want issueless software compatibility?

Recapped the mainboard of a PAL Saturn Model 2 I got last week. After some time of playing, the video was getting a certain tint (as if missing the red channel?) until powering off for some time; recapping solved it. Next week I'm doing the PSU.

derSammler wrote:

NamelessPlayer wrote:

With the A4000, it doesn't matter where you get it because there's an NTSC/PAL jumper right on the board, should the Early Boot Menu (hold both mouse buttons on startup) not suffice for switching. I may replace the lock switch on the front with a switch connected to that jumper.

Actually, to switch the hardware from PAL to NTSC or vice versa, you also need to replace the crystal oscillator. It's not enough to just change the jumper, as the system then runs at the wrong clock speed.

Nobody ever talks about switching the oscillator, probably because it's not very well-documented. I suppose I can compare my local friend's NTSC A500 to my PAL A500, though I'll have to go by photos for the A4000 (and Revision B boards at that).

I was under the impression that later Amigas just had one oscillator between regions anyway, and the fine differences between NTSC and PAL timings were handled by Agnus (OCS/ECS) or Alice (AGA). Even then, remember that the 8372A is a drop-in replacement Agnus for both NTSC and PAL systems, with the video mode set by pin 41 being grounded or not (grounded = NTSC). How would that possibly work if you didn't also need to replace an oscillator?

However, using the jumper or Early Boot Menu to switch has yet to give me any incompatibility problems with the games I've tried. Screen refreshes at 50 Hz with extra scanlines, they run fine. Speedball 2 loads, Exile has its full HUD showing.

Show me a single case of a game that doesn't run on an NTSC system sold in the US that's been jumpered to PAL, and maybe I'll then be inclined to bother with crystal switching. I'll test it myself to confirm or debunk whether that's the case.

The only thing I recall hearing about the oscillator differences being a real problem on are for genlocks, something that's fallen out of relevance since SD video died off.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Nobody ever talks about switching the oscillator, probably because it's not very well-documented.

Maybe just outside of Germany / Europe, where the Amiga community is rather weak. In Germany, this is common knowledge.

http://www.amigawiki.de/doku.php?id=de:models:a4000t_jumper

The switch you can make in the Early Startup only changes the video mode, nothing else. Correct clock speed requires changing the jumper and the crystal oscillator. PAL games may run on NTSC hardware when soft-switched to PAL, but speed will be wrong, which is problematic in all games using a timer (e.g. racing games against the clock etc.).

brostenen wrote:

Was there not red monochrome too? Or do I mistake colours for one another.

Monochrome CRT monitors for MDA, Hercules and CGA were either black&white, amber or green.
(please correct me if you believe I am wrong on this claim)

But some early LCDs were blue (due to light polarisation when traversing typical green LCD cells) and early plasma displayes were orange (appear red on some photos).

Predator99 wrote:

^...already disassembled: […]
Show full quote

^...already disassembled:

The attachment DSC_7243.JPG is no longer available

Does indeed not look good.

After the 1st cleaning run its better:

The attachment DSC_7247.JPG is no longer available

There is liquid below the 1st PCB layer but I think I will leave it as is at the moment. When removing it will not look good anymore. I also expect the 74F27PC needs to be replaced...

Spare parts arrived and soldered a T74LS27B1 for the 74F27PC in the Amiga memory expansion board. Dont know about the types and differences of these logic ICs but this was a cheap one and I am lucky its working again 😎
A500+ seems also to be running again after replacing the damaged caps. However, floppy doesnt accept any disk and most of the case screws are missing.

Will not care about fixing the batteries and geeting the RTCs running again as I dont think they are required?

Think I will order a Gotek as I am not able to transfer any ADF to the Amigas. My only worbench disk has damaged sectors and transfer of the client application over the Nullmodem cable resuls in wrong file sizes. Dont know the reason but I dont think its worther to go deeper into failure resaerch...

OldCat wrote:

Monochrome CRT monitors for MDA, Hercules and CGA were either black&white, amber or green. (please correct me if you believe I […]
Show full quote

brostenen wrote:

Was there not red monochrome too? Or do I mistake colours for one another.

Monochrome CRT monitors for MDA, Hercules and CGA were either black&white, amber or green.
(please correct me if you believe I am wrong on this claim)

But some early LCDs were blue (due to light polarisation when traversing typical green LCD cells) and early plasma displayes were orange (appear red on some photos).

As I said. It is only a vague memory that I have, from back in the early 80's.

Predator99 wrote:

Spare parts arrived and soldered a T74LS27B1 for the 74F27PC in the Amiga memory expansion board. Dont know about the types and […]
Show full quote

Predator99 wrote:

^...already disassembled: […]
Show full quote

^...already disassembled:

DSC_7243.JPG

Does indeed not look good.

After the 1st cleaning run its better:

DSC_7247.JPG

There is liquid below the 1st PCB layer but I think I will leave it as is at the moment. When removing it will not look good anymore. I also expect the 74F27PC needs to be replaced...

Spare parts arrived and soldered a T74LS27B1 for the 74F27PC in the Amiga memory expansion board. Dont know about the types and differences of these logic ICs but this was a cheap one and I am lucky its working again 😎
A500+ seems also to be running again after replacing the damaged caps. However, floppy doesnt accept any disk and most of the case screws are missing.

Will not care about fixing the batteries and geeting the RTCs running again as I dont think they are required?

Think I will order a Gotek as I am not able to transfer any ADF to the Amigas. My only worbench disk has damaged sectors and transfer of the client application over the Nullmodem cable resuls in wrong file sizes. Dont know the reason but I dont think its worther to go deeper into failure resaerch...

DSC_7267.JPG

Nice. Good work. The clock is not needed at all anymore. Unless you really want to avoid setting the internal clock on each boot. I can only imagine that it is good for getting a correct time stamp on documents. Though if you decide to write a novel or large book, then I guess a correct time stamp would be convenient. On the other hand. Do there exist any writer at all, that are still using an Amiga for work?

Regarding the Workbench disk.... I have this opinion, that you really don't need to get a floppy drive these days. Unless you really want that 100% authentic experience. I have been looking into replacement options for the 500 that I am working on. I have different options that I can use.

1: Get a replacement drive, that are an original drive wich have been refurbished.
2: I have a special datacable, that provides all signal's to the Amiga, that I can use a standard PC drive with.
3: Buy an unused PC drive, that have been hardware modded to a "real" Amiga drive.
4: Get a gotek solution.

There is no guarantee that an original refurbished one will keep working the next 5 years. The mod-datacable are working like a charm, though the program/tool called systest, will report that it is reading too fast (in practical use, I have not experienced any issues). The modded floppy disk drive, will work, though the eject button is the big issue, as well as an issue when using the mod-datacable. It can be solved, by getting a drive that have a 3d-printed eject button, made specifically for the Amiga500 case. The last issue, is with the gotek drive. The gotek does work yet it gives no nostalgic feeling, regarding disk swapping. The gotek might be the best option, if you wish to put the least amount of money into the machine in the long run. For me, I have narrowed it down to eighter a modded pc drive with a 3d-printed ejet button or the gotek solution. I will keep my two mod-cables for future Amiga projects. You know... To at least have something that I can load disks with, if I will be getting another Amiga project in the future. They will not be used as a final solution. Only a temporary one.

I hope these options that I have described, will be at some help to you.

I've been trying to upgrade my early XP PC this week. It's got an Nvidia MX440 64Mb 128bit GPU in it, which I got with a broken active cooler. I put a motherboard chipset heatsink on it (it's quite a big one and now takes up two 'slots') but the mounts are a mm or two out, so the mounting pins are at an angle but at least the contact with the GPU is good.

Anyway I've been trying to upgrade it (even though it just won't die and actually performs better than I keep thinking it will) but every newer, more powerful GPU I get is dead or dying so I keep having to go back to it. This weekend I got a 6800 vanilla - artifacts during boot - and a 6600LE - artifacts in 50% of games. Last week I got an X1650 but it performs worse than the 6600LE, I think it is a power issue as it requires a floppy power connector and it doesn't seem to like sharing power with my HDD and DVD-RW. Eugh. I guess the MX will have to stick around a while. I'm getting quite fond of it now!

What it should look like:

What mine looks like:

A couple of weeks back I got a bunch of possibly broken VGA cards off of eBay. Today I though, maybe I can get them running again. So first up is the TVGA 9000A. It looked really shiny and all, but it would not produce any picture. The 286 would totally refuse to boot. There was one jumper closed on the card. All others open. Ok, so let's open it. And voilà! I now have a 512KiB spare TVGA 9000A. picture quality in text mode and games (400 lines) is fine. Windows at 480 lines is a bit wiggly on my OSSC. But still a decent card.

Video performance is roughly half that of the ET 4000. Dr Hardware reports a performance of 2.8, where the ET 4000 gets 5.9.

brostenen wrote:

Nice. Good work. The clock is not needed at all anymore. Unless you really want to avoid setting the internal clock on each boot […]
Show full quote

Predator99 wrote:

Spare parts arrived and soldered a T74LS27B1 for the 74F27PC in the Amiga memory expansion board. Dont know about the types and […]
Show full quote

Spare parts arrived and soldered a T74LS27B1 for the 74F27PC in the Amiga memory expansion board. Dont know about the types and differences of these logic ICs but this was a cheap one and I am lucky its working again 😎
A500+ seems also to be running again after replacing the damaged caps. However, floppy doesnt accept any disk and most of the case screws are missing.

Will not care about fixing the batteries and geeting the RTCs running again as I dont think they are required?

Think I will order a Gotek as I am not able to transfer any ADF to the Amigas. My only worbench disk has damaged sectors and transfer of the client application over the Nullmodem cable resuls in wrong file sizes. Dont know the reason but I dont think its worther to go deeper into failure resaerch...

DSC_7267.JPG

Nice. Good work. The clock is not needed at all anymore. Unless you really want to avoid setting the internal clock on each boot. I can only imagine that it is good for getting a correct time stamp on documents. Though if you decide to write a novel or large book, then I guess a correct time stamp would be convenient. On the other hand. Do there exist any writer at all, that are still using an Amiga for work?

Regarding the Workbench disk.... I have this opinion, that you really don't need to get a floppy drive these days. Unless you really want that 100% authentic experience. I have been looking into replacement options for the 500 that I am working on. I have different options that I can use.

1: Get a replacement drive, that are an original drive wich have been refurbished.
2: I have a special datacable, that provides all signal's to the Amiga, that I can use a standard PC drive with.
3: Buy an unused PC drive, that have been hardware modded to a "real" Amiga drive.
4: Get a gotek solution.

There is no guarantee that an original refurbished one will keep working the next 5 years. The mod-datacable are working like a charm, though the program/tool called systest, will report that it is reading too fast (in practical use, I have not experienced any issues). The modded floppy disk drive, will work, though the eject button is the big issue, as well as an issue when using the mod-datacable. It can be solved, by getting a drive that have a 3d-printed eject button, made specifically for the Amiga500 case. The last issue, is with the gotek drive. The gotek does work yet it gives no nostalgic feeling, regarding disk swapping. The gotek might be the best option, if you wish to put the least amount of money into the machine in the long run. For me, I have narrowed it down to eighter a modded pc drive with a 3d-printed ejet button or the gotek solution. I will keep my two mod-cables for future Amiga projects. You know... To at least have something that I can load disks with, if I will be getting another Amiga project in the future. They will not be used as a final solution. Only a temporary one.

I hope these options that I have described, will be at some help to you.

Thank you!

Yes, I will leave the battery as is. It will not look nice with a coin cell modification either.

Regarding the floppy: Yes, the experience is a good argument against the Gotek. And: You can not copy between Gotek and Floppy until you dont have a system with 2 drives.

Therefore I am afraid I still have to find the problem during the serial transmission to get a ADF transfer from the PC working. Maybe I will put a working drive from an A500 and put it in the A500+. If it does not work in the 500+ I will try to copy the transferred file back to the PC and take a look with a Hex-Editor where the Problem is. File size is few bytes to small every time regardless of the settings. When transferring pure text everything looks OK.

More texel collecting, this time it's a dark gray texel modulated up while in 16bpp. I'm doing this to plan some filtering study for future shader funs

derSammler wrote:

Maybe just outside of Germany / Europe, where the Amiga community is rather weak. In Germany, this is common knowledge. […]
Show full quote

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Nobody ever talks about switching the oscillator, probably because it's not very well-documented.

Maybe just outside of Germany / Europe, where the Amiga community is rather weak. In Germany, this is common knowledge.

http://www.amigawiki.de/doku.php?id=de:models:a4000t_jumper

The switch you can make in the Early Startup only changes the video mode, nothing else. Correct clock speed requires changing the jumper and the crystal oscillator. PAL games may run on NTSC hardware when soft-switched to PAL, but speed will be wrong, which is problematic in all games using a timer (e.g. racing games against the clock etc.).

Then this raises the question of exactly what part of the Amiga's systems that clock crystal is regulating, because it sure isn't the CPU on anything that isn't the bare 68000. Most accelerator boards have their own clocks, and the custom chipset seems tolerant enough to the slight difference in the crystals that it can switch between modes like that.

On top of that, we're seeing aftermarket motherboard designs - Amy-ITX for OCS/ECS, A4000+ for AGA. It's kinda like the Amiga equivalent of the C64 Reloaded.

Surely, this would be a prime opportunity to have dual clock crystals for perfect region switching without kludging in a breakout board somewhere, since the A4000's oscillator in question (there's actually two) sits right underneath the CPU board, not a whole lot of space under there.

This also raises the question of whether it's possible to correct a WHDLoad-installed game for NTSC or PAL oscillators per user preference, since running games that way tends to patch them up in all sorts of low-level ways, from enabling a second joystick button to just making them work properly on later Kickstart versions and without futzing around in the Early Boot Menu (disabling CPU caches and possibly running in OCS/ECS mode).

It regulates everything starting with the CPU down. PAL and NTAC units have different CPU speeds, just like the C64.