Defective Apollo4060

[Yulquen74]

I'm trying to help out a friend with a defective Apollo4060 board, which he aquired many years ago but never got working.

The board has a 50MHz clocked rev.1 060.

Testing was done on a bare A4000 board with floppy only, and the machine starts normally and boots my test-floppy if I remove all fast-ram from the Apollo4060.
If I try and add fast-ram to the mainboard, the machine still starts, but the mainboard fast-ram is not recognized.

I have inserted a 32MB simm in one slot at the time, and if it is inserted in one of the 2 innermost slots, the machine never reaches the kickstart screen or boots, and for the 2 outermost slots, I get a flashing power led at the time it is supposed to show the kickstart screen (kick3.1, long IDE wait) or boot.

Looking at various pictures on the net suggests that the resistor jumpers for clocks are ok, but I wonder if anyone owning a 4060 can tell me if the resistor arrangement in the middle of the cpu socket is correct before I go further?

[cv643d]

Occasionally happens to my Apollo 1260 from time to time too. Isolated the problem to a dirty SIMM socket and SIMM module.

Occasionally I get a flashing power LED and no boot. If I press on the socketed chips a few times to seat the chips in the sockets the machine eventually boots.

[hooverphonique]

The solder joints look very dull on that photo - is the board just dirty? If not, maybe look for cracked joints.

Did you verify the A4000 mobo (w/ fastram) using a different cpu board?

Edit: Oh, maybe you meant inserting a 32MB simm into a mainboard socket?

[Vypr]

The solder joint on D25 of the CPU looks to me to be a bit lacking in solder and it may just be the picture but the trace coming off of TDI looks broken to me but that may just be the shadow on the image.

[sq7bti]

Is there S18, R17 and R18 tied together?

[Yulquen74]

I have checked the simm sockets - the problem is not dirty simm/socket.

The only socketed chips here is the EPROM and CPU (the machs have been soldered on), which is firmly in place (though I did remove once to check the sockets - found nothing wrong there).

I found the problem with it not detecting mainboard fast-ram - it did not like the 4MB one I used. I inserted a standard 3630 card, same problem there. I tested 4-5 different kinds of 4MB simm I had until I found a working one.
When going back to the apollo, now it can see this as well. I assembled a small test disk with apollo 060 libs as it did not seem to like the one on my other test disk (crashes during setpatch), and sysinfo test and amiga test kit mem test are ok.

Some pads have been soldered on previously on this board, and I have checked all above mentioned signals/pads++, and I have found no shorts or broken traces so far.
sq7bti: do you refer to the 2 smd resistors soldered to the 3 060 legs in the upper right corner of the 060 socket? If so, they are 1K pullups for !LOCK and !LOCKE signals, I have seen them on other cards too.

So the conclusion for now is, it detects mainboard fast-ram after all, but not its local RAM.

[Yulquen74]

I decided to give this board a go again. Replaced the (non-programmable) logic chips, electrolytic caps, CPU and motherboard socket. Also, loads of traces were measured and found ok.

Now it does detect onboard RAM, but not everyone I try.

I have a number of different 32MB SIMM's, and when testing all the different types,
the SIMM's based on the following chips was found working (survived at least one full AmigaTestKit memory test cycle):

Hynix GM71C17403CJ6
Hynix GM71V17403CJ6
Samsung KM44C4100CK-6
MEC MV617405
Vanguard Microelectronics VG26V17405DJ-5
Texas Instrument TMS417400DJ-60

and the following were not working at all (flashing power LED before kickstart splash screen):

Toshiba TC5117400CSJ-60
Toshiba TC5117405CSJ-60
NEC 4217405-60

Looking at the datasheet, all working and non working types are regular fast-page or EDO, which should work.

I take it that the Apollo does not care about the 4 presence solder jumpers on the SIMM's, which indicates
their size and speed. SIMM's in both categories are either correctly configured, or not at all, and changing the
unconfigured ones did not make a change.

Also, this board does not like it when mixing SIMM's based of different chips, then it either fails completely
with flashing powerled during powerup, or fails during memory test.

The only SIMM's I had 4 identical of which were in the working category is the ones with Hynix GM71C17403CJ6 chips.
When testing over time, it seems to hold.

My question at this point is, can someone tell me if this board is supposed to be somewhat picky about SIMM's, and mixing them, or could it be an indication there are still some unresolved issues left here?

[jostberg]

Originally Posted by Yulquen74

My question at this point is, can someone tell me if this board is supposed to be somewhat picky about SIMM's, and mixing them, or could it be an indication there are still some unresolved issues left here?

Yes, it's extremely picky. See link: http://www.canit.se/~glenn/apollo.html
I had to try a lot of different SIMMs to fill up all 128MB

[Yulquen74]

Thanks!