Amiga A590 info/help?

[bugsymalone666]

Ok so on the back of my other thread about modding an A590, my 590 has arrived through the post, seems its been a little bodged so I havent tested it and have been stripping it down to check it over before even turning it on.

I have found someone has done something odd with the LEDs, normally they are board mounted, but the Wilma (is that hard drive or power) is a green LED on a wire now, fred is missing, the red LED is now on a connector which was connected to a connector next to the LED jumper:



The memory slots all seem to have been filled but with 2 different batches of chips, I am guessing this unit either had none from new or maybe half the slots filled.

So I prized out the second batch of chips:





Pictured is both batches, and heres where I got a little confused, the chips installed are apparently 256k words 4 bit, am I right in think that means its 256k chips, eg a row of 4 = 1mb? or is it 512k?

Anyway the second batch of chips I prized out seem to be the same spec I think, meaning the 590 was loaded with 2mb? However I found one of the chips had a snapped leg that someone had tried to solder or something, which is why I prize the whole second batch out.

so then I was thinking with all this chip slots, what limits the ram to being 2mb with this board rather than 8mb? Also relating to this there is a jumper for ram, whats the amnesia setting? I have seen a pic on the big book of amiga that shows all ram slots filled with it set to amnesia?

Final random question about it was underneath I spotted this black wire:



is that factory?

Looks like the hard drive is the original 20mb scsi unit, I might look at getting it working tomorrow to see if it spins up.

I saw it has 2 large chips at the front of the board (I think the bios?) say V6.6 on each one, is that any good?

who knows if this will ever work properly again!

Any advice much appreciated or things to look for!

[rgrocha]

Hi,
Max fast memory for A590 is 2mb.
For memory chips, you can mix them as long they have the same bits size and speed.

The amnesia jumper config means no memory, the others are 512kb, 1mb and 2mb.

The v6.6 ROMs are fine, but latest s v7.0, seems like it fixes or improves something

Hope this helps you

[bugsymalone666]

Originally Posted by rgrocha

Hi,
Max fast memory for A590 is 2mb.
For memory chips, you can mix them as long they have the same bits size and speed.

The amnesia jumper config means no memory, the others are 512kb, 1mb and 2mb.

The v6.6 ROMs are fine, but latest s v7.0, seems like it fixes or improves something

Hope this helps you

I found the Amnesia setting rather random, but this is what I have found about old computing (like have an LED called Fred and one called Wilma!). I did wonder if it was known why the ram is limited to 2mb.

Also I know I have some Zip chips, can they be used? (I know the socket spacing is a little off, but that can be adjusted) If not i have a trapdoor expansion which no longer works, I may be able to rob the chips from that ( I did a chip mod and populated my mainboard with 4 extra chips and now have 1mb of chip ram, at the cost of the trapdoor expansion.)

Was I under the impressed that there is a limit to disk size with 6.6 roms?

[bugsymalone666]

Well I gotten as far as turning the unit on for the first time, it recognises the 1mb of ram I left in the unit in work bench (yay!), but the hard drive doesnt seem to be up to much.

The hard drive powers up and spins up in a noisy 20 year old way and is awesome, but it doesnt boot and when I set the dip switches to none auto boot and boot workbench, it doesnt see a hard drive.

So for old hard drives what sort of tools do I need? Part of me thinks there must be something on the hard drive based on the fact that its 20 years old and clearly been used. Problem is its scsi so I have nothing to interface with it other than the amiga. I'm not sure what other settings you can adjust to make it see the hard drive, there only 3 jumpers you can adjust, but the actual hard drive light doesnt seem to operate at any stage (even though I know the LED is ok and I have wired it correctly as my multimeter illuminates it)

What other checks and stuff can I do?

As for modifications, I wanted to look into making IDE68K and adding that, along with one of the memory additions, I wondered how these might interfere with the A590 interface if they were connected to the edge connector?

[mech]

Originally Posted by bugsymalone666

Well I gotten as far as turning the unit on for the first time, it recognises the 1mb of ram I left in the unit in work bench (yay!), but the hard drive doesnt seem to be up to much.

The hard drive powers up and spins up in a noisy 20 year old way and is awesome, but it doesnt boot and when I set the dip switches to none auto boot and boot workbench, it doesnt see a hard drive.

So for old hard drives what sort of tools do I need? Part of me thinks there must be something on the hard drive based on the fact that its 20 years old and clearly been used. Problem is its scsi so I have nothing to interface with it other than the amiga. I'm not sure what other settings you can adjust to make it see the hard drive, there only 3 jumpers you can adjust, but the actual hard drive light doesnt seem to operate at any stage (even though I know the LED is ok and I have wired it correctly as my multimeter illuminates it)

What other checks and stuff can I do?

As for modifications, I wanted to look into making IDE68K and adding that, along with one of the memory additions, I wondered how these might interfere with the A590 interface if they were connected to the edge connector?

As others posted, the ram is the same type, 256x4 dips. zips will not work. 4 chips per MB.
My 590 doesn't have the leds(fred/wilma) yours has,the holes are blank.

Leave the 590 on autoboot and run the A590 disk here: http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/a590
if autoboot is off, the scsi driver in rom (scsi.device) wont be loaded.

More than likely the drive may not have a bootable setup on it.Run hdtoolbox from the disk and partition and setup the drive(be sure to click the bootable box).save everything and reboot and the drive icon should reappear. You will need to format the partition from workbench.

You may then need to install a working workbench to it if there is not one.

[bugsymalone666]

That sounds pretty reasonable, funny enough I found that link a little while ago after I posted and then I used ADF Opus to convert the dms to adf, as I have a raspberry pi primary disk drive replacement I built from instructions online, so I can just throw ADFs on an SD card and bam, software also means I have tons of blank disk space for backups

currently I am running a 2.05 rom from an amiga 600 too, but I want to get some sort of bootdisk rom for 3 so I can run workbench 3.1.

I am not sure if its possible to use a bootrom disk type affair and then an autoboot hard drive, might require some mucking about.

quite surprised you said you dont have Power/HD LED's in yours from new, mine has them but they were not installed to great so need to work on it tomorrow.

[mech]

My 590 leds use the 4 pin connector. maybe someone broke off the connector and soldered your leds direct..not sure.

[bugsymalone666]

Hmm thats interesting, theres a little 4pin connector (well its a 5 pin connector with 1 pin missing in the middle) above the LED selector. The red HD LED was on that connector and the green one was connected to what should be the HD one I think (wilma?).

Seems strange but I'll suggest the tools you suggest. Ta

[bugsymalone666]

Ok so I have been doing some reading and came across something that said the A590 allocates the entire 8mb ram block even though it only uses 2 mb, is there any truth in this?

I'm trying to work out how an extra ram extension module that you can fit would work if the above is true, as surely it means the ram map is already taken up before the full 8mb is actually installed?

[Seblington]

Hello, sorry if these have been answered before but I have been playing with the A590, one think I have noticed is some machines do have the LCD's hard wired, some are soldered to the board with a bit of optic plastics which transfers the light up to the case, and some have plug in connectos, the only down side is that they have a shape to them which fits the holes in the cover so to replace it you may be lucky with a standard 5V 5mm LED or you may be lucky with a square one.

So far I have managed to install 520MB SCSI drives into these with no issues, larger drive do corrupt but I am sure one of the gurus here will point out its a limitation of the ROM, the 20MB HDD installed is not SCSI, its XT, there is a 3 pin jumper at the front of the board which needs to be in the right possition depending what drive you have.

The memory as mentioned is 256KB 4 bit, think its 60Ns, I brought these

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1715133879...%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

these are cheap enough and I think you will find the seller will do you a batch of 16, you could get them all to match and I can add that in the 3 I have upgraded, they have worked great.

[bugsymalone666]

Originally Posted by Seblington

Hello, sorry if these have been answered before but I have been playing with the A590, one think I have noticed is some machines do have the LCD's hard wired, some are soldered to the board with a bit of optic plastics which transfers the light up to the case, and some have plug in connectos, the only down side is that they have a shape to them which fits the holes in the cover so to replace it you may be lucky with a standard 5V 5mm LED or you may be lucky with a square one.

So far I have managed to install 520MB SCSI drives into these with no issues, larger drive do corrupt but I am sure one of the gurus here will point out its a limitation of the ROM, the 20MB HDD installed is not SCSI, its XT, there is a 3 pin jumper at the front of the board which needs to be in the right possition depending what drive you have.

The memory as mentioned is 256KB 4 bit, think its 60Ns, I brought these

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1715133879...%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

these are cheap enough and I think you will find the seller will do you a batch of 16, you could get them all to match and I can add that in the 3 I have upgraded, they have worked great.

Hi dude thanks for this, I have managed to populate the 590 I have with a full 2mb, its got a 20mb scsi drive which has a few bad blocks, so I figured more space is good if I want to do music and stuff on it, so i figured something bigger would be better.

At the moment I am trying to get the data off, then I am looking for something bigger and quieter.

With my LED's I worked out that I had connected them to the board and it wasnt working so I used the connector and did a rewire so now I have green and amber LEDs working just fine - result!

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by bugsymalone666

Ok so I have been doing some reading and came across something that said the A590 allocates the entire 8mb ram block even though it only uses 2 mb, is there any truth in this?

I don't think so. Most likely some other A500/A590 related autoconfig problem (A500 is not really designed for multiple autoconfig boards)

So far I have managed to install 520MB SCSI drives into these with no issues, larger drive do corrupt but I am sure one of the gurus here will point out its a limitation of the ROM

Pre-7.0 ROM: 1G drive limit (Drive size may be reported correctly but reads and writes are restricted to first 1G of drive, this is a real limit, not a wrap around, fortunately). Direct SCSI filesystems do not have this limit.

7.0 ROMs removes 1G limit but you still need to take care of usual >4G drive size problems. (or use direct scsi filesystem)

[bugsymalone666]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

I don't think so. Most likely some other A500/A590 related autoconfig problem (A500 is not really designed for multiple autoconfig boards)



Pre-7.0 ROM: 1G drive limit (Drive size may be reported correctly but reads and writes are restricted to first 1G of drive, this is a real limit, not a wrap around, fortunately). Direct SCSI filesystems do not have this limit.

7.0 ROMs removes 1G limit but you still need to take care of usual >4G drive size problems. (or use direct scsi filesystem)

so if I say got a 4.5gb scsi drive, I could still use it but only see 1gb? Its just an availability thing, seems you can get 36gb+ drives really cheap, I'm not worried about using all of it I just want a gb maybe.

Can you partition the scsi drive (if it was above 1/4/18+gb) into 900mb segments so that the amiga would just see a load of drives?

How many can it address?

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by bugsymalone666

so if I say got a 4.5gb scsi drive, I could still use it but only see 1gb? Its just an availability thing, seems you can get 36gb+ drives really cheap, I'm not worried about using all of it I just want a gb maybe.

Bigger drives should still detect normally, even with old ROMs.

Can you partition the scsi drive (if it was above 1/4/18+gb) into 900mb segments so that the amiga would just see a load of drives?

No. Only first 1G of the _drive_ is available. All partitions must be inside first 1G to be accessible. (if old ROM)

But just use direct scsi filesystem (pfs3aio/pfs3ds) and forget about all limits

[Seblington]

There is another limitation, the standard A590 PSU isnt strong enough for most drives, the larger drives such as the 68 pins rotate at 7200 RPM, 3 of my A590s failed to even spin them up, in fact 2 struggled to spin a 4.3GB 50 pin 5400 RPM drive, so be careful what you pick.

There is a nice and cheap 1GB on Ebay now

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Fujitsu-M2...item27f0f162e0

[bugsymalone666]

Originally Posted by Seblington

There is another limitation, the standard A590 PSU isnt strong enough for most drives, the larger drives such as the 68 pins rotate at 7200 RPM, 3 of my A590s failed to even spin them up, in fact 2 struggled to spin a 4.3GB 50 pin 5400 RPM drive, so be careful what you pick.

There is a nice and cheap 1GB on Ebay now

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Fujitsu-M2...item27f0f162e0

All I can say is wow! I thought the PSU would be beefier than that, I can see why people build custom PSUs. I am wondering what sort of PSU I'd need to run an amiga and A590 at the same time.

I have found a few 1gb drives online, but I thought I'd see what limitations there were.

I have a scsi card in a PC from 1997 that I still have, just finding a way to make it so I can use winUAE then I can access and format HDs from there I take it?

[mark_k]

You could, if you don't mind making a hole in the casing, fit an extension cable for the power connector of the hard disk in the A590, and plug a separate power supply into that. Such power supplies can be had quite cheaply on eBay, e.g. this one. Or get a power supply like that and fit an A590-type connector on the end to use instead of the original A590 power supply. But maybe power having to go through the A590 board traces limits the possible current, so connecting directly to the drive would be better.

Perhaps the best option though, would be to just get an external SCSI case/enclosure and fit the drive in that. That would avoid power-related problems

You can get PCI Express SCSI cards, if your modern desktop PC doesn't have any PCI slots. You should be able to get WinUAE to work with the drive connected to a PC SCSI card. In fact, if you're careful you might even be able to have the PC and A590 connected to the drive at the same time...

[Seblington]

Dont go hacking a PSU just yet, also it would be unwise running a power supply to the HDD and a separate one to the logic board, pretty sure I have tried something similar and you end up with an unbalanced SMPSU which can result in damage, the connector to the back of the unit is a simple 4 PIN DIN, super cheap. it all depends what size drive you put in there, you may find what you use will be fine.

You could however get one of these little devices and cure all the power and transfer issues

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/CF-AztecMo.../301432423475?

OK yes, its expensive but it is very low power consumption and quicker assess times, don't honestly know what the speed difference is like on the data transfer but I plan to stick one in my A530

[bugsymalone666]

Originally Posted by Seblington

Dont go hacking a PSU just yet, also it would be unwise running a power supply to the HDD and a separate one to the logic board, pretty sure I have tried something similar and you end up with an unbalanced SMPSU which can result in damage, the connector to the back of the unit is a simple 4 PIN DIN, super cheap. it all depends what size drive you put in there, you may find what you use will be fine.

You could however get one of these little devices and cure all the power and transfer issues

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/CF-AztecMo.../301432423475?

OK yes, its expensive but it is very low power consumption and quicker assess times, don't honestly know what the speed difference is like on the data transfer but I plan to stick one in my A530

Yeah I had considered one of those, but generally no UK based seller and a fraction pricey for the amount I am likely to use it for. I am looking into building a IDE68K interface to run a CF with as I have a 512mb CF somewhere, but obviously having more storage to install alot of my games to would make life easier.

With the power supply I was thinking more along the lines of building a single unit to run both the A500 and A590, I suspect the PCB tracks would be fine, but I could always beef the ones up from the PSU socket to the drive itself with wire.

[Seblington]

The IDE68K looks good, if you are going internal maybe a Kipper2K would be a better choice? you can get them in 4 and 8MB versions

http://kipper2k.com/amigaforsale/