Problem with A1230 card

[bobingabout]

Okay, I have several peices of hardware here.
I have an Amiga 1200, aparantly a Rev 1D.4 motherboard in it.
When I bought it second hand, it included a GVP A1230 Accelerator card.
I Also have a PCMCIA Amiquest/Overdrive external hard drive that I used in my Amiga 600, this worked fine. Since I now have a 1400MB hard drive installed in the A600 and a 4GB IDE CF drive A1200, it is mostly used for backups and transfering files between the 2 computers.

However, my GVP A1230 only had 1MB of RAM, totaling 3MB in the whole Amiga 1200, sounds slightly pathetic for a 40MHz processor, the RAM became the biggest limiting factor. I tried to install some EDO RAM, to find it wouldn't fit. Aparantly I needed 64pin GVP specific SIMMs

I found it was actually cheaper to buy a new ACT 1230 Turbo MKIII, with 32MB RAM isntalled from ebay then it was to buy a pair of 16MB GVP SIMMs, so I did.

However, now that I have my new 1230 installed, my Amiga 1200 won't detect the PCMCIA Hard drive. an Icon does pop up for the Overdrive, but clicking it does nothing, and loading the partitioning tool for it causes the whole computer to stop responding.


I did a few tests:
Bare A1200: Overdrive worked fine
GVP A1230: Overdrive worked awesome
ACT A1230 Turbo MKIII: Buggy


I did a quick google and found this
http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=...postcount=1359

Before I go and butcher my A1200, I'd like an opinion on if I should do it, if there's any chances of making things worse, and if it could actually be a problem with the A1230, rather than the A1200, since the GVP card seems to work fine.

[demolition]

Just don't throw away the components and they can be soldered back in, in case that was not the cause of the problem.

[bobingabout]

Not exactly the response I was looking for, but good advice all the same.
I guess I'll get my tools together to give it a try tonight.

[Hewitson]

Does it work with no RAM on the accel?

[quarkx]

Could be a simple case of the power supply not being "strong" enough. I know when I poped in an ACA 1230 card, the system was crashing every few minutes and such. I then swapped for a beefer one and the problem was fixed.

[bobingabout]

This is an Amiga 600 PSU I'm using it with, not the original A1200 PSU, but you're right in that it might not be Powerful enough, I can try an A500 PSU if I can find where I put that.

Anyway, I performed the hardware timing fix, and no change, let me re-assemble the Amiga, then tidy up, and then I'll go try these other sugestions and I'll report back.

Edit1: No RAM: There's a change, the HDToolBox for the Overdrive doesn't crash, but the hard drive comes up with Jargon and about 18MB rather than the 8GB that was being detected normally.

Edit2: Found my A500 PSU. 4.5A @ 5V vs 3A, 1A @ 12V vs 500mA, I think this is more powerful.

Edit3: From no RAM, the PSU made no change, I'll put the RAM back in and see what it does with the beefier PSU.

Edit4: RAM and Bigger PSU. Doesn't crash when I run the partition tool, but it doesn't detect the hard drive in the overdrive at all.

[sneeker]

What version of workbench and kickstart is it?

With 3.1 a lot of cards clash with the pcmcia address when you use more than 4mb on the card, my dkb cobra has 16mb, and when I was using workbench 3.1 I couldnt use my pcmcia slot, with workbench 3.0 it works.

[prowler]

Originally Posted by sneeker

I was using workbench 3.1 I couldnt use my pcmcia slot, with workbench 3.0 it works.

It's dependent on Kickstart, not Workbench version.

[bobingabout]

It's 3.1, I probably still have my 3.0 ROMs around somewhere, except I have no idea where, we've moved out and in again due to the floods of 2007, they could've been thrown out by my mother who doesn't know anything about this sort of thing.

[bobingabout]

Okay... No luck finding my 3.0 ROMs, however, I recently got a pair of 27C400s, was going to "play" with making a costom Kickstart ROM set.

If you suspect this to be a problem only with Kickstart 3.1, and not 3.0, do you think making a costom Kickstart using some of these rom modules might help?
http://lilliput.amiga-projects.net/ROM_modules.htm

I'm thinking in particular Card.resource(that is for the driver for the PCMCIA slot, right?) and SCSI.device while I'm at it. Add in the ResetCard package to fix the PCMCIA reset line problem, and... thats about all I planned to update really.

[prowler]

Why don't you just create a standard 3.0 ROM set to replace the chips you can't find?

It may not be the Kickstart version which is causing your problem after all.

It's actually quite unusual to get RAM conflicts with the PCMCIA port when using '030 accelerator cards.

[bobingabout]

Originally Posted by prowler

Why don't you just create a standard 3.0 ROM set to replace the chips you can't find?

It may not be the Kickstart version which is causing your problem after all.

It's actually quite unusual to get RAM conflicts with the PCMCIA port when using '030 accelerator cards.

I could name a few reasons why not...

EDIT: Okay, I split the 3.0 ROM, now I just need to program my EEPROMs. Problem: I left them at work, will have to do it tomorrow <.>

Edit 2
I programmed my EEPROMs at work, this programmer is awesome, I probably didn't need to bother messing around trying to split the ROM image, because it has a 32bit to 2x16bit chip set function built in, with a byteswap feature too!

[bobingabout]

Okay, with a V3.0 Kickstart, Same problem.

[bobingabout]

okay, so the motherboard fix didn't help, Changing the kickstart didn't help, Bigger PSU didn't help... anyone have any other sugestions?
the strange thing is it seems to work perfectly fine with everything except my overdrive...
I could try and sell it, then just buy the GVP RAM from ebay.