ACA500 plus?

[E-Penguin]

Try doing a soft reset (ctrl+amiga+amiga) after it's frozen

[softiron]

It seems 28Mhz was too much.
Switched to 14, worked fine, then 21 - this one is also solid rock for my configuration.

[Marty_McFly]

I bought some weeks ago ACA500plus but after about 27 years of honorable career I have been forced to remove my A500 expansion to allow to ACA500plus to work properly.
From what I remember it is a fast ram memory. I always seen 1.8MB of total fast ram as available/free from WBench screen (then I suppose it is a 1.5mb expansion card). The strange thing is that has not a clock despite other expansion cards. I found it connected to a chip, I suppose it is Gary CHIP, right?
Just to help me to identify it, you can find some images below:

http://i63.tinypic.com/oayg5f.jpg

http://oi64.tinypic.com/2lwm1om.jpg

Are you able to identify it?
Is there a way to allow its working with ACA500plus?
Thank you for any help.

[demolition]

The chips on it are each 256k x 4 bit, so that amounts to 1.5MB in total. Have you tried installing it without using the Gary adapter? Perhaps then it would be seen as a 512k expansion.

[Marty_McFly]

I will surely try without the Gary connection. I hope that next versions of firmware could find a solution for this trouble.
I have been forced to remove it because every selection from the ACA500 plus menu gave me a green screen and some mem addresses of error, followed by a fast blink of the red light of my Amiga.
About the name of the expansion card as you can read is written "PC WARE 4990" but I din't find any result via Google...
Thank you for your precious tips.

[E-Penguin]

It can't be fixed in Firmware - the Gary adapter does stuff the ACA500plus can't "see", so it can never be compatible.

[Jope]

Perhaps just sell the big ranger mem board to someone and get a commonly available 512k expansion in its place, or if you have a rev6 motherboard, solder the chips to the motherboard. :-)

[Marty_McFly]

Bad news my friends. Just made an attempt only connecting the expansion without the Gary Chip plug and It resulted impossible to start my Amiga. Switching on the power supply the computer remains with a permanent green screen and the blinking red light.

I don't know which revision no. is my Amiga. I bought it in Dec 1989. It has a Kickstart 1.3.
I could evaluate to buy a 512k expansion card, but apart from that I would like at least to understand the difference between chip and fast mem. If I have to look for a 512 chip or fast expansion mem. I had a look to some wiki pages but the difference is not totally clear.

Getting back to ACA500plus, hoping it could be useful to other users of this forum, I tested the following CF cards and I confirm that are perfectly working, both in boot and aux slots (in this case with a simple FAT partition):

- Transcend 4GB 133x
- Kingston 8GB (serial no. 9904318)
- SanDisk Ultra II 4GB 15MB/s

About Aux slot I discovered that it can works as a single floppy.
I made an attempt copying the entire content (files and dirs) of a WB 1.3 disk to an amiga formatted CF, inserting it in the aux slot (insted of boot slot).
After I switched "aux slot on" in ACA menu (F10->F7) and I was really surprised of the outcome because WB has been run as on a floppy!

I tried also inserting the CF with WB inside in the "CF boot slot", I hoped that the CF was handled at the same way as in the other slot (considering that it is a boot slot for formatted amiga CF...) but the CF has been totally ignored. Why?

Anyway I would like to know better the role of the "amiga boot CF slot". Can the latter be used only as HDisk?

[vext01]

Is it me, or does the 7MB chip RAM expansion not work in the 0.97 firmware?

[mattsoft]

The boot CF slot is for your Amiga CF "hard disk".

The AUX slot can be FAT formatted and hot-swapped. Easy to transfer files between PC/Mac and your Amiga.

Very handy!!!

Originally Posted by Marty_McFly

Bad news my friends. Just made an attempt only connecting the expansion without the Gary Chip plug and It resulted impossible to start my Amiga. Switching on the power supply the computer remains with a permanent green screen and the blinking red light.

I don't know which revision no. is my Amiga. I bought it in Dec 1989. It has a Kickstart 1.3.
I could evaluate to buy a 512k expansion card, but apart from that I would like at least to understand the difference between chip and fast mem. If I have to look for a 512 chip or fast expansion mem. I had a look to some wiki pages but the difference is not totally clear.

Getting back to ACA500plus, hoping it could be useful to other users of this forum, I tested the following CF cards and I confirm that are perfectly working, both in boot and aux slots (in this case with a simple FAT partition):

- Transcend 4GB 133x
- Kingston 8GB (serial no. 9904318)
- SanDisk Ultra II 4GB 15MB/s

About Aux slot I discovered that it can works as a single floppy.
I made an attempt copying the entire content (files and dirs) of a WB 1.3 disk to an amiga formatted CF, inserting it in the aux slot (insted of boot slot).
After I switched "aux slot on" in ACA menu (F10->F7) and I was really surprised of the outcome because WB has been run as on a floppy!

I tried also inserting the CF with WB inside in the "CF boot slot", I hoped that the CF was handled at the same way as in the other slot (considering that it is a boot slot for formatted amiga CF...) but the CF has been totally ignored. Why?

Anyway I would like to know better the role of the "amiga boot CF slot". Can the latter be used only as HDisk?

[E-Penguin]

Originally Posted by vext01

Is it me, or does the 7MB chip RAM expansion not work in the 0.97 firmware?

Do you mean 1mb chip or 7mb fast?

So my ACA500 plus works fine in my Rev 5 NTSC Amiga. So I know the ACA500 plus is working correctly.

I am in the process of repairing my Rev 6 NTSC 500. It was booting to green screen, but I desoldered the chip ram and socketed in some replacement chips. The 500 now boots to kickstart animation (2.x rom) and can boot off of gotek. However with the ACA500 plus in the machine never boots and the DisMo stops on #20. Can anyone shed any light on what the DisMo boot codes mean and why it is stopping on #20. I have every reason to believe I am not done fixing my Rev 6, but knowing why it's stopping at #20 might give me a nudge in the right direction
Thanks All
Brian

[alpine9000]

Mine was shipped yesterday :-)

[nobody]

A question, mine cannot adjust CPU speed beyond 14 Mhz, the system hangs. I guess it's a PSU problem?
Other than that a superb card. It really gives life to the A500.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by nobody

A question, mine cannot adjust CPU speed beyond 14 Mhz, the system hangs. I guess it's a PSU problem?

Perhaps it is just a chip that does not overclock well? No-one has promised speeds over 14MHz, that is already above the CPU's rating of 10MHz.

The MC68EC000-10 processor is clocked at 14MHz as standard. This guaranteed frequency will give your computer more than a double-speed boost. If that's not enough, you can choose overclocking to 21, 28 or even 42MHz. By attaching an ACA12xx or Blizzard 12xx accelerator, you make your A500 faster than a stock A3000.

https://icomp.de/shop-icomp/en/shop/...CA500plus.html

[E-Penguin]

Originally Posted by briansallee

Can anyone shed any light on what the DisMo boot codes mean and why it is stopping on #20.

From my understanding, the DisMo codes show a percentage of loading, rather than an error code as such.

The stock answer for all problems seems to be "power supply!" at the moment - have you got a multimeter you could use to check?

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by nobody

A question, mine cannot adjust CPU speed beyond 14 Mhz, the system hangs. I guess it's a PSU problem?
Other than that a superb card. It really gives life to the A500.

If it hangs after (not during) KS ROM unpack messages, try changing F8 menu reset option.

[Signman]

Installed mine in my Amiga 1000 and surprisingly works most of the time even if not supported. Put my 1232/25hz accelerator with it and runs smooth.

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

From my understanding, the DisMo codes show a percentage of loading, rather than an error code as such.

The stock answer for all problems seems to be "power supply!" at the moment - have you got a multimeter you could use to check?

Thanks E-Penguin. I do have a multimeter handy. Same powersupply that is driving the rev5. I have a bigfoot a500 power supply I can swap out for. That said since the power supply is driving the rev 5 I imagine the powersupply itself is fine, but I suppose it could be related to power distribution once it's on the motherboard itself.

If your right about the codes being % of load then that means its getting around 32% or 1/3 of the way through boot before hanging. Anyone know the boot process?

[Schoenfeld]

Originally Posted by briansallee

So my ACA500 plus works fine in my Rev 5 NTSC Amiga. So I know the ACA500 plus is working correctly.

The Rev.5 NTSC version was critical with the previous version, but it's not any more with the ACA500plus.

Originally Posted by briansallee

I am in the process of repairing my Rev 6 NTSC 500. It was booting to green screen, but I desoldered the chip ram and socketed in some replacement chips. The 500 now boots to kickstart animation (2.x rom) and can boot off of gotek. However with the ACA500 plus in the machine never boots and the DisMo stops on #20.

First of all, the DisMo codes are not percentages of the boot process, but simple codes that are being displayed before entering a certain routine. They may be in an increasing order, though.

$20 is "DEBUG_STATUS_INIT", and if it stops there, some early detection of CPU/memory/other hardware fails. This usually happens if there is an incompatible hardware extension in the A500. Since you're repairing, you may have a unit that has bad contacts on the Gary-chip from a previous installation of a larger trapdoor memory expansion. In any case, it seems that the repair is not yet complete.

You get a lot more info from the serial log: Make a nullmodem cable, connect between the serial port of the A500 and "some other computer", launch a terminal program on htat other computer using 115200 Baud, 8N1, no handshake, and of course switch on the debug output (that's a new setting in the latest menu version, global F8 menu).

Jens