Restoring an Amiga 2500UX

[bozimmerman]

Hello all. I'm trying my best to restore an Amiga 2500UX, which I can find very little information or support for.

The machine has an A2630 with 2MB, an A2091 card with 6.6 roms, and a floppy drive. I have a BigRam 030 I can bump up the ram with. It came with some SCSI hard drives with AmigaOS 3.x and no sign of AMIX. I imaged the AmigaOS hard drives and will replace them with an SD-card board.

So: has anyone ever installed AMIX on an A2630 machine? Is there anything I need to know or do? ATM, I'm testing from the composite video port.

So far, booting from a pre-configured hard drive image OR attempting to boot from the AMIX boot disks just results in a black screen of nothing-going-on.

Any experience, thoughts, or outright help is appreciated,
- Bo Zimmerman

[bozimmerman]

Replying to my own message because I figured out the cause of the black screen of nothing-goin-on.

It was the BigRam. I removed it, and everything started working.

Perhaps AMIX boot disks do a memory check? If so, perhaps if I'd let it sit at the black screen for another hour or two it would have finished coming up?

Anyway, it seems like I'm on the good path now.

Thanks for reading.

[dannyp1]

Have you tried booting into AMIX without the A2630? Probably 15 years ago or so I messed around for awhile trying to get a Blizzard 4030 working for AMIX on my 3000ux and never had much luck.

[Matt_H]

AMIX is very picky about hardware, so the BigRAM may not be addressable. Have a look at the https://amigaunix.com wiki for additional tips. Definitely consider bringing your 2630 up to 4MB and adding 2MB to your 2091. The 2MB on your 2630 you have now possibly isn't enough - AMIX officially requires at least 4MB of contiguous memory. Once you achieve that there might be a tiny chance the BigRAM will start working, but don't bet on it.

Also, you'll have a much easier time with installation if your hard drive is set to SCSI ID 6 and your "tape drive" is set to ID 4. You may want to install the system under WinUAE and then bring the drive back to your Amiga.

[bozimmerman]

Originally Posted by Matt_H

AMIX is very picky about hardware, so the BigRAM may not be addressable. Have a look at the https://amigaunix.com wiki for additional tips. Definitely consider bringing your 2630 up to 4MB and adding 2MB to your 2091. The 2MB on your 2630 you have now possibly isn't enough - AMIX officially requires at least 4MB of contiguous memory. Once you achieve that there might be a tiny chance the BigRAM will start working, but don't bet on it.

Also, you'll have a much easier time with installation if your hard drive is set to SCSI ID 6 and your "tape drive" is set to ID 4. You may want to install the system under WinUAE and then bring the drive back to your Amiga.

I did upgrade the 2091 to 2mb, and that went fine.

I tried bringing the 2630 up to 4mb, using some TC514256AZ-10 chips I picked up. The internet seemed sure they would work, despite having one less pin than the normal 414256 chips in there. They failed AmiKit ram tests though, so I don't know (did I make a soldering mistake?). AMIX also stopped booting, even after jumpering back to 2mb, so I had to remove those chips to get the system back. :/

Anyway, still working through details, but it's mostly working at least.

[salax54]

@bozimmerman: you know we need to see pictures....

[bozimmerman]

Originally Posted by salax54

@bozimmerman: you know we need to see pictures....

And *you* know I have them for you.


Here's what the system looks like ATM:
http://coffeemud.net:8080/cbmpics/in...-CA1074777.jpg

You can click back to the A2500 directory from there to see others, intermingled with my normal A2500.

You can also read a little blog post I made about the process of restoring it here:
https://ode2commies.blogspot.com/202...unix-amix.html

- Bo

[mousehouse]

Great to read up on your project! I do remember our old and trusted A2630 having a boot menu for both workbench and Amiga UNIX in there. I would need to open the machine to check the ROM versions, 4.x if I remember correctly.

I have the SCSI2SD from my 3000UX that I sold in corona times with a working image on it if you'd need something like that.