Individual Computers - New accelerator cards for A600 & A1200

[trebormills]

Havent checked up on the amiga scene for ages, I may have to dig out my A1200 and grab one of these new cards. Its totally stock but I do have a 4way IDE board and an ide to CF adaptor which I never got round to fitting

heres hoping for a cd32 adaptor...will go nicely with my FDU adaptor and a4000 keyboard

Just need ebay sales to raise cash

[tin]

Originally Posted by FOL

Thats proberly your problem,
Your supposed to remove E123C, E125C.

With the other board, you have all four removed? its only supposed to be two removed.

Reason for the post is that I am a bit cautious of this.

1) 1D1 I supposed to be OK for timing (I think) hence no need to remove

2) 1D4 Is unstable EVEN though they ARE removed



BTW reading http://www.ianstedman.co.uk/Amiga/am..._mobo_fix.html it seems it doesn't matter if you remove one (C), the other (R), or both (R and C). Same effect.

[amigoun]

Thanks for the link tin. Interesting reading. My mobo (2B) worked fine with Blizzard 1220/28, but experienced constant lock-ups with ACA 1230/28.
I removed only E123C, E125C as recommended and the lock-ups are gone and the card & amiga seems to work reliably and stable.
But I discovered minor problems with the parallel port (printing is ok, but connecting my 1541-II with par port cable for transfering data does not work anymore - it freezes amiga), so maybe it should get better if I do more fixes described in the link you provided.

[rockersuke]

After beeing lost for a week in the limbo of Spanish mail service due to christmas heavy mailing traffic (sigh...) the little Aca630 beast has safely arrived home today!

It just worked right out of the box. There have just been a handful of random crashing in a few hours which I still don't know if I should worry about, then again I haven't even started to mess with Acatune. I just copied the version included in the floppy (hey! that was nice!) but I think the one linked in this thread is the latest, right?

As expected, setting the No Disk jumper (as default) killed PCMCIA. Workbench would show my external CF card there, but couldn't access its contents properly. No trouble for me, as I pretend to keep my floppy drive in place and have no plans for an ECS Indivision... now. If I change my mind in the future the solution with the floppy conector jumpers seems easy enough, so unless someone strongly encourages me to do so for a good reason, I'm not returning it for a fix. I just hope the info in this post will be available in a easier to find place in the future, just in case...

Apologizing in advance for our annoying, persistent, unstoppable "too much heat" paranoia... . As shown in the photo, my internal CF is in direct touch with the heatsink. Is that safe in the long term?

Now I have a lot of things to try and install and enjoy and test and have fun with . Thanks a lot to Individual Computers, AmigaKit, and everyone involved!

--

[FOL]

Originally Posted by tin

BTW reading http://www.ianstedman.co.uk/Amiga/am..._mobo_fix.html it seems it doesn't matter if you remove one (C), the other (R), or both (R and C). Same effect.

Yeh, but it causes confusion.

[Predseda]

New usergroup has been created

ACA owners

[Foxman]

Nice

[tin]

Originally Posted by FOL

Yeh, but it causes confusion.

Maybe, but as stated in the original post, this is how the Amiga came to me. I have not made any modifications yet, and was posting to ask for some advice given the circumstances and findings so far before I DO make any mods.

[FOL]

Originally Posted by tin

Maybe, but as stated in the original post, this is how the Amiga came to me. I have not made any modifications yet, and was posting to ask for some advice given the circumstances and findings so far before I DO make any mods.

Where did you get the card from?
If it was from us, please start a support ticket.

We would also require all availabe details on your setup (including all chip revs).

[rave]

Got my ACA630/25 through the post a few days ago and put it in the other night.
worked out the box, and have now enabled all the features I want in ACATune.
Have played a few whdload games and demos and all is working great
big thanks to Jens for making the card and to amigakit for providing the driver disk.

Happy!

[Photon]

Originally Posted by fitzsteve

I was thinking (outside the box so bare with me) that if you made a custom 1.3 Rom with the SCSI.Device the you could do away with the Rom switch because in theory then you'd have by default 1.3 Rom for your floppy games with the ACA630 disabled but with the ACA630 enabled + ACATune you could remap 3.1 rom into FastRAM.

Would this idea work or am I missing something?

At least when I get an ACA630 I'd like to try this...

Steve.

Not to discourage you, other aspects with ACA630 switched off, such as 1+ MB chip and no fast or fake fast will be just as bad for 100% compatibility as the Kickstart version. Non-1 MB games will boot from disk fine, with a few exceptions like reading DF0 head position directly from kick 1.2 ROM

You know I'm all about the kick 1.2/1.3 A500 512k/512k platform, but I can't really see a solution here (for 100% compatibility). And I know from trying many, many demos even after just upgrading my Amigas to >1.3 kick or fastram that you can't switch off (either via real switch or compatible with misc bootblocks and commands), that it's hard to reach this goal.

Real kickswitch and hardware switchable fastmem or fake fast is still closest. If you plan to run as many programs for my favorite platform as possible _from harddisk_, Kick 3.1, any kind of fastram, and an 'take all fastmem' command for the really early demos comes pretty close. Some A1000 demos, early cracktros and Mr. Gurk/Celebrandil demos will still fail but many games will work.

Kick 1.3 or 3.1 (but nothing in between) will take you pretty far.

Don't hit me on the head with a stick if you know this already

[Retrofan]

A Sad Story:

You know from time to time a parcel gets lost in the postal service. It's not the usual thing here where I live, I've received hundreds of sendings... but you know it can happen sometime. I was looking Amigakit and I saw the ACA 1230/56 before it was posted here. I taked an hour to preorder it as I had problems with my password there; if not, I think I could have been the first to buy it.

I was waiting it by the 6 of January, the day we celebrate here the Three Kings, but it didn't arrive . A couple of days ago I knew it was supossed to be delivered on January, the 7th... but it never did; it got "lost".

Now I have to wait 25 days since the sending so Amigakit can open a reclamation... I don't know how much will it take so I can get my ACA (and my Commodore book)... .

I can't (I think) even join the group of ACA owners, 'cause I'm not.

Please give me confort

[fitzsteve]

Dont give up hope yet! People are still receiving Christmas post even in the last few days. I hope its with you soon or a replacement if it genuinely is lost.

Steve.

[Retrofan]

Originally Posted by fitzsteve

Dont give up hope yet! People are still receiving Christmas post even in the last few days. I hope its with you soon or a replacement if it genuinely is lost.

Steve.

Thanks... buaah, buaaahh, please give me a hug...

[dabone]

still waiting.. I guess it because of exploding toners... grrr...


later,
dabone

[MrDBUG]

All hope lost for my ACA ??

Images:
http://picasaweb.google.com/dag.jacobsen/ACA123028#

Seem to have damaged pins inside the edge connector ?? :-(
I cant believe how that could have happened ..

Is there any way of replacing the edge connector in service ?

[desiv]

OK, if this works, this is my first post from a WEB browser on my Amiga thanks to the ACA1230.
If it doesn't work, it has nothing to do with the ACA1230, getting AmiTCP and IBrowse to play took a bit of poking.

desiv
p.s. The 30 minute iBrowse demo time limit might be tricky as it took about 28 minutes to load EAB.. :-) KIDDING!!

[Paul_s]

Originally Posted by MrDBUG

All hope lost for my ACA ??

Images:
http://picasaweb.google.com/dag.jacobsen/ACA123028#

Seem to have damaged pins inside the edge connector ?? :-(
I cant believe how that could have happened ..

Is there any way of replacing the edge connector in service ?

The ACA-1230 isn't meant for installtion into your toaster In anycase that looks bad... maybe better to have it replaced for a new one, unless it's the rarer 56MHz edition?

[MrDBUG]

I was pretty careful I thought ... but something must have happened along the installation struggle ... I KNEW I shouldnt have "tried this at home" :-(

Idiotproof, nope QED :-S

And it is / was the 28 mhz thank heavens .. Right now I just wish I hadnt attempted it.

Something must have been odd with my A1200 CPU connector.

Wonder if I ship it back to Jens now maybe he can reuse the 030 ? Or replace the connector ?

I wish I had let AmigaKit put it in the miggy, If Ive somehow managed to destroy this poor ACAs INSIDE connector, postage to the uk would have been cheaper :-(

Someone higher up please give us a CloneA or eqvivalent prebuilt, NOW, no assembly required !!!!! :-D
:-(

Now for some pizza ... >

Atleast my new PCMCIA network card seems to work :-)
That lil detail keeps me from bawling :-( Only sad I just have 2 meg ram on that computer instead of the royal amount of 66 ....

Thankfully I have two other A1200s as a comfort .. One unexpanded refurbed from A'kit, that also was supposed to get an aca,
and one NOS from A'kit with an e-matrix 16 meg card ..
Its not like 64 meg would be, but since my old amigadays (88-ca92) was spent with 1 meg A500 , only 16+2 is pretty good..

I just wanted this ACA in my workhorse 1200 as an "insurance in numbers" against Amiga deprivation,
or from "sudden hardware death - due to old age", that unmentionable beast that seems like its always lurking in the shadows,
to strike us vintage computar'ians unexpectedly, like the spanish inquisition ......

Now pizza ! NOT TOAST thank you ! :-P

[Schoenfeld]

I would like to investigate this connector issue. It does seem to be bent a little (open pins in the back don't look exactly aligned), but I can't tell exactly from the pictures.

Since we have developed the tooling to manufacture these connectors, any return is a valuable lesson for future changes. I would like to investigate if this is a fault of the tooling (bad for me, but a warranty issue for any customer), a single faulty connector (warranty issue), or a simple user error. In any case, I'd like to see the thing. Please contact me through the web form of icomp.de - thanks.

Jens