Upgrading CDTV disaster

[Antiriad]

I bought a CDTV off Ebay recently. Its a 1MB Chip Ram model - Motherboard Reviosion 2.3, but with Kickstart 1.3 and therefore OCS Denise. It had a fair amount of scratches on its case which I have since painted over with a matte black car spray - looks as good as new now

Anyway, I got interested in upgrading it. As such, I opened my upgraded A500+ motherboard and inserted my ECS Super Denise and Fatter Agnus (a Mini Mega Chip) onto the CDTV motherboard without any problems. Booted her up, and lo and behold, full ECS and 2MB Chip Ram...

I thought "great!", and as I have ordered another Super Denise chip (for the A500+) and one of those Elbox 2MB Fast Ram from Vesalia the other day, I was looking forward to installing all the above permanently and having a kick ass CDTV to run JST or Whdload games via CD.

However, for a variety of reasons I wanted to upgrade the kickstart without having to use Skick and lose 512MB of Ram in the process (that and theres never any guarantee it will work). As such, I inserted my 2.04 chip from my A500+. This didnt work so well. What I got was continual rebooting. So... I then tried my 2.05 chip I have spare from my A500 which I upgraded to 3.1 thinking that as this was a later revision it might be more CDTV friendly.

This time nothing happened, no continual reboot. No activity. It was at this point that I thought I may have put the Rom chip in the wrong way round. So, I turned it round and re-inserted it.

BIG MISTAKE...

No, this time I REALLY had put it in the wrong way round and it showed because as soon as I powered the CDTV up there was no LED display (there was before) and only the power pack fan whirring incessantly - much louder than before strangely...

So obviously it had been the right way round the first time round...now the problem is that my CDTV with all its original chips restored is still not powering up and I am at a loss as to what to do

Any advice would be greatly appreciated...

[TheBoss]

OMG not a sexy CDTV gone dead in this world, its inhuman
I wish I could help out but my speciality isn't messing around CDTV stuff.

[yadster]

I've never had a CDTV, too expensive for me at the time then the Cd32 came out. Anyway I have a dead CD32 (think it's the CD drive that has gone kaput) but if there is anything I can rip out of it you're welcome to have it.

[TheBoss]

OMG not a cute CD32 gone dead in this world, its inhuman!

[yadster]

Yes but we have the technology to fetch it back to life - Robocop style

[Akira]

Sorry to say this, but I think your lovely CDTV is FUBAR.

first off, the CDTV's ROM is NOT the same as every other 1.3 ROM. The CDTV is not just an A500 with a CD drive, therefore it needed a special ROM.

Now, as you saw it didn't work, but inserting it the wrong end (it's easy to check man, it has a little mark in the chip and the socket ) surely has killed the CDTV for good.

May it rest in peace in Silicon Heaven.

[Antiriad]

:eek

Im suprised doing this could do so much damage!

[Antiriad]

I mean I had thought the CDTV like the CD32 had an extension ROM and that it was this that took care of the CD special part of things, so changing the main ROM made no difference...

Im kicking myself over this I can tell you...

[Toni Wilen]

Maybe just dead powersupply? It is possible +5v was shorted to ground when ROM was connected wrong way. I only hope PS regulation didn't fail causing overvoltage (too fast PS fan..)

Disconnect PS and check voltages with multimeter.

btw, CDTV KS ROM is standard KS1.3 (not like CD32 which has custom KS3 ROM)

[TheBoss]

This is sorely the saddest news I have heard today and it sucks!
Isn't there a possibility for a repair... such a fine CDTV shouldn't just drop dead!

[Antiriad]

Oh Im gutted over this I can tell you...Ive opened up and/or upgraded ALL my Amigas Ive ever owned and never once broken one before...

In regards to the PS Toni, you might have a point as the fan is now going too fast and is noisy, whereas it was virtually silent before...this mean the PS is seriously misbehaving then?

I really should get myself a multimeter too...and thanks for letting me know that the CDTV KS Rom is a standard one.

[Akira]

I didn't know it was a standard one, thanks for the info.

Anti, I hope you fix it, otherwise, I'll buy next ticket to the UK and whip your ass >S

[Antiriad]

I deserve it too

[Akira]

*WHIP*
and

*WHIP*
and

*CDTVSLAP*

So you learn!
*smashes Antiriad's head with Atari ST floppy disk unit*

*Tells Richard Joseph to punish Antiriad*

[Antiriad]

Well...folks! Good news!!!

I wrote to Oliver Hannaford-Day of www.cdtv.org.uk and he said the following:

First dont panic, the CDTV is fine and there is a 95% chance the kickstarts fine to, the CDTV is fully protected for shorts and its protected very well (I connected the prototype Phase5 CPU upgrade in to my CDTV and put the cover back on not noticing the card was resting against the metal case, I turned it on and Bzzzzz the CDTV goes down, after a quick change of the fuse the CDTV and prototype card was working just fine.)
All you need to do is open the CDTV's case, open the PSU up (two screws on the big silver box thing) and remove both fuses, check which one has blown (probably just the one closest to the front of the CDTV) and change it, the CDTV should work just fine after.

So...I opened the beast up and lo and behold the front fuse had gone KABOOM! Noticed it was a 5a fuse (not the usual 13a ones you get in power plugs) so cue a MAD panic looking for a 5a fuse in the house and sometime later I found one...

Slapped it in plugged everything up again and...YES IT WORKED!!!!

Shouts of
*YES!!!*
eminated around the house!!!

So thank god eh? Last time i play silly buggers with the Kickstart Rom on my CDTV I can tell you!!!

Its also a doublely happy day as I got in a new keyboard membrane for my Speccy 128+ and now all the keys are working again!!!

[Dizzy]

[TheBoss]

Thats great news, the best I've heard today

[killergorilla]

Awww good to hear you've fixed it sonny!

I always find that a mallet to the front of any Atari fixes it well!

[Figi]

hehe, yes! cheerio to commodore for protecting the thing with two fuses, eh?

That reminds me, one of my C64 was saved twice by it's fuse.

[Akira]

Good on you Anti!

[Antiriad]

thanks for the support pals, suffice to say je suis une happy bunny now

[DrBong]

BTW if you want to upgrade your CDTV to Kickstart 2.0+, you have to change 2 prom chips first and they will fry your machine if you don't put them in correctly. More info. is available about it here:

http://www.cucug.org/amiga/aminews/1...923-amiga.html

Unfortunately, the group mentioned in that story only produced the chips in limited quanitites for a year or two, and after that they stopped answering emails. The chips can be produced by someone with an eprom burner. I bought my ones privately from a German guy (he may have been an Amiga dealer or technician) a couple of years ago, who I'm sure did the very same thing.

Occasionally you will see sellers on Ebay offering chips or devices that will allow you to upgrade your CDTV to a higher kickstart. Usually they have come out of developer machines that C= handed out. IIRC they're not as good as replacing the proms because you are limited to Kickstart 2.x and the cdrom drive won't work with the higher kickstart. Real pity is that they often go for top dollar on Ebay when the reality is that they're not all that special (unless you're an Amiga collector I guess).

[Antiriad]

Cheers for the info Michael Schumacher

[gary]

For what it is worth, I can confirm that with an Amiga2000 1.3 3meg machine using mkick to soft-kick to kickstart 2.0 you can get quite a few WHDload games (and some JST games) working. I guess the number would be less with 1.5 meg remaining on a CDTV but its worth trying.

A kickstart 1.3 version of WHDload would be great (even if they ditched some of the features such as 'exit to dos'). There will still be some problems with a few WHDload installs such as Archon , Rainbow Islands and Volfied as they seem to require a 68020+ CPU.

[Antiriad]

I think with the Mini Mega Chip and Elbox thing installed, it should be a 2MB Chip, 2MB Fast Ram. Ill certainly see what I can get to run off that.

I have assumed that JST is KS1.3 friendly, I was also contemplating using JST to run some Whd Slaves as well.

[Jope]

Antiriad, you need a newer set of CDTV expansion ROMs in order to use kickstarts above 1.3 ..

http://www.cdtv.org.uk/1515.html ("CDTV Prom Files.")

So, get yourself an EPROM burner and upgrade the expansion ROMs and go all the way to 3.1. :-)

Some CDTV titles fail with kickstarts above 1.3, however!

If you're planinng on using it as a very low spec Amiga, then it won't matter, of course. :-)

[alexh]

Hi,

Interesting thread. I too am thinking of upgrading my CDTV.

Any idea which PROM's the CDTV needs? (i.e. which devices are they?)

How much was the 2mb Elbox RAM upgrade? Did it work with the megachip thingy?

Hi.
I've also tried fitting KS 2.04 to my CDTV which has the later roms fitted allready, unfortunatly it boots up to the cdtv prefs screen and then locks with the KS 2.04 roms fitted??? Do I need to bend one of the 2.04 pins? Has anyone had any luck doing this, as I hate workbench 1.3 and would love to boot up to WB 2.04.

[keropi]

r0x0rz

[T_hairy_bootson]

Disable jumper 15, it should by-pass the extended roms. You will lose the CDTV bootup though.

If it doesnt work you can just replace the jumper and go back to your crashing kickstart 2 config.