GVP G-Force 030 / 50MHz Accelerator Problems
 

Came with my Amiga 2000, previous owner claimed it worked OK 2 - 3 yrs ago. With card removed from my 2000HD, it works fine. As soon as its installed my display looks strange, like flickering from certian colors, any time I launch an app / demo or anything that demands CPU power I get software errors, lockups and reboots.

Checked all jumpers using the manual, and dbl-checked those against http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showha...cgi?HARDID=177 . Removed RAM, tried disabling different settings - but none have really made a difference. With auto-boot disabled its almost as if the entire card becomes disabled.

Booted to the GVP install disk and ran the diagnostics on there - of course they all passed.

Any ideas?

Hmm ... Maybe GVP + HDD is drawing too much power from your poor old A2000 psu ? The autoboot jumper is probably the rom jumper. I think GVP boards have some kind of driver in the rom for the onboard ram, so you lose it when you disable it (I observed this with my boards too). Did you try without the HDD connected and booting from floppy ? maybe something's wrong with your HDD's and they're drawing too much power ?

Very interesting - found this on another FAQ site:
http://www.amigau.com/aig/hardwarefaq.html


Q. I have an A2000 with a GVP SCSI Series II hard card with 8 Megs of RAM on board. If I add a Picasso II, will there be any problems?
A. Yes. The Picasso II has 2 Megs of its own RAM which it maps into the Zorro II address range. This RAM will cause an addressing conflict with the 8 Megs you already have. The solution is to drop the 8 Megs down to 6, by changing the jumper settings (if this amount is possible) and the Amiga's AutoConfig will sort out the rest of the Zorro II addressing.




I have a Picasso II installed. Will remove it tonight and see if that makes any difference. Could explain the 'color flickering' I was referring to.

well, actually GVP boards have the ability to map their ram into 030's extended address space. You don't need to uninstall any ram, check the jumpers if your ram is configured into extended space.

I figured out my problem. Basically it boils down to my lack of understanding of how the GVP cards work.

With the card installed, I was booting some old floppy games and demos, which apparently aren't compatible with the 68030 CPU. I also had a bad hard drive, and the 68000 CPU on the motherboard needed to be removed, cleaned, and reseated (I also de-soldered the battery).

Once I got a new 50MB hard drive installed, I disabled auto-boot, loaded the GVP utilities disk, prepped, partitioned, and formatted the disk. Enabled auto-boot, installed workbench 3.1, and it works perfect! The boot to 68000 mode now also works since the on board CPU was cleaned.

I spent many, many hours trying to figure this all out so I hope this is useful to someone else.

Try to change TICK jumper to other position. I have solved various and stranges problems ;)