Fitzsteve's Amiga Journey (OMG Huge Pics!) - Page 5

RMK · 09 February 2011, 01:27

Steve,

Do you have a picture of the damage to the A4000 motherboard before and after the repair?

fitzsteve · 09 February 2011, 09:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by RMK

Steve,

Do you have a picture of the damage to the A4000 motherboard before and after the repair?

Sadly no pics wre taken as the repair was rushed through due to Zetr0 having so much work on.

I've only got this pic of the battery leakage:

Its scary that small amount of leakage can destroy tracks and stop the Fast Ram from working

Some other bits (chips to left of battery IIRC) were also re-worked and caps replaced so it is a shame we don't have it documented

Steve.

zipper · 09 February 2011, 10:41

It's about the same I had - and it had eaten one track which coudn't be seen by eye but looked suspect; it measured open circuit. A jump wir fixed it.

fitzsteve · 10 February 2011, 10:33

Fitzsteve’s Amiga Journey – Part 9

Retr0 Replay had been an awesome event, it was great to meet yet more awesome Amigans from the community.

Sadly over the course of the event my A4000 had developed a fault with the Scan Doubler on the PicassoIV so once home I stripped it down to fault find.

Whilst the A4000 was in bits I also decided it was time to try and do something about the Buster since I’d had further troubles installing an X-Surf network card, I was intending to use this at the event for some network play but it wasn’t meant to be.

This is what I had:

The Belkin Wifi adapter I hoped would connect this to my Wifi Network

As you can see I had no problem installing the card, but the Amiga just refused to boot with it in place.

As always lady luck was shining on me and I spotted an A4000 Motherboard and Elbox Tower on Amibay, the Motherboard was complete with Buster -11 and I also took the Tower as I got a deal on the pair.

Luckily I had enough spares in my box of bits to build this into a basic Amiga 4000 for testing; I had my spare A3630 that I took out of the A4000D when I upgraded to the Apollo 4040. I also had my old 3.0Roms and plenty of cable =D

I was actually very impressed with the Elbox Power Tower, it’s a very sturdy Tower and I like the way the side panel detaches for installation of the Motherboard/Busboard:

Now time to test out my Zorro cards that didn’t work with the A4000D along with a PicassoII I’d picked up.

Finally after having the Z3 Fastlane for several months I saw it work! Along with the X-Surf and to my surprise the Wifi adapter did a great job too!

Now I had to make a decision on where to take these projects, since the A4000D was back up and running, the Scan Doubler fault was cured by a new Daughter Board and it was back to full function as you read in Part 8 and to be honest I was very happy with it.

Being back up and running I was also reluctant to pull it apart and fit the new motherboard and then try to squeeze the Z3 Fastlane and X-Surf in, it was clear things would start to get very crowded in the little desktop case.

So, I done what all Amiga nut cases do, I started a new project! My A4000 Tower project was born!

First thing I done was source a new front for the case, borrowed from an A1200 Power Tower:

Here she is along side her little brother =D

Next thing’s sourced were an A3640 to give the old girl a boost! And some shiny new 16mb Simms for the Z3 Fastlane:

Whist she installed just fine I did have trouble getting all the Ram to be configured, to this day the best stable configuration I can achieve is 128mb, I’ve had it running at 192mb but it crashes and never quite got 256mb

I won’t bore you with the details here but there are some lengthy threads in Amioracle if you fancy a read!

For now the work stopped here because the A3640 was very unstable, I put up a wanted ad for repair and also upgrade to 33mhz, an awesome Amibay member d0pefish offered to take on the job and the A3640 was shipped off along with a nice shiny new 33mhz 040 chip for the work.

In the mean time I found a nice Cybervision 64/3D to replace the PicassoII, I was also lucky enough to find a Scan Doubler unit for it as well:

READ ON HERE

fitzsteve · 10 February 2011, 10:34

A3640 Upgrade

Upon receipt of the A3640 Dale tested and confirmed that there was indeed a problem and that it would only boot randomly.

We decided to replace the CPU for a 33mhz unit, replace the Caps and also fit a socket for the oscillator so that we could try to overclock to 33mhz.

The first of the parts arrived:

Next job was to replace the caps:

As you can see Dale identified and repaired the problem, one of the Caps had blown and damaged a track leading to the 040 CPU!

Dale didn’t stop here, he also re soldiered all two hundred pins on the CPU connector!

He found that the Gal chips were getting very hot and this caused the card to be unstable so also socked and replaced the Gals upgrading the A3640 to rev 3.2

Here is one of the suspect chips:

Removed and replaced with socketed chip:

Job done and now we have a fully stable 33mhz A3640 Rev 3.2!

I can’t thank Dale enough for taking on this job for me and the work he has done, with this at the heart the A4000 is very nippy indeed.

Here is a short video of it up and running:

[ Show youtube player ]

So we’re almost there, just one chapter left to go! I hope you've enjoyed my story so far. I'll try not to keep you waiting too long for the final instalment...

READ ON HERE

seuden · 10 February 2011, 11:23

I love the white monitor!

Steve.

fitzsteve · 11 February 2011, 10:06

Fitzsteve's Amiga Journey - Part 10

Well my friends, my epic journey is drawing to a close, you’ve seen how in about 18 months I’ve gone from one A1200 and an A500 to a very generous collection of some of the finest Amiga hardware available.

The final step for me was to own one of Stachu100’s upgraded 330Mhz BPPC’s, I toyed with the idea of upgrading my 240mhz PPC but the risk against the small gain did not add up. I decided to buy one of the cards that had already been upgraded.

Here it was, the most awesome piece of hardware to enter my collection:

Not only is the PPC upgraded, it also has the latest mask 060 chip which runs cool even at 72mhz!

The FastATA has been returned to this A1200 Tower so now I run a few different setups. Off the Blizzard SCSI I run OS3.9 with AfA_OS Installed, all Warp3D/WarpOS games are working fine and I also get online via a RealTek PCI NIC. Sound is still provided by a SoundBlaster 128 although I hope to get my TerraTec running at some point soon.

Off the FastATA I switch between CWB P96 and AmigasysAGA, again these are fully setup and ready to rock ‘n’ roll with a wealth of games and apps including setup for internet access.

Check out WipEout2097 running on this badboy!

[ Show youtube player ]

READ ON HERE

fitzsteve · 11 February 2011, 10:07

One Last Project

So with my new PPC taking pride of place in my A1200 Tower my final project was born.

It was time to put my old PPC in a Desktop A1200, inspired by the awesome projects of mfilos, phipscube and r0jaws I set about creating my own.

First item I acquired was a Blizzard Vision RTG Card:

I also changed the fan on my old 240mhz BPPC and added a fan to the BVision:

The fan is powered by the floppy header on the A1200 and its hot glued in place so that it can be removed if need be, I used some fresh compound and I’m pleased to say that the Permedia Chip is nice and cool with this solution.

Here it is all installed in the A1200 Desktop:

I mounted the VGA adapter on an old PCI backplane which was cut to size by our resident guru Zetr0:

And here she is, all up and running with the help of mfilos’ OS3.9 install:

[ Show youtube player ]

So that’s it, the end of my epic journey.

I hope you enjoyed reading these as much as I have enjoyed sharing my work with you all. I’ve made some great friends, friendships that I will treasure and have learned so much. Now I have this established collection I can turn my attention to helping others who are upgrading with all I have learned along the way.

But this is not the end of my story; fear not I have a couple more pictures for you!

I leave you with my A600, modelling its latest upgrade. An ACA630 & Indivision ECS:

And final pictures of my complete collection, all on display and ready to use whenever I feel the need for miggy time:

So that’s my full collection, I’ll be honest there is no immediate plans to start any further projects, I’ll be keeping an eye out for a few little upgrades to these I’m sure like USB when funds allow, but for now that’s me done, cases closed and RF Shields in place, ok maybe I lied about the RF Shields! Oh ok and the cases…

Special thanks to all whom I have traded items with and especially for the gifts which have been gratefully received and will be forever cherished in my collection.

I’d also like to thank all who have helped me with repairs, help, advice, listening to me loose the plot and everyone who have made my return to the scene such a great experience!

Cheers!

Steve.

Peter · 11 February 2011, 11:59

What a thread - thanks for putting so much time and effort into making this a very interesting and entertaining read Steve - I have really enjoyed reading and re-reading this all the way through!

This thread is a real bonus to anyone undertaking a similar project to yours (not all!!) - it's great to have some pictures on-line to check out your set up's.

fitzsteve · 11 February 2011, 12:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by Peter

What a thread - thanks for putting so much time and effort into making this a very interesting and entertaining read Steve - I have really enjoyed reading and re-reading this all the way through!

This thread is a real bonus to anyone undertaking a similar project to yours (not all!!) - it's great to have some pictures on-line to check out your set up's.

Hi Peter!

I'm really glad you enjoyed reading it

Its been great fun writing it up as well as its reminded me of the ups and downs along the way, I wanted to write everything up now though whilst it was fresh in my mind, plus there really is nothing else for me to do at work whilst I wait for my redundancy LOL

I re-read myself yesterday parts 1-9 following the links, its shocking to think how much I've done in this small amount of time - took me a good 40mins to read it all back

We'll have plenty to talk about over the next beer eh mate?

Steve.

AmigaFriend · 11 February 2011, 14:03

Quote:

Originally Posted by fitzsteve

We'll have plenty to talk about over the next beer eh mate?

Yep, and June is closing fast so I'll be most fortunate to have a peek on this awesome collection!

Really nice read Steve. This only shows how passionate you are about your Amigas.

fitzsteve · 11 February 2011, 14:09

Quote:

Originally Posted by xpect

Yep, and June is closing fast so I'll be most fortunate to have a peek on this awesome collection!

Really nice read Steve. This only shows how passionate you are about your Amigas.

You're welcome at my home any time my friend

I'm only 27 minutes from central London by train

And I'll buy you lunch in a nice country Pub.

11 February 2011, 17:35

This thread is awesome Fitzsteve! I love the amount of effort you've put into everything especially the amount of photos you've taken to show everything off. Excellent work mate!

seuden · 11 February 2011, 17:46

This is a stupid thread!!! It finished too early!!!

This thread actually makes me want to mod my 2 A1200's!!

8bitbubsy · 11 February 2011, 23:33

That was a great journey!

Also, for me the need to repair old Amiga stuff before it's working good, is what makes up the charm and the "hobbyist" factor in it.
If you just plug it in and it works good, then you're good to go but you didn't get any challenge.

Anyways, I love the pictures. The A600 almost made me wet my pants.

fitzsteve · 12 February 2011, 00:32

Thanks guys!!!

Quote:

Originally Posted by AJCopland

This thread is awesome Fitzsteve! I love the amount of effort you've put into everything especially the amount of photos you've taken to show everything off. Excellent work mate!

Really glad you enjoyed it

Thanks for the kind words

Quote:

Originally Posted by seuden

This is a stupid thread!!! It finished too early!!!

This thread actually makes me want to mod my 2 A1200's!!

He he, I just hope I don't bankrupt anyone with bad ideas

Quote:

Originally Posted by 8bitbubsy

That was a great journey!

Also, for me the need to repair old Amiga stuff before it's working good, is what makes up the charm and the "hobbyist" factor in it.
If you just plug it in and it works good, then you're good to go but you didn't get any challenge.

Anyways, I love the pictures. The A600 almost made me wet my pants.

There have been a few scary moments, flash IC corrupted on my 330mhz BPPC a couple of weeks back and was all but dead - lucky a re-flash brought it back to life. But I shat my pants lol

I've bought myself some soldering kit, and hope to do some mods and hopefully move onto repairs - watch this space

Steve.

fitzsteve · 18 March 2011, 15:24

For anyone that has missed this, I've updated all the images which are now thumbnailed, so much easier to read. Just click on them for full size image

Also fixed some broken links and re-hosted some of the images.

Enjoy!

Steve.

Bloodwych · 18 March 2011, 16:02

Thanks for the tidy up. Thread reads much easier now.

10 February 2011, 10:33	#84
fitzsteve Professional slacker! Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Kent, UK Age: 44 Posts: 6,685	Fitzsteve’s Amiga Journey – Part 9 Fitzsteve’s Amiga Journey – Part 9 Retr0 Replay had been an awesome event, it was great to meet yet more awesome Amigans from the community. Sadly over the course of the event my A4000 had developed a fault with the Scan Doubler on the PicassoIV so once home I stripped it down to fault find. Whilst the A4000 was in bits I also decided it was time to try and do something about the Buster since I’d had further troubles installing an X-Surf network card, I was intending to use this at the event for some network play but it wasn’t meant to be. This is what I had: The Belkin Wifi adapter I hoped would connect this to my Wifi Network As you can see I had no problem installing the card, but the Amiga just refused to boot with it in place. As always lady luck was shining on me and I spotted an A4000 Motherboard and Elbox Tower on Amibay, the Motherboard was complete with Buster -11 and I also took the Tower as I got a deal on the pair. Luckily I had enough spares in my box of bits to build this into a basic Amiga 4000 for testing; I had my spare A3630 that I took out of the A4000D when I upgraded to the Apollo 4040. I also had my old 3.0Roms and plenty of cable =D I was actually very impressed with the Elbox Power Tower, it’s a very sturdy Tower and I like the way the side panel detaches for installation of the Motherboard/Busboard: Now time to test out my Zorro cards that didn’t work with the A4000D along with a PicassoII I’d picked up. Finally after having the Z3 Fastlane for several months I saw it work! Along with the X-Surf and to my surprise the Wifi adapter did a great job too! Now I had to make a decision on where to take these projects, since the A4000D was back up and running, the Scan Doubler fault was cured by a new Daughter Board and it was back to full function as you read in Part 8 and to be honest I was very happy with it. Being back up and running I was also reluctant to pull it apart and fit the new motherboard and then try to squeeze the Z3 Fastlane and X-Surf in, it was clear things would start to get very crowded in the little desktop case. So, I done what all Amiga nut cases do, I started a new project! My A4000 Tower project was born! First thing I done was source a new front for the case, borrowed from an A1200 Power Tower: Here she is along side her little brother =D Next thing’s sourced were an A3640 to give the old girl a boost! And some shiny new 16mb Simms for the Z3 Fastlane: Whist she installed just fine I did have trouble getting all the Ram to be configured, to this day the best stable configuration I can achieve is 128mb, I’ve had it running at 192mb but it crashes and never quite got 256mb I won’t bore you with the details here but there are some lengthy threads in Amioracle if you fancy a read! For now the work stopped here because the A3640 was very unstable, I put up a wanted ad for repair and also upgrade to 33mhz, an awesome Amibay member d0pefish offered to take on the job and the A3640 was shipped off along with a nice shiny new 33mhz 040 chip for the work. In the mean time I found a nice Cybervision 64/3D to replace the PicassoII, I was also lucky enough to find a Scan Doubler unit for it as well: READ ON HERE Last edited by fitzsteve; 18 March 2011 at 14:54. Reason: added thumbs

10 February 2011, 10:34	#85
fitzsteve Professional slacker! Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Kent, UK Age: 44 Posts: 6,685	A3640 Upgrade A3640 Upgrade Upon receipt of the A3640 Dale tested and confirmed that there was indeed a problem and that it would only boot randomly. We decided to replace the CPU for a 33mhz unit, replace the Caps and also fit a socket for the oscillator so that we could try to overclock to 33mhz. The first of the parts arrived: Next job was to replace the caps: As you can see Dale identified and repaired the problem, one of the Caps had blown and damaged a track leading to the 040 CPU! Dale didn’t stop here, he also re soldiered all two hundred pins on the CPU connector! He found that the Gal chips were getting very hot and this caused the card to be unstable so also socked and replaced the Gals upgrading the A3640 to rev 3.2 Here is one of the suspect chips: Removed and replaced with socketed chip: Job done and now we have a fully stable 33mhz A3640 Rev 3.2! I can’t thank Dale enough for taking on this job for me and the work he has done, with this at the heart the A4000 is very nippy indeed. Here is a short video of it up and running: [ Show youtube player ] So we’re almost there, just one chapter left to go! I hope you've enjoyed my story so far. I'll try not to keep you waiting too long for the final instalment... READ ON HERE Last edited by fitzsteve; 18 March 2011 at 15:05. Reason: added thumbnails

11 February 2011, 10:06	#87
fitzsteve Professional slacker! Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Kent, UK Age: 44 Posts: 6,685	Fitzsteve's Amiga Journey - Part 10 Fitzsteve's Amiga Journey - Part 10 Well my friends, my epic journey is drawing to a close, you’ve seen how in about 18 months I’ve gone from one A1200 and an A500 to a very generous collection of some of the finest Amiga hardware available. The final step for me was to own one of Stachu100’s upgraded 330Mhz BPPC’s, I toyed with the idea of upgrading my 240mhz PPC but the risk against the small gain did not add up. I decided to buy one of the cards that had already been upgraded. Here it was, the most awesome piece of hardware to enter my collection: Not only is the PPC upgraded, it also has the latest mask 060 chip which runs cool even at 72mhz! The FastATA has been returned to this A1200 Tower so now I run a few different setups. Off the Blizzard SCSI I run OS3.9 with AfA_OS Installed, all Warp3D/WarpOS games are working fine and I also get online via a RealTek PCI NIC. Sound is still provided by a SoundBlaster 128 although I hope to get my TerraTec running at some point soon. Off the FastATA I switch between CWB P96 and AmigasysAGA, again these are fully setup and ready to rock ‘n’ roll with a wealth of games and apps including setup for internet access. Check out WipEout2097 running on this badboy! [ Show youtube player ] READ ON HERE Last edited by fitzsteve; 18 March 2011 at 15:15. Reason: added thumb's

11 February 2011, 10:07	#88
fitzsteve Professional slacker! Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Kent, UK Age: 44 Posts: 6,685	One Last Project One Last Project So with my new PPC taking pride of place in my A1200 Tower my final project was born. It was time to put my old PPC in a Desktop A1200, inspired by the awesome projects of mfilos, phipscube and r0jaws I set about creating my own. First item I acquired was a Blizzard Vision RTG Card: I also changed the fan on my old 240mhz BPPC and added a fan to the BVision: The fan is powered by the floppy header on the A1200 and its hot glued in place so that it can be removed if need be, I used some fresh compound and I’m pleased to say that the Permedia Chip is nice and cool with this solution. Here it is all installed in the A1200 Desktop: I mounted the VGA adapter on an old PCI backplane which was cut to size by our resident guru Zetr0: And here she is, all up and running with the help of mfilos’ OS3.9 install: [ Show youtube player ] So that’s it, the end of my epic journey. I hope you enjoyed reading these as much as I have enjoyed sharing my work with you all. I’ve made some great friends, friendships that I will treasure and have learned so much. Now I have this established collection I can turn my attention to helping others who are upgrading with all I have learned along the way. But this is not the end of my story; fear not I have a couple more pictures for you! I leave you with my A600, modelling its latest upgrade. An ACA630 & Indivision ECS: And final pictures of my complete collection, all on display and ready to use whenever I feel the need for miggy time: So that’s my full collection, I’ll be honest there is no immediate plans to start any further projects, I’ll be keeping an eye out for a few little upgrades to these I’m sure like USB when funds allow, but for now that’s me done, cases closed and RF Shields in place, ok maybe I lied about the RF Shields! Oh ok and the cases… Special thanks to all whom I have traded items with and especially for the gifts which have been gratefully received and will be forever cherished in my collection. I’d also like to thank all who have helped me with repairs, help, advice, listening to me loose the plot and everyone who have made my return to the scene such a great experience! Cheers! Steve. Last edited by fitzsteve; 18 March 2011 at 15:21. Reason: added thumbnails

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09 February 2011, 01:27	#81
RMK Registered User Join Date: Jun 2008 Location: UK Posts: 189	Steve, Do you have a picture of the damage to the A4000 motherboard before and after the repair?

09 February 2011, 10:41	#83
zipper Registered User Join Date: Mar 2004 Location: finland Posts: 1,843	It's about the same I had - and it had eaten one track which coudn't be seen by eye but looked suspect; it measured open circuit. A jump wir fixed it.

10 February 2011, 11:23	#86
seuden uber cool demi god Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Kent/England Posts: 2,073	I love the white monitor! Steve.

11 February 2011, 11:59	#89
Peter Still an Amiga user Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Kent Age: 55 Posts: 2,715	What a thread - thanks for putting so much time and effort into making this a very interesting and entertaining read Steve - I have really enjoyed reading and re-reading this all the way through! This thread is a real bonus to anyone undertaking a similar project to yours (not all!!) - it's great to have some pictures on-line to check out your set up's.

11 February 2011, 17:35	#93
AJCopland Posts: n/a	This thread is awesome Fitzsteve! I love the amount of effort you've put into everything especially the amount of photos you've taken to show everything off. Excellent work mate!

11 February 2011, 17:46	#94
seuden uber cool demi god Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Kent/England Posts: 2,073	This is a stupid thread!!! It finished too early!!! This thread actually makes me want to mod my 2 A1200's!!

11 February 2011, 23:33	#95
8bitbubsy Registered User Join Date: Sep 2009 Location: Norway Posts: 1,715	That was a great journey! Also, for me the need to repair old Amiga stuff before it's working good, is what makes up the charm and the "hobbyist" factor in it. If you just plug it in and it works good, then you're good to go but you didn't get any challenge. Anyways, I love the pictures. The A600 almost made me wet my pants.

18 March 2011, 15:24	#97
fitzsteve Professional slacker! Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Kent, UK Age: 44 Posts: 6,685	For anyone that has missed this, I've updated all the images which are now thumbnailed, so much easier to read. Just click on them for full size image Also fixed some broken links and re-hosted some of the images. Enjoy! Steve.

18 March 2011, 16:02	#98
Bloodwych Moderator Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: I'm behind you! Posts: 3,763	Thanks for the tidy up. Thread reads much easier now.

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