A1500 purchase: specs and what to do....?

[Zetr0]

LMFAO!!!!!

looks like some one had been bitten badly by the bug.... fear not.... the craziness will wear off...... after death.....

[skote]

Uh oh... problems.
I picked up my shiny A1500 tonight from my mate's. It looked like a great proposition, with a clean case, unleaked battery, crudless keyboard and unthumbed manual.

So I fired it up when I got home. Starting it up the screen went grey and white as expected. The HDD booted straight away and WB 2.1 loaded as I had seen when it was demoed. After a few seconds of clicking, drawers refused to open, and after a few more seconds the mouse pointer froze as well. I began to "WTF?" quite a lot and stripped every board out of the case. Booting into the most vanilla A1500 with no Zorro boards and no HDD into WB 2.1 also hangs. I systematically went though every board and each time got the same result, booting from a floppy version of WB 2.1 or from HDD. Each time a hang. So I tried WB 3.0, fully expecting it not to work and got that to hang too.

I then thought "Maybe my KS 2.0 ROM does not work with the WB2.1 that the seller gave me". So I "found" a copy of WB 1.3 and booted that from floppy. That also hangs after 20 seconds or so.
Now for the paradox in all of this:

1. The Nexus card install and config floppy works absolutely fine. This appears to boot into a WB1.3 env and I tested my HDD sectors with it for 20 minutes with no problem.
2. Speedball 2 - I played this with my mate for 40 minutes. Rock steady with all boards installed.
3. Frontier Elite II works fine.
4. Cannon Fodder works fine too.
5. Sensible Soccer works fine toooooooooo.
6. A magazine disk based on WB 1.3 works fine.

However, a magazine disk that said "requires OS 2.0 or greater" hung too.

My thinking is that OS loads that request something particular from Kickstart are causing my problems. Is my KS nobbled? Am I right or am I talking rubbish? The reason I think this, is that the OCS type games I have tried worked absolutely fine and whatever flavour operating system I tried seemed to cause problems.
Can anyone help?

[skote]

OK.... so I fixed it....
It took me a fair few hours but here is what I did:

I systematically whipped each zorro board out and tried the 1500 again naked and with each board individually (like i did last night) and got the same result each time. I then used limited logic and decided that the only other things I could try were all the custom chips and the 68000 on the board.

Using the Amiga 500 I picked up last night for a tenner (I intended to use it for spares anyway, like a mouse and an additional PSU for my 1200, but the mouse and the PSU were both knackered and the 500 itself is a bit flaky in terms of stability), I whipped out all the socketed chips except Agnus (couldn't get 'er out of 'er 'ole the fat cow) and tried each one with the 1500 in vanilla mode. I went though Denise, Gary and Paula before coming to the pair of CIA chips. Hallelujah! the 1500 worked faultlessly thereafter. I also found out that the Denise in the A1500 is in fact an ECS chip (model 8373 R4 rather than the OCS 8362 R8! ). So, aside from chilling in the garden with my mate and my wife today, I have had the 1500 running for hours and it has been just fine. I've also now got a load of spare custom chips that I know work, just in case.

Now having just fired the 1500 up to play North and South with a friend for retro posterity's sake my HDD has corrupted. Hopefully this is repairable, but then again I have a spare one which I am picking up in a few weeks.

A few questions now guys:

1. Does Workbench 3.0 work with Kickstart 2.04 or do I HAVE to upgrade? 2. Should I stick a fan in the box to keep her cool?
3. Where oh where can I get a graphics card from that doesn't cost £££? It doesn't have to be top of the line, just able to display a decent array of colours on a 30KHz CRT.

If I can get this HDD going again I am going to be well pleased with myself

[TheCorfiot]

You will probably find that the CIA chips probably didn't need replacing, just reseating, push them firmly into their sockets. but be gentle with Agnus.

This is the most common repair for odd or intermittant A500/A2000 issues, simply reseat the IC's, especially after transit.

As mentioned before Upgrade to KS3.1 it will work fine, as for the Graphics card, Well I think most A2000 owners are looking for one me included.

Enjoy your classic machine.. I spend more time with my A2000 now than my A1200's

[skote]

It does have a certain appeal.... more so than my A1200, which is definitely faster.

I did run through all sorts of checks like making sure the boards and chips were seated, that no cables or jumpers had come loose etc.... I'll bear it in mind for the future though.

I think I'm not going to be satisfied without a graphics card. And that ROM of course I've just picked up OS 3.5 from eBay too.

[skote]

So..... I just got KS3.1 ROMS for my A1500 and A1200 from Amiga-Digital in Holland. Excellent stuff! Now all I'm waiting for is OS3.5 on CD and I can get cooking

[TheCorfiot]

While you are waiting for OS3.5 may I suggest the following

1) Install the KS3.1
2) Download & install Bloodwych's excellent Classic Workbench lite 3.1
Loves ECS 1MB too. & very nippy with an accelerator.

You may find OS3.5 can wait a while longer


Check out the thread in CWB regarding SCSI CDROMS to get full CDROM functionality using IDEFix97 (yes even with SCSI the cachecdfs is much better than the 3.1 CDfilesystem)

[skote]

Hmm. Thanks Corfiot. I've got Bloodwych's CWB on my A1200 and was considering it for the A1500. Will OS3.5 slow me down some in the 1500? I'm still waiting for my SCSI CD / HDD / Syquest 85MB removable gubbins from Suffolk. My Xetec FastSCSI card readme even mentions that Syquest drive as a decent drive to boot from. So far my wife has taken the hint of "why don't you go and see your friend in Suffolk?" as a distant projection

[TheCorfiot]

Originally Posted by skote

Hmm. Thanks Corfiot. I've got Bloodwych's CWB on my A1200 and was considering it for the A1500. Will OS3.5 slow me down some in the 1500? I'm still waiting for my SCSI CD / HDD / Syquest 85MB removable gubbins from Suffolk. My Xetec FastSCSI card readme even mentions that Syquest drive as a decent drive to boot from. So far my wife has taken the hint of "why don't you go and see your friend in Suffolk?" as a distant projection

OS 3.5 Does take longer to boot yes, The 16 Colour limitation of ECS makes CWB look better than OS3.5, and memory overheads are greater with OS3.5
It's a case of using what you have at the moment too, CWB runs very well on the A2000 /A1500.
My A2000 Boots OS3.5 from onboard HD, But I also Boot CWB 3.1 from my SCSI Zip Drive.
Personally I'm finding it hard to go one way or the other fulltime, as Bloodwych has done such a fantastic job with CWB, it's pretty complete esp now I've upgraded the CD filesystem.

[skote]

Well, I have stuck CWB ADV on the A2000 (cos it is now I peeled the 1500 label off!) and it runs just fine.
Now I've sold my A1200 to a dude in Sweden, I'm down to just one Amiga, so I'm going to give OS3.5 a go in ther next few weeks. No web browsing on this puppy though. 16 colours? Ewwwwwww!

[skote]

Well...... I've had it running sweet. I've got more RAM and more SCSI cards than my Zorro slots can deal with.... but I've got to sell. Check out the Marketplace for links.