BYRD@HEAP.CISCO.COM (Bruce Byrd) (03/10/90)
Jumping into the desktop video world late last year I decided to go with the Amiga thinking it was the best choice. I have a 2000 with added memory, Supra card, and a Mitsubishi Diamond Scan monitor (first mistake). I also purchased a Frame Grabber at the same time. My first problem was hooking the Frame Grabber to the Diamond Scan. My dealer didn't have a cable for this and referred me to Redmond Cable. The first cable I got from them didn't work and after ohm'ing it out I compared the pinouts with the signal diagrams in the Amiga manual and the monitor manual and not one was right (not even close)! After convincing Redmond that they made a mistake (the person I dealt with was not too pleasant) I finally got a cable that worked. Whew, one down... I went off to digitize the world and continue my software purchases waiting for the day that the Supergen 2000s would be available. It finally was released and I kept calling the dealer with credit card in hand waiting for them to get one. It took a couple of shipments but they finally had one when I called and I went down to make the $1500 plunge. The installation went pretty smooth and turned it on to see what I basically bought the Amiga to do. I was surprised not to get any RGB output (well a few squiggly lines). I took my unit into my dealer and after doing some swapping with their unit/cable it turned out that the RGB cable to the Diamond Scan was causing the problem (a Commodore monitor worked). I was able to use the composite output from the Supergen to my monitor so I was able to do some taping with this configuration. My dealer talked to some manufacturers and determined that another type of cable was needed to handle a composite sync. Two weeks later, they say it should be in from Redmond (yikes) anytime. I'm waiting to see if this takes care of it. Now, for chapter 2- I had this insane idea to try my Framegrabber for the first time with the SuperGen installed. I hooked up the RGB port to the Framegrabber and the "special" cable from the framegrabber to the monitor (RGB) and it seemed to work UNTIL I pressed the button to digitize a picture. When I did, my system locked up and I had to power off. Powering it back on, the Supra wouldn't boot and I periodically got SCSI busy messages. Since the green harddisk light was on solid I followed the Supra manual which said that AmigaDos might be verifying the disk which would take 1 to 20 minutes. 45 minutes later I decided to boot off floppy and when I did, I was able to access the hard drive. Don't ask me why, but after that the Supra was able to do a warm boot. Now that I was up and going again, at least I thought I was, I began to call up some pictures in Photon Paint but the system would crash every minute or so. After some troubleshooting I discovered that with the cable plugged into the RGB port (no matter if it was connected to anything on the other end) the system would crash. Disconnecting it stopped the crashing. Talking with a nice gentleman at Digital Creations (SuperGen) he had the same idea that I had and that the cable might be bad. Well bad or mis-cabled. I'm taking my unit back to my dealer with my entire $6000+ investment to hopefully get a resolution to all this and be pro-Amiga again. At this point my suggestion to the net world is NOT to buy a monitor that the Amiga community hasn't ever tested their products with like the Diamond Scan. I can't rule out that my Amiga might not be doing what it should like having the right voltage levels, etc. Bruce Byrd byrd@cisco.com