scott@edson.ee.UAlberta.ca (Scott Stephens) (07/26/89)
I (not very) recently purchased an RC4 ramcard from BriWall. The board is made by Digitronics (this product was made mention of on the net sometime in the last six months). I purchased it for an A1000 in January and sent it back shortly after receiving it because I had problems. I had phoned Digitronics, asking if they knew of any problems running it on an A1000 (since it was actually designed for an A2000, but came with an adapter board for the A500), but was told it should run fine. At that time I also asked if the fix to the A1000 daughter-board (grounding the PALS to the motherboard) would help, but was told it shouldn't be necessary. Well I finally got the board back (after an absence of 4 mo.) and it still failed to work. This wasn't just a repair to the board, but was a different revision of the board. Somewhat in desperation I tried soldered the ground pins on the PALS together, connecting them to the motherboard. That was over a week ago, and I have had no problems with the board since. So if any of you have purchased this board for an A1000 and have had trouble with it, this fix may solve your problems. The symptoms on an A1000 would be a clean boot, loading Workbench seemingly without incident, but after clicking on the disk icon, a software task held requestor appears, and the Amiga is dead to the world. I also tried this on a friends A1000 with exactly the same result. One caveat to this, during the 4 mo. the board was away, my drive failed, and since A1000 drives are difficult to come by, I had an A2000 drive installed. With this drive Workbench wouldn't even load, and I wound up with errors on the boot disks, so make sure you have backup copies. You may be wondering why it took Digitronics better than 4 mo. to replace the board. Their claim is that the board was misplaced, and until I finally contacted them (thru BriWall, Digitronics is always a recording, and my later calls weren't being returned) they thought it had been sent back. To make up for it Greg (Digitronics owner and only employee as far as I can tell) sent me an extra 512K, and an external power supply (which I certainly appreciate), so I don't think he just doesn't care about customer support, but I still wonder why my calls weren't being returned. In all fairness, the original board I was sent probably would have worked, if I'd implemented this fix, but I only knew there was a fix, and didn't know what it was. Anyway if you were thinking of buying a ram expansion, this is at least some food for thought, hope it helps. R. Scott Stephens