dac@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au (Andrew Clayton) (03/17/91)
I spent a large chunk of today over at a hardware guru's 'Sunday Fixit'
session, watching him attempt to repair kludgy 1084 monitors, work out why
someone's A500 wouldn't let Digiview work, diagnose someone's HD as being
completely beyond repair (it woulnd't power up!), and ...
Install a Phoenix board!
For those of you unaware of what I'm talking about, here is a brief summary
of what this beastie is:
Phoenix Microtechnologies is a small company in Adelaide, South Australia,
that was set up by Andrew Wilson and friends, in order to manufacture and
sell replacement A1000 motherboards.
Andrew wanted people to be able to have 1Mb of chip memory, and access to
68881 maths chips, and SCSI on board, and internal hard drives, and memory
expansion up to 10Mbytes, and, oh, lots of stuff. When the A2000 came out
with the 'fatter agnus', and suddenly had 1Mb of chip memory to play with,
his -replacement- board idea got more and more backing.
He asked people to send in a $100 deposit on the board, so that they could
get some working capital together, in return for a 20% discount on the
final price (which was, at the time, assumed to be $600). He got 600
deposits, and the plan went ahead.
A year and a bit later, Phoenix Microtechnologies are shipping their
replacement boards.
Enough background, on with the events of today:
The Phoenix board is a drop-in replacement for the existing A1000
motherboard. It is a very well made piece of hardware, with only five minor
modifications on the board that I saw [a few wires on the base of the board,
and a resistor - this was board #73, so thats not too bad!]. There are many
configuration options available, but this on was a plain jane board.
It requires the entire case from the A1000, as well as some of the chips,
specifically, the CPU, the CIA chips, Denise and Paula. It comes with the
fatter agnus already installed, and 1Mb of memory, with space on board for
further 1Mb of memory (256K * 4 chips) (There is an option to have a
further 8Mb of expansion ram, internally on a daughterboard arrangement.)
Opening the (five year old) A1000 revealed tons of dust, so a good cleaning
out was necessary. The original mother/duaghterboard was removed, and the
required chips carefully extracted (as well as the RF sheilding, including
the sheilding around the edge connectors on the front and side of the
A1000)
After cleaning up the dust and grime the new board was brought out and the
CIA's, Paula, Denise and CPU from the old Amiga, were put into the sockets
provided. There are also sockets for extra ROM's, 68881 co-processor, SCSI
chip, B2000 video slot, and B2000 expansion slot [putting anything in these
slots would currently entail not being able to close the case! but they are
present, so you can run flicker fixers, and accelerator boards].
Putting it all back together was simple enough (although the top shielding
was firmly attached, when the hardware guru realised that he had forgotten
to affix the power led to the motherboard, and had to take the sheilding
off again. He swore mightily. :-)
They tested it, and it worked first time, and then had some sporadic
failures, caused by [get this!] WATER - seems that the enthusiastic washing
of the plastic case had left water in the screw-holes. Primary testing
prior to putting it all back together was a startling success. After
putting all those screws back, it failed constantly. Opening it again
reduced the errors, and then the hardware type noticed the drops of water,
and applied a heat gun to the entire board, and cured that problem.
It works great.
I was impressed. I would have been buying a Phoenix (I put down a deposit)
but got an offer I couldn't refuse on a 2500/20 [now a 2500/30], so no
longer need it.
p.s. I am NOT an expert on matters relating to the Phoenix board. I cannot
answer specific questions, and I am in no way connected with the company
that makes these boards - I merely thought that some of you people might be
interested in a first hand report.
Dac
--
David Andrew Clayton. // _l _ _ dac@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au *or*|I post.I am.
Canberra, Australia.\X/ (_](_l(_ ccadfa.cc.adfa.oz.au!prolix!dac@munnari.ozsl242003@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Jon Paul Baker) (03/18/91)
I have an A500, and I think that the chips necessary from the A1000 are the same on the A500. Is it possible to get this motherboard and raid my A500 for the chips? I have already hacked my A500 into a tower case, so I do not mind hacking another board into this or a different case. (As long as I don't have to cut part of the motherboard off again. :)