bscott@pikes.Colorado.EDU (Ben M Scott) (03/11/90)
I'm feelin' mighty low... Today I finally got my tax refund, found that the CSA Midget Racer was on sale at the local store, and got there just in the nick of time before they closed for a 3-day weekend. Got home, installed the Midget Racer, and voila! An "Insert WB 1.3" prompt. This is with an autobooting HD connected, folks. So, I popped in a disk. It got almost all the way through the boot, then a weird GURU (#2C3A or some such?). After that, nothing but hardware failure messages and repeted attempts to boot. Swapped back in the 68010; all is well. Disconnected the A-590, put the MR back in, and it works! But 1 meg, and no HD does not an Amiga make (at least not one which earns its owner money in the video business). After a lot of hardware fiddling which I am by no means qualified to do, I found that there is just no way to get the thing to work with the 590. No way to access the drive, even. Without it I could run CSA benchmarks, games, and such, and the '020 worked. Setup: A-500 rev 5, 1 meg Agnus, 1.3 ROMs, populated A-590, and the CSA MR. What's worse, during one of the last few swaps I guess I blew a chip somewhere, because my floppies no longer work. The drive light stays on all the time (even during a reboot), and they don't respond to anything. Great. What did I blow? I now have to wait until Tuesday to even return the card. Does anyone out there have a Midget Racer working with an A-590?? The manual, which I finally broke down and read, says that CSA does not guarantee it to work with any non-Commodore equipment. I don't HAVE any non-Commodore equipment that could possibly be interfering. My modem, printer and external drive aren't hooked up at present. I'm able to run with the 68010 and booting off the HD, but no floppy at all. Other notes: I am using a used 68020 chip (no FPU) from the Krueger Company. It is in a MR that was shipped with a CPU that the store removed for me, because they said they had the unpopulated version and didn't, so they 'made' one for me. But the fact that it works without the HD means (to me) that there's nothing wrong with the chip or my installation of the board. Please somebody help me! I'm sorry for making this post so long but at this time of the night I'm not good at concise messages. Also, it's hard to type while beating yourself with a stick for spending your whole refund on a possibly-useless piece of... electronics. . <<<<Infinite K>>>> -- _______________________________________________________________________________ | | | Someday, I'm going to make up a clever .sig file like everyone else has... | |_____________________________________________________________________________|
wb69@tygra.UUCP (Alan Beck) (03/12/90)
I have an Amiga 1000, and a similar thing happens when you bump the modem
cable. The system crashes without any gurus or messages. Then the drive
light goes on, and the power light goes off, but the fan is running.
I found it's happy if you wiggle the cable to the correct position.
So, what I'm saying is you may have a faulty cable on your system which
is causing the whole thing to go down.
Hope this gives you some help. Alan
--
= CAT-TALK Conferencing Network, Prototype Computer Conferencing System =
- 1-800-825-3069, 300/1200/2400/9600 baud, 8/N/1. New users use 'new' -
= as a login id. <<Redistribution to GEnie PROHIBITED!!!>>> =
E-MAIL Address: wb69%tygra.uucp@sharkey.cc.umich.edubscott@pikes.Colorado.EDU (Ben M Scott) (03/13/90)
In article <97@tygra.UUCP> wb69@tygra.UUCP (Alan Beck) writes: >I have an Amiga 1000, and a similar thing happens when you bump the modem >cable. The system crashes without any gurus or messages. Then the drive >light goes on, and the power light goes off, but the fan is running. Happy to report I've 'fixed' my floppies. Apparently I plugged the power cable for the internal back in incorrectly. Funny thing is, I can't remember ever UNplugging it in the first place. There's no reason to. So I don't know how it got in the wrong way in the first place... anyway, I got a suggestion to reduce MaxTransfer on the drive from 0xffffff to about 250, which didn't help. The Midget Racer works fine but only if I unplug the A-590. >So, what I'm saying is you may have a faulty cable on your system which >is causing the whole thing to go down. The only cables I had hooked up during the tests were power, RGB, and mouse. But thanks for the info. >= CAT-TALK Conferencing Network, Prototype Computer Conferencing System = >- 1-800-825-3069, 300/1200/2400/9600 baud, 8/N/1. New users use 'new' - So what is this exactly? A BBS? Is there a fee? . <<<<Infinite K>>>> -- _______________________________________________________________________________ | | | Someday, I'm going to make up a clever .sig file like everyone else has... | |_____________________________________________________________________________|
wb69@tygra.UUCP (Alan Beck) (03/13/90)
Well, it possibly could be a cable, but why would the modem cable make it
crash even if the system wasn't on????I'll live with it...
Well, the Cat-Talk thing at the bottom of this letter I have no control
over. It's put on by our Sysop. The board has an 800 number that costs
$20 a month to access. It has Clarinet and Usenet news, along with a few
games. It is mostly online conferencing. There are 4 lines coming in. But,
there are no file transfers!!
I'm sorry to ask this, but I've heard of the Infinity machine, but don't
know exactly what it's supposed to do. Our system only carries this back
24 hrs. Can some one give me some info? I have one of the first A1000.
(To tell you the truth, I don't think it has a half brite-chip, and it came
with 256k). I just can't afford a new 2000, or even with the trade in. I
just bought an IBM to run my BBS off of.
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--
= CAT-TALK Conferencing Network, Prototype Computer Conferencing System =
- 1-800-825-3069, 300/1200/2400/9600 baud, 8/N/1. New users use 'new' -
= as a login id. <<Redistribution to GEnie PROHIBITED!!!>>> =
E-MAIL Address: wb69%tygra.uucp@sharkey.cc.umich.edubscott@pikes.Colorado.EDU (Ben M Scott) (03/14/90)
Well, I took the Midget Racer back to the store and had them call CSA. Apparently, they are aware of the problem but aren't willing to do anything about it (except refund my money, of course, which isn't what I wanted). They, of course, blame Commodore (as did the store) for the problem with the 590. Something about the Western Digital drive in the 590 (which, BTW, I disconnected once to see if it was the problem) being the cause of it. The manual says "Not guaranteed to work with non-Commodore equipment". I think they should modify it! "Not guaranteed to work period" would be more appropriate. I am extremely frustrated. I have waited over a year for one of these things, and hardly ever heard of any problems with it, and now that I finally got one it won't work with my system! CSA is planning to do nothing to fix things. But I say it's got to be something weird they did if an accelerator card won't work with a hard drive!! Nothing else is in my price range (saving up for a much bigger HD) so I am back to 68010 speed. CSA also said something along the lines of Commodore having shipped the A590 with many different types of drives, including Quantum and Seagate models. I was only aware of the original Epson and the current WD 93028-X_A. David Haynie once told me that the XT IDE drives were chosen due to their low cost in relation to transer rate, which doesn't entirely make sense to me since what good is a high transfer rate when your avg. access time is over 70 ms? But, unlike the store salesmen, I am inclined to trust Commodore before CSA... Arrgh. What am I going to do now? Anyone got any used A-500 accelerators BESIDES the Midget Racer for sale? (and I don't mean the LUCAS board, as I'm rather fond of my RF shield right where it is and tend to solder my thumb when building kits...) . <<<<Infinite K>>>> -- _______________________________________________________________________________ | | | Someday, I'm going to make up a clever .sig file like everyone else has... | |_____________________________________________________________________________|