A4000: Installing Indivision AGA mk2

Hey peepz, long time no see, but I had a really good excuse :)
On 26th of May my lovely daughter was born and for that matter I was fully devoted to her and my wife :)
I'm really happy that everything worked out just fine, and that a new girly Amigan was born.

Anywayz... this weekend I found some time between her sleeps to tinker my lovely A4000 and my newly acquired Indivision AGA mk2 (for A4000/CD32).
Many have already made some reviews and troubleshoots via the known forums but here I will present my own POV.

So, this is what the package includes

The screw that was provided to secure the GND cable to the Indivision was a bit bigger than the hole so I secured the GND cable to the already mounted screw with plastic stand. Kinda weird though.
In order to mount Indivision to Ratte's auto switch you need all of these adapters LOL!

Well, until I make a custom cable (20pin to 10pin) I thought of mounting all this huge combo  on the right side of the custom Fan.

Ok that was the first part. This was what the installed Indivision looks like (sorry for the dark photo, I forgot to put the flash on). The bend ribbon was put that way in order for the Voodoo custom fan not to touch it :)

And that was the assembly again of the Grex with Voodoo...

...and the rest of the PCI cards :)

Powering up the Amiga showed the new Individual Computers logo on the top left of the screen.

If you see correctly you'll see that there are some vertical bars which are annoying! While searching a1k.org Ratte mentioned this as well, and with a custom cable that he made, the bars disappeared. Apparently all these adapters tend to kinda screw the signal a bit. Soon I'll fix that as well :)

Just before I close this article I'll present some differences between Indivision mk1 and Indivision mk2 using SysInfo program on it's native resolution.

Indivision AGA mk1 (SysInfo screen)

Indivision AGA mk2 (SysInfo screen)

Indivision AGA mk1 (SysInfo detail)

Indivision AGA mk2 (SysInfo detail)

As you can see (and if you put aside the vertical bars) it looks really good and the resolution seems to have a better scaling than the previous version!
Here's hopin' for future and better core releases along with new Indivision Config tool!

Stay tuned :)

A4000: Modding and testing an ATI Radeon on GREX

Hey peepz.

Some time ago I ordered an ATI Radeon 9200 (256MB RAM) in order to give it a test on the GREX :)

Yep I know that official CGX drivers don't exist for GREX but no worries... Ratte has something up his sleeve :)

So... the main problem with the Radeon is that it requires also a 3.3V line to operate which the Amiga PSU doesn't deliver.

Every problem though has it's solution so there are a couple of ways to bypass this:

1. Putting an ATX Power Supply into the Amiga, and then feeding Radeon with the 3.3V line from the ATX PSU that Amiga doesn't use.
2. Using an LM1084 3.3 regulator that you can feed with a max voltage of 27V as input (5V from Amiga are just fine to produce less heat) and ouput the required 3.3V.

I decided to use the second approach just because it seemed easier and more good looking :)

So... this is the ATI Radeon of mine in which I have marked the spots on the PCB where you can get the Input (5V), Output (3.3V) and GND lines.

The LM1084 has the following easy pinout as well...

Since regulator is getting a bit hot, I decided not to let it stay naked but instead I thought of putting a dedicated transistor heatsink.

Since my regulator was a PCB version without a hole for a screw, and because the heatsink was a bit big for my taste, I dremeled it and attached the regulator using a thermal paste glue!

Result was nice for my taste :) After soldering the wires to both the regulator and Radeon and gluing the heatsink on Radeon... this is how it looks like...

Not bad at all!!! The height is same as the GPU heatsink so it doesn't interfere anywhere else :)

This is how it looks in my Amiga's last available PCI slot (Slot 0).

After checking out PCI Info from CSPPC's screen, card was recognised!!! Time to log OS3.9 and check PCITool and OpenPCIInfo applications...

Presto! Both applications recognize the board just fine. You can check both logs from the links bellow:

• PCITool 2.3
• OpenPCIInfo 1.5

I hope I'll have more news about this experiment in the following days :)

Stay tuned.

A4000: Custom audio connector

Just before I install my repaired A4000 mobo by Cosmos, I thought...
"Why don't you put an internal Audio cable so you could insert it into ESS-Solo-1's input?"
 I thought that in the past, but there was no way I would dismantle the whole Amiga to do such a mod :)

Now I had the opportunity :D

So, I got some nice cable and soldered it underneath the mobo to the RCA connectors

I really like the small cut that existed by default on the mobo! It gave me the necessary space I needed for the audio cables to pass underneath.

After installing everything and putting Grex and the cards... I had to install the internal audio cables!

You can see the new audio cable coming from the back of the default RCA headers (on the bottom left) and going on one connector on ESS-Solo-1/
Also you can see the CD Audio cable that I had made in the past (you can see previous article about it) as well mounted in ESS-Solo-1.

One more panoramic photo bellow where you can see everything mounted .

So... ESS-Solo-1 has the following now:

• Backplate - Green = Line Out
• Backplate - Blue = Line In
• Backplate - Red = Mic In
• Internal - CD1 = Paula (Shows as "Aux" in Solo Mixer in Workbench)
• Internal - CD2 = CD (Show as "CD" in Solo Mixer in Workbench)

Everything works perfectly now!

Stay tuned \o/

A4000: Mobo got a nice service :)

As I said in my previous article, I was without my A4000 mobo for about 2 weeks due to sending it to Cosmos for general repairs.

The mobo was operating just fine as you can tell from the previous Blog articles, although it required at a point a professional service for some stuff like:

• Repairing the RTC circuit (it didn't work)
• Replacing all the SIMM sockets with new ones having metal brackets
• Replacing all caps (they were just fine but a refresh is always nice to have)
• Checking SuperBuster's socket (it was kinda bent)
• Putting sockets in PIO GALS in order to put the updated PIO-2 GALS.
• ... and finally a general lookout.

 Cosmos supplied me with photos of his repairing process so I'm presenting some of those here.

First of all and after removing the SIMM sockets, he realized there were 2 cut tracks underneath, so after clearing them a bit, he bridged them :)

Now the sockets could be replaced... so this is how it was before

...and after the replacement

 

After that, it was time to replace teh caps which is easy stuff for him :)
Motherboard with the former caps was like this...

...and after the replacement like this

Sadly there was one shity one that lost it's pads so they had to be replaced customly.

Perfect job isn't it? :D - Ok lets continue...
RTC circuit after examination had a burned Ricoh so it was replaced with a new one. One diode that was soldered into a Pin of Ricoh was placed under the socket in case of future replacement!

Previous owner (or a previous repair guy) had already putted a coin battery socket with a diode but it was floating in the air not so professionally.

Cosmos decided to mount it better in the mobo so he putted another smaller diode and twisted a bit the coin battery socket in a way so it could fit just fine :)

Socket was indeed kinda bent so after asking me, we decided to remove SuperBuster's socket and solder the SuperBuster 11 directly to the motheboard.

Well... one pad had issues but not something that couldn't be fixed with a wire to the nearby track :)

PIO GALS removed and sockets including the upgraded GALS were put in place.
This was what it was before...

...and this is how it's now with the sockets and the PIO-2 GALS in place.

Last but not least, some diodes had a little solder so Cosmos thought of giving a bit of fresh one since he had some issues in the past with those.
This is an example of how it was before...

...and after the refresh...

As always, I'm gonna give a full mobo photograph of before and after the whole service...

BEFORE:

AND AFTER:

Awesome job Cosmos mate! Thanks again and I can't wait to assemble everything from scratch to check it out \o/

Stay tuned