A600: Picasso96 via Indivision ECS!

Hey peepz,

Busy weeks those have been but I was around the usual forums checking around and testing new stuff.

The previous weeks were exciting cause Symplex (Lutz D.) created an pseudo RTG driver that uses Indivision ECS via Picasso96 RTG system for our beloved Amigas!
What started as a joke on 1st of April evolved pretty quickly into something really nice with great potential :)

As we exchange PMs with Symplex on a1k.org, I was testing thoroughly the driver and it's update versions supplying photos and videos along with info to try help him out understand what was going on with my system.

The initial versions didn't work on my system, but after some updates... yesterday the newest driver worked on my System as well \o/

I made a quick video to share with other people over Amibay/EAB and A1K.org which you can check as well bellow

After some requests from Amibay, I thought of trying this driver under my heavy modified ClassicWB 3.1 Full installation. I was certain that the system would be really slow cause ClassicWB is by default more heavy than a stock 3.1 installation due to many patches and Scalos. I had to try though :)

You can check from the video below a test of mine using my own installation to a clone CF.

As I thought, speed isn't that great, but it's not as bad as I'd thought it would be! Really impressive stuff tbh :)

To be able to understand the difference between speeds between this beta driver and my current stable 800x600@8 installation using Ratte's SuperPlus driver you can check the video below

Awesome work Symplex mate. I hope this driver will get more advanced and more quick overtime \o/

A600: A604 received! Case change and more

Yesterday I received the wonderful A604 Chip RAM Expansion from AmigaKit.
What an awesome designed product! It's so small comparing it with the A603 and offers a lot more things.

• 2x clockports (instead of 1)
• Custom clockport extender 2nd clockport for mounting Subway (special driver required)
• The second clockport reaches a 60% higher transfer speed than the first, which makes Subway a lot faster!
• Angled Indivision ECS socket that makes Indivision ECS co-exist along with the floppy!
• All the usual stuff like 1MB Chip RAM to max out A600's Chip RAM to 2MB total, and RTC.

Getting a new A604 also gave me appetite to re-case my A600 into a spare that I had which was more white (near mint) and didn't have any cut on the case. Keeping the floppy on the case was a nice thing to have.




My spare A600 is really awesome but required removing of the TV Modulator and a good mobo bath!!!
Modulator was an easy task to remove (done it 4-5 times in the past) and a good bath is always nice for my Amiga mobos :)

This time I decided NOT to remove the stock power connector since I got some time ago a nice PSU from MechWare.



Since I wanted to minize the cutting on the new case I decided that except from the replacement of the TV Modulator with the VGA connector for the Indivision ECS, I'd also make a small hole for the Kickstart switch (that simultaneously disables ACA on Kickstart 1.3).





You can check the internal mod of both the VGA connector and Kickstart switch that gets it's +5V from a nearby resistor and Ground from the nearby RGB's connector ground :)



As you may have seen I'm using Mika's angled CF2IDE adapter since for the time being I didn't want to make a hole above PCMCIA (waiting kipper2k's rev.2 CF2IDE adapter in the following days since I had issues with his rev.1 in my previous setup).

You can check some photos of the so far re-casing. I really loved the way that Indivision ECS's cable can go under Indivision and Subway making it look really clean:





Looking good doesn't it? The mods are looking a lot cleaner without the extra cabling that existed in my previous mod. Only need to see now where am I gonna put the USB headers, although I will use for sure the headers I used on my A1200 as well.

Just before I close this post, I thought it'd be nice to include 2 more photos of the A600 in use... Enjoy :)

A600: Testing ADoom 1.4 with Indivision ECS

Since my friend Zetr0 asked on EAB, I'm sharing a test video of my A600 testing the new version of ADoom 1.4 (with Indivision ECS support)...

Enjoy

A600: ACA630@30MHz + HxC rev.B --> rev.C mod

I thought of making a small update since from the last time, I have now the new ACA630@30MHz replacing my old Apollo 630@40MHz

Yep it's a piece of art and fits like a glove along with the other hardware that co-existed!




Good thing is that the extra socket I putted in the past for raising a bit the Indivision ECS (hacked in A603) for the Apollo to co-exist is a lot better since without it... mounting the clockport cable would be difficult!

Since I had some time off today I thought of making the extra mod in my beloved HxC SD Floppy Emulator in order for me to be able to also "Write" instead of only "Reading" floppy images.
The mod exists in Jeff's Release notes (that can be downloaded with the new firmware from his website) and consists of 4xResistors, 1xCapacitor and 1xMicrochip.

Well since finding the microchip was a pain in the butt to find locally I ordered it from eBay so while waiting for it to arrive... I used a socket instead to finish my mod





Cool isn't it

OK here are now all put-up together



And to finish this post...

Here's some photos of the case (semi) closed and WB up and running.
1st pic is a ClassicWB AdvSp installation (DH0@PFS3) while 2nd pic is a OS3.9 (DH1@PFS3) installation. Both reside in 2 different partitions in the CF drive selectable via Early Startup Menu.




Well for a old ECS machine... I'm pretty well proud!

I'd like to thank d0pefish and Cammy for sharing some info and ideas that helped me a lot!

Cheers and more to come soon