Thanks for the shout out Adrian! :) I think the disk drive you got is the one the cards shipped with. They used the same drives they shipped with the Commodore PCs I guess, so they were just pretty generic PC drives. The color was a bit different to the A2000 face plate on my father's model, too, if I remember correctly. It also always shipped with a little PC beeper speaker. There are Commodore native Amiga 5 1/4 disk drives, the A1020. Meant to be used with the A1000 mostly, I don't think they produced them for a long time, they are pretty rare. The Janus.library fault was definitely caused by the bridge board not starting up properly for me. I think it had contact issues both in the Zorro slots and in the PLCC sockets on the board, might make sense to replace those. I worked around for now by reseating all socketed ICs and using huge amounts of contact cleaner on the sockets. It took me some time to figure out (as seen in the video), information really is sparse about these cards. The latest Commodore version of the Janus software appears to run fine on all the OS and Kickstart versions I tried (up to 3.1.4).
Adrian, I have an Amiga 2000 with an A2088 Bridgeboard that's working. The 360K Chinon drive you got is the one that comes with the card as mine is the same one. To get it working you need to put the janus.library and a file called MFC into your EXPANSION folder, not libs. I hope this helps as this is how mine is setup and it works.
IIRC Jan also went back to an older version of the software, it might be that the latest version is more designed for the 286 & 386 boards while the 8086 boards need an older version.
It definitely was a hardware issue for me (contact issues galore). The most recent versions of the Janus software run fine, even on newer Kickstart/OS versions. The older versions of the software just seem to have different error handling so they started up to a certain extend but the PC side didn't work at all.
@Mr Guru I have the same card with A2000 running the original kickstart, never changed. Yes, do not have experience with bridgeboard on newer kickstart. Chill out.
Hi Adrian! I have exactly the same A2088 Bridgeboard card and the same 360k drive, so I really think the drive can be the original that came with it. In my Amiga 2000 I have a "Western Digital FileCard PS30 8bit ISA Hardcard for IBM PS/2" as a PC hard drive for this card. I use Workbench 2.0 and kickstart 2.0. Greetings from Hans in Belgium.
From everything I've ever seen, that is the original drive - it's the same model of Chinon that was used in the Commodore PCs of the era like the PC10-III etc. That's also where a lot of the A2088's components and BIOS come from.
I love when Adrian do some soldering work or fix some stuff and then the background music pops up and he starts working.. it is so relaxing.. It makes me want to start doing some soldering, mod, fix on anything I have around here..
The Janus.Library should be in the SYS:Expansion directory and loaded with Binddrivers from the S:startup-sequence script. Also try using SnoopDOS to understand what the program is tripping up on👍🏻
It was a "blink and you'll miss it moment" but the installer claimed to copy the janus.library to Amiga:Expansion. Maybe it's something simple like the startup-sequence being write protected, hopefully SnoopDOS and a little poking around reveals all. Sidenote: 🤯 It's still getting updates 🤯
Though you really can´t do that much with the 2088 Bridgeboard, it is really interesting getting this thing to work. I lost my entire Amiga knowledge over the years just like you but then I found my Amiga 2000 in my attic, fixed the (slight) battery leakage and you know what ? My Amiga knowledge slowly keeps coming back ;)
If it had worked I was going to try to use my own design ISA memory expansion board to bring it up to 640k -- to make it at least slightly useful. No such luck!
These are so much more than just a mail call. It's a mail call and investigation in one. So many "mailbag" style videos are just opening the packages and nothing else. You always do a bit of a dive into the things you get. Very enjoyable videos.
A silly joke: "Stop the technology madness" -- Someone should put that sticker on the Facebook sign at their Menlo Park CA campus. Facebook occupies the former Sun Microsystems campus and the main sign is the actual former Sun Microsystems sign. They reused it, and turned it around so the "Sun" side would face the employees as a reminder of a successful company that slipped into failure (and what not to strive for).
Anyone else disappointed with the quality of the current cotton swaps? In my days those things hardly ever came apart when rubbed against a surface. Nowadays you squint at it the wrong way and it already comes undone.
Definitely, the quality have become cheaper over the years, especially on the generic brand ones. The Johnson & Johnson ones are still OK, if I remember correctly.
they've always done that for as long as i can remember, you had to get special ones if you wanted them for applications where it was important they didn't fall apart
Yes . I have noticed this as well . Perhaps the manufacturers are using shorter strands , these days . The longer fibre cotton probably goes for a higher premium .
totally the same.... with the memory and the amiga... i used to have a 2000 and me and a friend created a self booting ram disc that would stay resident even after a reset.... i used to use to to run an ami epress bbs here in the uk.... also used to created demo discs for mail trading... with animated ansi art.... no idea how i did it.. now all totally gone... what a great time that was.... great to see the amiga is still going strong.. great video... hope the weather lets up.
Oh yeah! I was having a loooong day in the studio and completely forgot it was Wednesday and BOOM! Notification that there is a new Mid Week Mail Call video! Woohoo. :) Thanks Adrian.
I would guess the first cold boot issue may be a sign of the PSU not being able to ramp up the relevant voltages quick enough on the PSU filter capacitors. The extra load required by the accelerator card will exacerbate this issue.
@@adriansdigitalbasement I was thinking more along the lines that the filter caps may be aging and have an initial high ESR value causing a low voltage for a short period until the caps warm up and the ESR value drops giving you the full beans.
Well its probably not GVP G-Force 030 Combo accelerator card. It uses tantalum caps which usualy fork fine until they blow up, but sometimes they don't, and they work as resistors. The best way will be to do some initial testing without GPV. Thermal camera would be usefull.
I had this way back in the day. I had it in my A1500. Mine had a Nexus 52Mb SCSi card / drive in it also. What a beast, sorry I sold it but like you I moved to PC, although in 1993. Happy days
The Terminal Accessory stickers were used by people who worked on the Move Team. Sun had lots of movement between offices and buildings so Sun had a Team just to do that work. The sticker was put on the moving boxes so the physical movers knew to land that box first at the new office location so the Move Team Sysadmin knew where the cords, keyboard, etc were.
I have recently realized something... this awesome man is living the absolute dream right here! Thanks for sharing these little gems for us to enjoy :-)
When I saw your video, that reminds me that I used to have that same board A2088XT for my Amiga 2000, and I think I used it once... it was more prestige at that time, like to show off those PC people, who actually PC can be swallowed by Amiga (: More interesting is video capture card, very professional with the actual broadcast BNC connectors and also sync input, and with that card, Amiga 2000 was used in any television broadcast environment super easy. It was similar to Amiga500 and genlock, but in that case, video signal had to go via frame synchroniser....
I had picked up the latest one that was supposed to work with newer kickstarts. I'll most likely need to try to scope the 8088 to see if it's even trying to boot -- but sadly the amount of custom chips (And the lack of any kind of debugging on the Amiga side) just makes trying to figure out the issue so hard.
I also remember great times... I had an A2000 with almost all slots full with everything: 68030 40MHz Turbo, an 80286 card, a Multi-I/O card, a SCSI HDD, and one CD-ROM, one IDE HDD. A MERLIN Mystique GFX card,... Two A500: One with a build-in 3.5" 105MB HDD, another A500 with an external 3.5" 105MB HDD with a 68020 Turbo with 30MHz. Plus one CD-32. I sold already a lot of the parts...
You can plug almost any SBC with 16bit connector into A2000. I added the remaining 16bit edge connectors into my A2000, I installed Pentium 233MHz SBC with separate16bit sound card running Windows using its own HD. Works great. You do need separate monitor, mouse, and kbrd. I probably need to do some video on it. I hope you can get your PC card to work.
Back in the day, I had a 386( i think) bridgeboard. I also added the 16 bit extensions to the other isa slots.One thing I did was find a card which I believe came from a Packard Bell pc. The card plugged into an ISA slot and had 3 isa connectors on one side and two on the other. If you plugged it into the last Amiga ISA slot, you essentially got two extra slots at the expense of not being able to install the case. It was cheaper than buying the multifunction ISA peripheral cards they were marketing at bridgeboard users. Fun stuff
OMG Adrian, (your comment about 8MB Zorro-II addressing limit) may have just solved a head-scatcher that I had a few years back when I was fooling around with my A2088 bridgeboard. After extensive attempts, I managed to solve all kinds of incompatibility issues. Things like proper Kickstart ROM, Amiga OS, and Bridgeboard SW versions. I had ISA addressing conflicts with my WD digital MFM/RLL card and ISA Lotek Adapter. I then resolved what appeared to be proper JANUS library version to get the Bridgeboard to support HD and, Lotek IDE booting DOS using flash cards. Another trick I stumbled on by mistake was to power up the Amiga/Bridgeboard, launch PC-Mono or Color, wait for failure, then click (“PC-Reset Icon”) which worked perfectly on the 2nd PC Soft Boot. It was hard to pinpoint exact causes/solution for of each type of failure. HOWEVER!! Once all was working & stable without any needed workarounds I still couldn’t figure out why my A2088 wouldn’t work with a Zorro-II GVP Impact-HC+8 SCSI card installed. In this video you covered the 8MB mapping limit on A2000 Zoro-II slots. I think that was my stumbling block since the GVP board I bought had 8MB pre-installed, resulting in the Mapping Limit/Conflict. I just read the GVP manual and there are jumpers to configure the memory 0,2,4,6,8 MB. I probably can either jumper the memory down to 6MB (leaving memory in), or remove some memory and adjust the jumpers to match. I wonder if I had similar issues with GVP board and the Budha IDE installed. I can’t wait to try things again. It would stun me if all of a sudden all 3 Zorro-II cards work simultaneously. Thanks for one more chance and motivator to figure this out. It may also help me as I attempt to make things work all over again with the PiStorm 2k / 68k Emulation.
Is it bad that I have memorized "Well, hello everyone, and welcome back to Adrian's Digital Basement." and "So, without further ado, let's get right into it! {Intro music}"? I can watch his intro in my head and even sometimes find myself saying it aloud lol
A few tips from a bridgeboard user. Janus.library normally resides in sys:expansion and is loaded upon boot. When it is loaded, it tries to activate the PC side of the bridgeboard (releases the RESET line). When the PC doesn't wake up and respond, Janus.library gives up after a timeout period of some 10 seconds and it unloads. There could be a RAM issue on the PC side, that may also be indicated by PC speaker beeps (you can connect a speaker to J2). Or simply a faulty CPU. What also may help diagnostics is using an ISA POST code card.
The drive also works with native amiga formats in 5.25” type?!?! If so, what would be the formatted capacity on the Amiga side.???? ’m sure it wouldn’t be 880k as this requires a disc drive with double sided heads along with a double density disc.... I believe it’s strictly a PC drive. Correct me if I’m wrong. :)
@@danielgadze3920 The Amiga floppy controller is flexible. It would store 440KB on a 5.25" disk. Here are the device settings to use: Device = trackdisk.device Unit = 2 /* first external unit */ Flags = 1 /* important ! */ Surfaces = 2 BlocksPerTrack = 11 Reserved = 2 Interleave = 0 LowCyl = 0 ; HighCyl = 39 Buffers = 20 BufMemType = 1
@@brianh2771 I never knew amiga could format it below 880kb for diskettes. I’ve always been used to 880kb 3.5” (as well as have used 1.76mb high density drives for my high end Amiga’s) I also own 2x external 51/4” disk drives which do 880k using 360k discs... it works for me fine! Have over 3,000 discs in my collection... I’ve always liked 51/4” discs to be used on my amiga systems as I grew up with the c64/128D(1541 / 1571 drives) and used them quite a lot back then hehe... I was marvelled and so delighted fo get 880kb on a non high density 51/4” disc... those were the days eh??
@@danielgadze3920 You're so right. Coming from the C64+1541, the Amiga's floppy capacity and speed was mind-blowing. I was certain I had come into possession of miraculous computing power :)
I had an Amiga 2000 with the 8086 bridgecard running on the stock 68000 and Kickstart 1.3. It worked flawlessly and was really useful. If I was to troubleshoot your setup, the first thing I would do is pull the accelerator card and try getting it setup and running on the 68000.
I had the same problem but eventually got it to work. It should not matter, but I used the software from 1988 on a booteble floppy disk and one morning it just worked. I restarted, it would not work again. I restarted again and it worked. Now it's stable. And I have installed the latest software. I am using kickstart 1.3. I saw that you changed the location for the virtual hard drive. I did that to and it did not work for me. I changed my amiga harddrive name to "work" and put it in there, since this was the default location. Then it worked. I hope you get it working, I was super happy when everything worked :D It's really cool to see dos game play and drag the screen down to reveal workbench behind it :)
I used to work configuring those machines at commodore UK, if I remember, its a long time ago that bridge board requires a v1.3 kickstart ROM and that A2000 board would of been sold with a v1.3 ROM. The 386sx board required v2.0.
The Amiga itself can support 5.25" drives, they just weren't commonly used... the interface is Shugart compatible and you can connect them though. There's a few things that make it awkward - the Amiga OS is geared around drives that can tell if the disk has been changed, which 5.25" drives cannot do. There is a "diskchange" command that you had to issue when you changed the disk in such drives.
Yes, this was going to be my suggestion as well. That'll at least allow him to figure out of the PC side is POSTing correctly and possibly give error messages to hit at what to look at if there is a problem there. Also hook up a PC speaker to the bridgecard, it has a spot for it and will help with diagnosing via POST beeps. Alternately if he has a PC diagnostic card to put in one of the ISA slots (the kind with the two LED 7-segment displays on it), that could help as well.
That's pretty cool that the A2000 even has ISA slots ready and waiting for after you to install a bridge card. Presumably then you can install a sound card and other goodies. Looking forward to a future episode when you can get this to work.
I had the 386sx-25 version with separate graphics and sound combo card. It was pretty neat as the card had superior color and resolution to the old amiga and better sound (full 16 bit). Ran win3.1 decently enough with its dedicated drive.
@@hannescamitz8575 it's not like windows has been at the edge whether it's cutting or bleeding. MSDOS/Windows was simply leading the way in terms of market share.
I just love your videos man, be it MMC or any other video. They are interesting and I learn from them. Have a great evening, afternoon or morning depending on the time of day.
I got to see the Falcon Heavy on the pad when they did the pre-launch test burn. We were taking my mom to Disney World for her 70th birthday; and popped over to KSC for a day; and we happened to get the timing right...
Adrian - Regarding your cold boot with the accelerator in. I've worked on a lot of these. You may want to dismantle the power supply and check out the electrolytics. The current draw is much higher with the accelerator. When those caps start to go, you can get weird power stuff, especially when cold.
Hi Adrian, Aluminum does oxidize, it turns into a white powder, the same white powder you saw all over the drive. Glad to see the 360K drive working properly. Sorry for the Bridgeboard.
I had the sidecar for the a1000, and when I got the a2000 I got the a2088 card for it. It was amazing for its time, and I used an IBM hdd for both the amiga and the IBM PC.
That Chinon 360k drive is original, came with the A2088. At least with mine. :) Exact same model. It is a PC-drive, not Amiga compatible at all. There were aftermarket 5 1/4 drives for the Amiga (external ones), they would format to native amiga 880k format. The drive itself in those units was probably a HD drive for PC's (not sure).
Commodore actually had an external 5.25" drive for the Amiga (model 1020). It was VERY short lived...I think it was for use with the Original A1000's Sidecar PC expansion.
There were a few uses for the A1020 beyond simply reading DOS floppies, though that was probably it's primary intended purpose due to the support utilities on the Workbench Extras 1.x disks. It was bundled with The Transformer an early PC emulator which, according to those that have used it, was basically useless. The 1020 at the Computer History Museum confirms this. www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/X1611.99F You could use it as a native Amiga drive which would give it a capacity of 440k per "360k" disk because it formats 11 blocks per track instead of 9 sectors like DOS. I doubt many people ever used it like that as there are some annoying limitations. The drive doesn't support automounting, or disk change detection, it requires a hardware modification to work with an A500 and that's all in addition to it being a very obscure format. Basically it's a curiosity for the hardcore A1000 collector.
Amazing stuff as always! Seeing the oiling, and cleaning of the gears has sparked some ideas of what I could do to the PSone gears for the laser! Sorry you couldn't get the bridge board working though! :(
I have some photos I took at the first shuttle landing at the cape. My friend Leon got us some press passes and we had a front row seat (actually stand) ! It sounds like that floppy drive reads OK, but the write circuitry is hosed.
great video, i recently tried my A2088 bridge board, and had similar problems with that janus library error, i downloaded last janus software and same thing. after a while i pulled the card and pushed in all the chips and then it started working, to a point, then i had floppy issues, but i don't have the original drive. i was trying to get it to work with a 3 1/4 720k drive but it kept giving me floppy errors no matter what. Sent it off to my friend to try it out in his A3000 to see if he has any luck with it. before i go spending any more money on a drive that they want crazy amount of money for lol can't wait to see the next episode on this.
Sun Microelectronics was their division that made motherboards and things for third party vendors. The Ultra AXe and Ultra AXi were ATX style motherboards made for system designers to include in PC style cases or servers. I have an AXe board which is roughly equivalent to an Ultra 5 in hardware specs except it has PS/2 ports instead of Sun compatible mouse/keyboard. It requires the later version of Solaris 7 for the ports to be recognized. The early version of Solaris 7 will boot but the install menus will not respond to keyboard input.
For troubleshooting I would start with standard stuff, voltages, clocks on the CPU, reset pin being held. Check ram chips for data and address activity.
There was something called Sidecar for the Amiga (now known as Amiga 1000) which used the side expansion slot AKA Zorro-1 slot. This is the A2000 version of that solution. I know if you have one of these 5 1/4 inch drives installed in the Amiga 2000 the Amiga can see it, there is even am Amiga program that lets you write Commodore 64 compatible disks on PD disks. The real beauty of the Commodore Bridgeboards is the Janus software that comes with it, that was quite a thing, and there was also a 286 and 386SX version by Commodore (and Goldengate from Germany produced a 486SX board but this did not come with the sophisticated Amiga software like the Commodore Bridgeboards which allowed you to use the card on the Amiga's screen output).
Hi Adrian. You should be able to test the A2088 independent of any Amiga software. Insert a boot floppy and see if the PC boots. If so, try installing an ISA video card and see if you get the PC display that way. Also, I think there may be a problem with the assignment of "LIBS:" on your machine preventing it from finding "LIBS:Janus.library".
According to several people who have got it working (forum.amiga.org/index.php?topic=731.0) Janus has to be in SYS:Expansion it doesn't load from the LIBS: assign.
There is a NASA gift shop at Edwards AFB in SoCal, where the Shuttle often landed. Not sure if it is still there, but my mom worked there in the late 80s to early 90s.
I would try to remove the accelerator and boot directly off the Floppy with the Janus software. Also there are Hand Drawn Schematics availible for the 2088 (I think they are in the appendix of one of the reference manuals), I needed to look at them because mine has trouble with the second memory bank. Also you have a pretty early bridgeboard from germany (BSW). I have a similar revision. When it executes the binddrivers command, the bridgeboard should come to life (speaker, floppy seaking, output on a ISA video card)
I looked up the memory chips (OKI M41256A-12) and those are 256K RAM chips. Looks like that board has 4 MB of ram. Also, that board is missing the 8087 Math Coprocessor that was an optional upgrade for the Intel 8086 and 8088 TX motherboards. (But, if memory serves me, and it usually doesn't, the difference between the 8086 and 8088 was that the 8088 had the math coprocessor in it.)
I think I should really try to male a video on the PC-Speed emulator for the Atari ST. I tested it recently in my old Mega ST and it looked like it worked starting from floppy. Unfortunately the harddisk (Megafile 60) does not work. I have to find a replacement solution as else there is not much fun to have with the emulator. The PC-Speed emulator in the Atari works completely different to the Amiga Sidecarts and I find it so much more clever (sorry, putting a whole PC on a card is quite the brute force approach). PC-speed is a little card, the size it takes to have a 64 Pin socket to solder on the 68000 and a 40 PIN V30 CPU and 4 GALS. With clever software and drivers, the Atari hardware RAM, video, disks etc. are shared between the two. It was so nice a merging of the 2 worlds that you had accelerator software under TOS that used to help to accelerate the graphics using the V30 as it was faster (3cycles @8MHz) in memory access within 64K than the 68000 (4cycles @8Mhz). The emulated PC was of a beefy XT class category with CGA/Hercules and the special Olivetti graphics mode 640x400, up to 704 KiB memory (the 640K limit was a 704K limit on it) with EMS or RAM disk by using the supplemental Atari memory (up to 4 MiB).
Adrian, thank you for another awesome video. However, may I make a request that you don't play music when you are talking. I'm partially deaf and the combination of music and your voice makes it impossible for me to hear what you are saying. I wrote to you some time back regarding the intro music and you kindly gave me a pointer to where I could find the complete track. (awesome) I love the music and really enjoy your oratory but when melded together I cannot enjoy either. Thank you, from one dedicated viewer.
The Amiga supports 5.25" floppy drives just fine. You can have the official C= A1020 that will act and support a variety of uses (check out the 1541 filesystem driver for it on AmiNet), or you can have 3rd-party drives that act like a regular 3.5" (I believe these were popular in Germany).
Yeah I was thinking the exact same thing. There might be some kind of conflict there indeed. Only if he removes the GVP he doesn't have his SCSI boot drive. It also uses this drive for its 32meg virtual DOS partition and I think the Amiga needs a harddrive to run the bridgeboard software..This is a hard one... Maybe there's a way to get the bridgeboard to run from a floppy or a different harddisk controller so he doesn't need the accelerator.. I've got a Zorro II GVP fastram/harddiskcontroller that would do the trick.. Maybe I'll send that to him. The trick is elimination (as always): Get the A2000 as stock as you can, with the orginal Workbench, Kickstart etc. Might also be a good idea to start probing the 128k shared RAM and check all the signals in that area. There may be something stuck there... Also those old PLCC sockets tend to crack.. I would check those 3 as well...
I have an A2088 and it wouldnt work with my 68030 accelerator either. Even with booting the amiga up in 68000 cpu mode (hold right click on powerup)... After pulling the accelerator the A2088 started working beautifully. Now the A2088 and the accelerator are sitting in 2 different amigas. :-)
I should have bought stock in a cotton swab manufacturer, I could have been retired and on the beach in Fiji by now thanks to all the retro computer restorers out there. :P
The SCSI2SD that I have (looks like the same model as yours) also causes my A2k/GVP040 system to do the same cold-boot hang. With a real SCSI drive, it worked just fine, and the SCSI2SD worked just fine in a number of other systems, so it's something particular to the GVP-SCSI2SD combo. But, the overall convenience (and silence) more than make up for having to reboot it once.
@@PATTHECATMCD I’m looking for a 486 overdrive which fits on a 386 chip to upgrade my 386 bridge board.. anyone have any pointers/ideas (other than evil bay) where to obtain one? I prefer a dx2 or dx4 overdrive version? Doom would run fantastic and many other dos games like mortal kombat, day of the tentacle, sam & max, alone on the dark etc....
@@danielgadze3920 Overdrive version was never that common. If you pay less than $70 you are doing well. Try Aliexpress if you want to see HUGE price markup... Ebay don't seem so bad..
Hey Adrian, I had the same issue with my A1200 030. After a whole day, the system tried to boot and was just on halt. The second time it was fine and for the rest of the day. The Amiga is recapped and in great shape, so I was going crazy. Found the issue though, it was the new SanDisk SD card. I went back to Kingston and the problem vanished, at least in my case.
yes, the image on the Amiga side was really slow but it worked. If I remember correctly from my Amiga computer store days the bridge board would only work in Amiga 2000's and 4000's. Wow I forgot about the Amiga 3000. Usually when we had issues with the bridge board the edge connector was dirty and needed to be cleaned.
Does anyone else think it funny when he says, without further ado lets just get into it, and then the intro starts for about `15 seconds of further ado before he gets into it? It's cosmic irony.
It would seem that Commodore's habit of not keying floppy drive cables applied to all floppy drive cables used in Amigas. (The 3 1/2 inch floppy drives were somewhat infamous for not being keyed, and often slightly difficult to check visually when being inserted into the drives. Fortunately, being one pin off didn't send voltages to anything that couldn't handle it. The machine wouldn't initialize, though.)
Ah man I was really rooting for you to get this working somehow! Here's hoping it's just a software hiccup that can be resolved.
Yeah same man, it really sucks that he couldn't get it up and running ;w;
He'll definitely get this baby up and running some day. The guy is like Retro-McGyver 👌
Samesies. You know he'll do it though. He got that Commander X16 prototype to work!
Spoiler alert! ;)
@Mr Guru Oh 'elsewhere'. That clears things up ;-)
Just kidding. Very helpful. I suspect the GVP accelerator as well...
Thanks for the shout out Adrian! :) I think the disk drive you got is the one the cards shipped with. They used the same drives they shipped with the Commodore PCs I guess, so they were just pretty generic PC drives. The color was a bit different to the A2000 face plate on my father's model, too, if I remember correctly. It also always shipped with a little PC beeper speaker.
There are Commodore native Amiga 5 1/4 disk drives, the A1020. Meant to be used with the A1000 mostly, I don't think they produced them for a long time, they are pretty rare.
The Janus.library fault was definitely caused by the bridge board not starting up properly for me. I think it had contact issues both in the Zorro slots and in the PLCC sockets on the board, might make sense to replace those. I worked around for now by reseating all socketed ICs and using huge amounts of contact cleaner on the sockets. It took me some time to figure out (as seen in the video), information really is sparse about these cards. The latest Commodore version of the Janus software appears to run fine on all the OS and Kickstart versions I tried (up to 3.1.4).
Alameda... It's where they keep the nuclear wessles.
Yes Chekov
There be whales here! :)
You beat me to it, I never fail to think about that anytime I see Alameda.
But where is Alameda?
@@kbates666 it’s just south of Oakland, California on the east side of San Francisco Bay.
Adrian, I have an Amiga 2000 with an A2088 Bridgeboard that's working. The 360K Chinon drive you got is the one that comes with the card as mine is the same one. To get it working you need to put the janus.library and a file called MFC into your EXPANSION folder, not libs. I hope this helps as this is how mine is setup and it works.
*Does it move?* YES/NO
*Should it move?* YES/NO
*If 1 is yes and 2 is no, apply adhesive*
*If 1 is no and 2 is yes, apply lubricant*
Oh, my goodness... A TANDY DRIVE CLEANING KIT!!!! I used to have one of those... back in 1991... yeah, I'm old.
IIRC Jan also went back to an older version of the software, it might be that the latest version is more designed for the 286 & 386 boards while the 8086 boards need an older version.
@Mr Guru And some common faults for the bridge boards are? He may revisit it. Share the knowledge 👍
It definitely was a hardware issue for me (contact issues galore). The most recent versions of the Janus software run fine, even on newer Kickstart/OS versions. The older versions of the software just seem to have different error handling so they started up to a certain extend but the PC side didn't work at all.
Change kickstart to 1.3
@Mr Guru I have the same card with A2000 running the original kickstart, never changed. Yes, do not have experience with bridgeboard on newer kickstart. Chill out.
Hi Adrian! I have exactly the same A2088 Bridgeboard card and the same 360k drive, so I really think the drive can be the original that came with it. In my Amiga 2000 I have a "Western Digital FileCard PS30 8bit ISA Hardcard for IBM PS/2" as a PC hard drive for this card. I use Workbench 2.0 and kickstart 2.0. Greetings from Hans in Belgium.
Seconded. I have mine as well. Chinon FZ-502 in the same style and color.
I have the same drive with my A2088 bridge board as well.
From everything I've ever seen, that is the original drive - it's the same model of Chinon that was used in the Commodore PCs of the era like the PC10-III etc. That's also where a lot of the A2088's components and BIOS come from.
I appreciate you taking the time to properly thank people for being sent stuff. Others aren’t always so grateful even though they maybe should be.
I love when Adrian do some soldering work or fix some stuff and then the background music pops up and he starts working.. it is so relaxing.. It makes me want to start doing some soldering, mod, fix on anything I have around here..
The Janus.Library should be in the SYS:Expansion directory and loaded with Binddrivers from the S:startup-sequence script.
Also try using SnoopDOS to understand what the program is tripping up on👍🏻
Compatibility problems / Bridgeboard Problems - www.l8r.net/technical/bridgeboard.html
It was a "blink and you'll miss it moment" but the installer claimed to copy the janus.library to Amiga:Expansion. Maybe it's something simple like the startup-sequence being write protected, hopefully SnoopDOS and a little poking around reveals all.
Sidenote: 🤯 It's still getting updates 🤯
yeah Binddrivers i aways forgot that back in the day too
Though you really can´t do that much with the 2088 Bridgeboard, it is really interesting getting this thing to work. I lost my entire Amiga knowledge over the years just like you but then I found my Amiga 2000 in my attic, fixed the (slight) battery leakage and you know what ? My Amiga knowledge slowly keeps coming back ;)
If it had worked I was going to try to use my own design ISA memory expansion board to bring it up to 640k -- to make it at least slightly useful. No such luck!
These are so much more than just a mail call. It's a mail call and investigation in one.
So many "mailbag" style videos are just opening the packages and nothing else. You always do a bit of a dive into the things you get.
Very enjoyable videos.
Great I was needing something to watch since I wasn't able to make it to work with all the snow and ice and you delivered. Thank you sir
Adrian's videos are amazing. They're the only ones that show more likes than views (at least after the first minute).
Can confirm! Some UA-camrs are just an "insta-like".
Patreon get the videos first.
@@bradkamrath Thanks for that. I should have guessed since I've seen videos with comments from bots and zero views.
... and one dislike in first minute ??? some people are instant dislikers ...
and yes .... i'm instant Adrian's liker .... i click like before start watching video
Another mid-week MAXI mail call, just when I needed it :)
Adrian, you warm my heart. So calm, you are! Fun to watch.
A silly joke: "Stop the technology madness" -- Someone should put that sticker on the Facebook sign at their Menlo Park CA campus. Facebook occupies the former Sun Microsystems campus and the main sign is the actual former Sun Microsystems sign. They reused it, and turned it around so the "Sun" side would face the employees as a reminder of a successful company that slipped into failure (and what not to strive for).
I think they've got confused and are rapidly heading the way of Sun Microsystems.
@@ravenbarsrepairs5594 I really hope so. Facebook is cancer.
I use to work at that campus. Fun time at Sun Quinton. Since it was by the bay like San Quinton
Really? They cheaped out on their company sign?
@@XAWZ I'll take Facebook and the Zucc over Dorsay (sic) and the bowel cancer that is Twitter any day... Bring back MySpace! And BBS flame wars!
Anyone else disappointed with the quality of the current cotton swaps? In my days those things hardly ever came apart when rubbed against a surface. Nowadays you squint at it the wrong way and it already comes undone.
Definitely, the quality have become cheaper over the years, especially on the generic brand ones. The Johnson & Johnson ones are still OK, if I remember correctly.
they've always done that for as long as i can remember, you had to get special ones if you wanted them for applications where it was important they didn't fall apart
I just use the wooden stick lint free ones.
Yeah they are really utter crap these days.
Yes . I have noticed this as well . Perhaps the manufacturers are using shorter strands , these days . The longer fibre cotton probably goes for a higher premium .
totally the same.... with the memory and the amiga... i used to have a 2000 and me and a friend created a self booting ram disc that would stay resident even after a reset.... i used to use to to run an ami epress bbs here in the uk.... also used to created demo discs for mail trading... with animated ansi art.... no idea how i did it.. now all totally gone... what a great time that was.... great to see the amiga is still going strong.. great video... hope the weather lets up.
Oh yeah! I was having a loooong day in the studio and completely forgot it was Wednesday and BOOM! Notification that there is a new Mid Week Mail Call video! Woohoo. :) Thanks Adrian.
I got to see the final space shuttle launch in person, what an amazing experience!
So my husband has been watching your videos for the last couple of weeks. I just wanted to inform you that your doppelganger lives in Arkansas.
I would guess the first cold boot issue may be a sign of the PSU not being able to ramp up the relevant voltages quick enough on the PSU filter capacitors. The extra load required by the accelerator card will exacerbate this issue.
I actually have a spare PSU so I can swap it out ..... but yeah it's beefy so really what's in this machine is not a heavy load for the PSU.
@@adriansdigitalbasement I was thinking more along the lines that the filter caps may be aging and have an initial high ESR value causing a low voltage for a short period until the caps warm up and the ESR value drops giving you the full beans.
Well its probably not GVP G-Force 030 Combo accelerator card. It uses tantalum caps which usualy fork fine until they blow up, but sometimes they don't, and they work as resistors. The best way will be to do some initial testing without GPV. Thermal camera would be usefull.
Yes, that's the original drive. I got the same when I originally bought my A2000 with A2088 a long, long time ago. It's still working fine.
Glad you like the Bridgeboard. The system I pulled the card and drive from was an A2000 with the Varta destruction all over the main board.
Oh dear!! Yet another machine ruined by a leaking battery. Thanks though!
I had this way back in the day. I had it in my A1500. Mine had a Nexus 52Mb SCSi card / drive in it also. What a beast, sorry I sold it but like you I moved to PC, although in 1993. Happy days
Love this channel. 100 K just around the corner!
The Terminal Accessory stickers were used by people who worked on the Move Team. Sun had lots of movement between offices and buildings so Sun had a Team just to do that work. The sticker was put on the moving boxes so the physical movers knew to land that box first at the new office location so the Move Team Sysadmin knew where the cords, keyboard, etc were.
Interesting!!
I have recently realized something... this awesome man is living the absolute dream right here! Thanks for sharing these little gems for us to enjoy :-)
When I saw your video, that reminds me that I used to have that same board A2088XT for my Amiga 2000, and I think I used it once... it was more prestige at that time, like to show off those PC people, who actually PC can be swallowed by Amiga (: More interesting is video capture card, very professional with the actual broadcast BNC connectors and also sync input, and with that card, Amiga 2000 was used in any television broadcast environment super easy. It was similar to Amiga500 and genlock, but in that case, video signal had to go via frame synchroniser....
Fantastic donation =O If memory serves, there are two versions of the Janus driver - that might be your issue!
I had picked up the latest one that was supposed to work with newer kickstarts. I'll most likely need to try to scope the 8088 to see if it's even trying to boot -- but sadly the amount of custom chips (And the lack of any kind of debugging on the Amiga side) just makes trying to figure out the issue so hard.
Thanks for the videos, Adrian!
I also remember great times...
I had an A2000 with almost all slots full with everything: 68030 40MHz Turbo, an 80286 card, a Multi-I/O card, a SCSI HDD, and one CD-ROM, one IDE HDD. A MERLIN Mystique GFX card,...
Two A500: One with a build-in 3.5" 105MB HDD, another A500 with an external 3.5" 105MB HDD with a 68020 Turbo with 30MHz.
Plus one CD-32.
I sold already a lot of the parts...
The highlight of the weekdays for me :)
Been F5'ing for this!
You can plug almost any SBC with 16bit connector into A2000. I added the remaining 16bit edge connectors into my A2000, I installed Pentium 233MHz SBC with separate16bit sound card running Windows using its own HD. Works great. You do need separate monitor, mouse, and kbrd. I probably need to do some video on it.
I hope you can get your PC card to work.
But if nothing is bridged to the Amiga, what is the purpose of the PC then, other than having 2 computers in 1 box?
@@danielmantione Because I can, and it was fun making it work. It also shows that the PC slots are passive and you can use them as a SBC backplane.
Back in the day, I had a 386( i think) bridgeboard. I also added the 16 bit extensions to the other isa slots.One thing I did was find a card which I believe came from a Packard Bell pc. The card plugged into an ISA slot and had 3 isa connectors on one side and two on the other. If you plugged it into the last Amiga ISA slot, you essentially got two extra slots at the expense of not being able to install the case. It was cheaper than buying the multifunction ISA peripheral cards they were marketing at bridgeboard users. Fun stuff
OMG Adrian, (your comment about 8MB Zorro-II addressing limit) may have just solved a head-scatcher that I had a few years back when I was fooling around with my A2088 bridgeboard. After extensive attempts, I managed to solve all kinds of incompatibility issues. Things like proper Kickstart ROM, Amiga OS, and Bridgeboard SW versions. I had ISA addressing conflicts with my WD digital MFM/RLL card and ISA Lotek Adapter. I then resolved what appeared to be proper JANUS library version to get the Bridgeboard to support HD and, Lotek IDE booting DOS using flash cards. Another trick I stumbled on by mistake was to power up the Amiga/Bridgeboard, launch PC-Mono or Color, wait for failure, then click (“PC-Reset Icon”) which worked perfectly on the 2nd PC Soft Boot. It was hard to pinpoint exact causes/solution for of each type of failure. HOWEVER!! Once all was working & stable without any needed workarounds I still couldn’t figure out why my A2088 wouldn’t work with a Zorro-II GVP Impact-HC+8 SCSI card installed. In this video you covered the 8MB mapping limit on A2000 Zoro-II slots. I think that was my stumbling block since the GVP board I bought had 8MB pre-installed, resulting in the Mapping Limit/Conflict. I just read the GVP manual and there are jumpers to configure the memory 0,2,4,6,8 MB. I probably can either jumper the memory down to 6MB (leaving memory in), or remove some memory and adjust the jumpers to match. I wonder if I had similar issues with GVP board and the Budha IDE installed. I can’t wait to try things again. It would stun me if all of a sudden all 3 Zorro-II cards work simultaneously. Thanks for one more chance and motivator to figure this out. It may also help me as I attempt to make things work all over again with the PiStorm 2k / 68k Emulation.
Is it bad that I have memorized "Well, hello everyone, and welcome back to Adrian's Digital Basement." and "So, without further ado, let's get right into it! {Intro music}"? I can watch his intro in my head and even sometimes find myself saying it aloud lol
A few tips from a bridgeboard user. Janus.library normally resides in sys:expansion and is loaded upon boot. When it is loaded, it tries to activate the PC side of the bridgeboard (releases the RESET line). When the PC doesn't wake up and respond, Janus.library gives up after a timeout period of some 10 seconds and it unloads. There could be a RAM issue on the PC side, that may also be indicated by PC speaker beeps (you can connect a speaker to J2). Or simply a faulty CPU. What also may help diagnostics is using an ISA POST code card.
The Amiga Model 1020 Floppy Drive, released with the Amiga 1000, is a native 5.25" device that works with both Amiga and MS-DOS format disks.
The drive also works with native amiga formats in 5.25” type?!?! If so, what would be the formatted capacity on the Amiga side.???? ’m sure it wouldn’t be 880k as this requires a disc drive with double sided heads along with a double density disc.... I believe it’s strictly a PC drive. Correct me if I’m wrong. :)
@@danielgadze3920 The Amiga floppy controller is flexible. It would store 440KB on a 5.25" disk. Here are the device settings to use:
Device = trackdisk.device
Unit = 2 /* first external unit */
Flags = 1 /* important ! */
Surfaces = 2
BlocksPerTrack = 11
Reserved = 2
Interleave = 0
LowCyl = 0 ; HighCyl = 39
Buffers = 20
BufMemType = 1
@@brianh2771 I never knew amiga could format it below 880kb for diskettes. I’ve always been used to 880kb 3.5” (as well as have used 1.76mb high density drives for my high end Amiga’s) I also own 2x external 51/4” disk drives which do 880k using 360k discs... it works for me fine! Have over 3,000 discs in my collection... I’ve always liked 51/4” discs to be used on my amiga systems as I grew up with the c64/128D(1541 / 1571 drives) and used them quite a lot back then hehe... I was marvelled and so delighted fo get 880kb on a non high density 51/4” disc... those were the days eh??
@@danielgadze3920 You're so right. Coming from the C64+1541, the Amiga's floppy capacity and speed was mind-blowing. I was certain I had come into possession of miraculous computing power :)
I had an Amiga 2000 with the 8086 bridgecard running on the stock 68000 and Kickstart 1.3. It worked flawlessly and was really useful. If I was to troubleshoot your setup, the first thing I would do is pull the accelerator card and try getting it setup and running on the 68000.
I saw the power is out in Portland, my first selfish thought of course was about the supply of ADB episodes.
Check those two big interface chips in PLCC sockets. Use hard rubber to clean the contacts on chips, clean them with alcohol and reseat them.
1995 is 26 years ago. I think you can be forgiven for forgetting some things.
I know. I've forgotten most of my NetWare experience. And I had installed a few servers in my day.
I had the same problem but eventually got it to work. It should not matter, but I used the software from 1988 on a booteble floppy disk and one morning it just worked. I restarted, it would not work again. I restarted again and it worked. Now it's stable. And I have installed the latest software. I am using kickstart 1.3. I saw that you changed the location for the virtual hard drive. I did that to and it did not work for me. I changed my amiga harddrive name to "work" and put it in there, since this was the default location. Then it worked. I hope you get it working, I was super happy when everything worked :D It's really cool to see dos game play and drag the screen down to reveal workbench behind it :)
I used to work configuring those machines at commodore UK, if I remember, its a long time ago that bridge board requires a v1.3 kickstart ROM and that A2000 board would of been sold with a v1.3 ROM. The 386sx board required v2.0.
I was just thinking of the Jan Beta video for the Amiga Bridgeport when I saw you unboxing this one. XD Nice
The Amiga itself can support 5.25" drives, they just weren't commonly used... the interface is Shugart compatible and you can connect them though. There's a few things that make it awkward - the Amiga OS is geared around drives that can tell if the disk has been changed, which 5.25" drives cannot do. There is a "diskchange" command that you had to issue when you changed the disk in such drives.
People must love sending you things. It’s like doing computer show and tell with Fred Rogers.
Wooaaa, I'd so like to own such a bridge board!
Try putting in an ISA video card and plug a monitor to see if the bridgecard is initializing..
Yes, this was going to be my suggestion as well. That'll at least allow him to figure out of the PC side is POSTing correctly and possibly give error messages to hit at what to look at if there is a problem there. Also hook up a PC speaker to the bridgecard, it has a spot for it and will help with diagnosing via POST beeps. Alternately if he has a PC diagnostic card to put in one of the ISA slots (the kind with the two LED 7-segment displays on it), that could help as well.
That's pretty cool that the A2000 even has ISA slots ready and waiting for after you to install a bridge card. Presumably then you can install a sound card and other goodies. Looking forward to a future episode when you can get this to work.
8 or 16 bit, sound cards, graphics cards, network cards, hd controllers...
I had the 386sx-25 version with separate graphics and sound combo card. It was pretty neat as the card had superior color and resolution to the old amiga and better sound (full 16 bit). Ran win3.1 decently enough with its dedicated drive.
Around the time this came out I had an Amiga 1000 and I thought Amiga was the future, we called Windows "Windoze" as it was so slow!
and PC as "Pee See"
And then the amazing feature came to Windows, change settings like resolution without reboot... 🤣
That were the times.
@@hannescamitz8575 it's not like windows has been at the edge whether it's cutting or bleeding. MSDOS/Windows was simply leading the way in terms of market share.
Bosses forced their employees to buy a computer and it had only the option of sponsored PC with mandatory MSdos. 😔
I just love your videos man, be it MMC or any other video. They are interesting and I learn from them. Have a great evening, afternoon or morning depending on the time of day.
I got to see the Falcon Heavy on the pad when they did the pre-launch test burn. We were taking my mom to Disney World for her 70th birthday; and popped over to KSC for a day; and we happened to get the timing right...
I like the look of the sticky-out LED
Adrian - Regarding your cold boot with the accelerator in. I've worked on a lot of these. You may want to dismantle the power supply and check out the electrolytics. The current draw is much higher with the accelerator. When those caps start to go, you can get weird power stuff, especially when cold.
Hi Adrian, Aluminum does oxidize, it turns into a white powder, the same white powder you saw all over the drive. Glad to see the 360K drive working properly. Sorry for the Bridgeboard.
Looking forward to a follow-up video, if one is on the cards!
I had the sidecar for the a1000, and when I got the a2000 I got the a2088 card for it. It was amazing for its time, and I used an IBM hdd for both the amiga and the IBM PC.
6:12 Floopy drive, haha. That's a pretty funny typo.
That Chinon 360k drive is original, came with the A2088. At least with mine. :) Exact same model. It is a PC-drive, not Amiga compatible at all.
There were aftermarket 5 1/4 drives for the Amiga (external ones), they would format to native amiga 880k format. The drive itself in those units was probably a HD drive for PC's (not sure).
Commodore actually had an external 5.25" drive for the Amiga (model 1020). It was VERY short lived...I think it was for use with the Original A1000's Sidecar PC expansion.
There were a few uses for the A1020 beyond simply reading DOS floppies, though that was probably it's primary intended purpose due to the support utilities on the Workbench Extras 1.x disks.
It was bundled with The Transformer an early PC emulator which, according to those that have used it, was basically useless. The 1020 at the Computer History Museum confirms this. www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/X1611.99F
You could use it as a native Amiga drive which would give it a capacity of 440k per "360k" disk because it formats 11 blocks per track instead of 9 sectors like DOS. I doubt many people ever used it like that as there are some annoying limitations. The drive doesn't support automounting, or disk change detection, it requires a hardware modification to work with an A500 and that's all in addition to it being a very obscure format. Basically it's a curiosity for the hardcore A1000 collector.
@@firstsurname9893 yup. Got one in a big Commodore haul I bought about a year ago. Sold it off. Looked brand new.
I just picked up an Amiga 2000 with a bridgeboard installed. It has the same 5.25" floppy drive as yours.
Amazing stuff as always! Seeing the oiling, and cleaning of the gears has sparked some ideas of what I could do to the PSone gears for the laser! Sorry you couldn't get the bridge board working though! :(
I have some photos I took at the first shuttle landing at the cape. My friend Leon got us some press passes and we had a front row seat (actually stand) !
It sounds like that floppy drive reads OK, but the write circuitry is hosed.
great video, i recently tried my A2088 bridge board, and had similar problems with that janus library error, i downloaded last janus software and same thing. after a while i pulled the card and pushed in all the chips and then it started working, to a point, then i had floppy issues, but i don't have the original drive. i was trying to get it to work with a 3 1/4 720k drive but it kept giving me floppy errors no matter what. Sent it off to my friend to try it out in his A3000 to see if he has any luck with it. before i go spending any more money on a drive that they want crazy amount of money for lol can't wait to see the next episode on this.
Sun Microelectronics was their division that made motherboards and things for third party vendors. The Ultra AXe and Ultra AXi were ATX style motherboards made for system designers to include in PC style cases or servers. I have an AXe board which is roughly equivalent to an Ultra 5 in hardware specs except it has PS/2 ports instead of Sun compatible mouse/keyboard. It requires the later version of Solaris 7 for the ports to be recognized. The early version of Solaris 7 will boot but the install menus will not respond to keyboard input.
It was one of the many Sun fiefdoms. Also the division was in charge of the SPARC CPU design.
Nice video... I want a 'Floopy' drive too😏
The Video Toaster! what a wonderful times!
For troubleshooting I would start with standard stuff, voltages, clocks on the CPU, reset pin being held. Check ram chips for data and address activity.
There was something called Sidecar for the Amiga (now known as Amiga 1000) which used the side expansion slot AKA Zorro-1 slot. This is the A2000 version of that solution. I know if you have one of these 5 1/4 inch drives installed in the Amiga 2000 the Amiga can see it, there is even am Amiga program that lets you write Commodore 64 compatible disks on PD disks. The real beauty of the Commodore Bridgeboards is the Janus software that comes with it, that was quite a thing, and there was also a 286 and 386SX version by Commodore (and Goldengate from Germany produced a 486SX board but this did not come with the sophisticated Amiga software like the Commodore Bridgeboards which allowed you to use the card on the Amiga's screen output).
"Floopy drive" .. :-) Brilliant vid!
Hi Adrian. You should be able to test the A2088 independent of any Amiga software. Insert a boot floppy and see if the PC boots. If so, try installing an ISA video card and see if you get the PC display that way. Also, I think there may be a problem with the assignment of "LIBS:" on your machine preventing it from finding "LIBS:Janus.library".
According to several people who have got it working (forum.amiga.org/index.php?topic=731.0) Janus has to be in SYS:Expansion it doesn't load from the LIBS: assign.
@@firstsurname9893 Ah, thx. It is a device driver with "unfortunate" naming.
Whole bunch of the buildings at KSC have those bags in their shops--kind of a fun "perk" almost for working there.
Yes, It is the original drive. I have an old German Commodore leaflet which portraits the same drive in an A2000.
There is a NASA gift shop at Edwards AFB in SoCal, where the Shuttle often landed. Not sure if it is still there, but my mom worked there in the late 80s to early 90s.
I would try to remove the accelerator and boot directly off the Floppy with the Janus software.
Also there are Hand Drawn Schematics availible for the 2088 (I think they are in the appendix of one of the reference manuals), I needed to look at them because mine has trouble with the second memory bank.
Also you have a pretty early bridgeboard from germany (BSW). I have a similar revision.
When it executes the binddrivers command, the bridgeboard should come to life (speaker, floppy seaking, output on a ISA video card)
I looked up the memory chips (OKI M41256A-12) and those are 256K RAM chips. Looks like that board has 4 MB of ram. Also, that board is missing the 8087 Math Coprocessor that was an optional upgrade for the Intel 8086 and 8088 TX motherboards. (But, if memory serves me, and it usually doesn't, the difference between the 8086 and 8088 was that the 8088 had the math coprocessor in it.)
I own similar card for the A500, walked me through college!
Old computer is so amazing even in year 2021
Please don't stop making these.
Once again, doesn’t disappoint
I think I should really try to male a video on the PC-Speed emulator for the Atari ST. I tested it recently in my old Mega ST and it looked like it worked starting from floppy. Unfortunately the harddisk (Megafile 60) does not work. I have to find a replacement solution as else there is not much fun to have with the emulator.
The PC-Speed emulator in the Atari works completely different to the Amiga Sidecarts and I find it so much more clever (sorry, putting a whole PC on a card is quite the brute force approach). PC-speed is a little card, the size it takes to have a 64 Pin socket to solder on the 68000 and a 40 PIN V30 CPU and 4 GALS. With clever software and drivers, the Atari hardware RAM, video, disks etc. are shared between the two. It was so nice a merging of the 2 worlds that you had accelerator software under TOS that used to help to accelerate the graphics using the V30 as it was faster (3cycles @8MHz) in memory access within 64K than the 68000 (4cycles @8Mhz). The emulated PC was of a beefy XT class category with CGA/Hercules and the special Olivetti graphics mode 640x400, up to 704 KiB memory (the 640K limit was a 704K limit on it) with EMS or RAM disk by using the supplemental Atari memory (up to 4 MiB).
Adrian, thank you for another awesome video.
However, may I make a request that you don't play music when you are talking.
I'm partially deaf and the combination of music and your voice makes it impossible for me to hear what you are saying.
I wrote to you some time back regarding the intro music and you kindly gave me a pointer to where I could find the complete track. (awesome)
I love the music and really enjoy your oratory but when melded together I cannot enjoy either.
Thank you, from one dedicated viewer.
I remember having to modify the BIOS chips (odd and even pair) on the Commodore PC (IBM compatible) to accommodate larger hard drive sizes.
The Amiga supports 5.25" floppy drives just fine. You can have the official C= A1020 that will act and support a variety of uses (check out the 1541 filesystem driver for it on AmiNet), or you can have 3rd-party drives that act like a regular 3.5" (I believe these were popular in Germany).
Neat - I did not know (either)!
just an uneducated guess, maybe that accelerator card is causing some issues. could the PC card tried without the accelerator?
Yeah I was thinking the exact same thing. There might be some kind of conflict there indeed. Only if he removes the GVP he doesn't have his SCSI boot drive. It also uses this drive for its 32meg virtual DOS partition and I think the Amiga needs a harddrive to run the bridgeboard software..This is a hard one...
Maybe there's a way to get the bridgeboard to run from a floppy or a different harddisk controller so he doesn't need the accelerator.. I've got a Zorro II GVP fastram/harddiskcontroller that would do the trick.. Maybe I'll send that to him.
The trick is elimination (as always): Get the A2000 as stock as you can, with the orginal Workbench, Kickstart etc.
Might also be a good idea to start probing the 128k shared RAM and check all the signals in that area. There may be something stuck there... Also those old PLCC sockets tend to crack.. I would check those 3 as well...
yes he also have video toaster in, also can have some conflict, so basically he needs to pull out everything and try
I have an A2088 and it wouldnt work with my 68030 accelerator either. Even with booting the amiga up in 68000 cpu mode (hold right click on powerup)... After pulling the accelerator the A2088 started working beautifully. Now the A2088 and the accelerator are sitting in 2 different amigas. :-)
2088 bridgeboard? Automatic like!
I should have bought stock in a cotton swab manufacturer, I could have been retired and on the beach in Fiji by now thanks to all the retro computer restorers out there. :P
The SCSI2SD that I have (looks like the same model as yours) also causes my A2k/GVP040 system to do the same cold-boot hang. With a real SCSI drive, it worked just fine, and the SCSI2SD worked just fine in a number of other systems, so it's something particular to the GVP-SCSI2SD combo. But, the overall convenience (and silence) more than make up for having to reboot it once.
A Main Cap in the power supply not juicing up in time when the PSU hasn't been on in a while?
Wow, I never knew bridge boards even existed. Really cool concept
Very expensive in the days they were offered. Never was a 486 DX version (although some people hacked their boards to do that).
@@PATTHECATMCD I’m looking for a 486 overdrive which fits on a 386 chip to upgrade my 386 bridge board.. anyone have any pointers/ideas (other than evil bay) where to obtain one? I prefer a dx2 or dx4 overdrive version? Doom would run fantastic and many other dos games like mortal kombat, day of the tentacle, sam & max, alone on the dark etc....
@@danielgadze3920 Overdrive version was never that common. If you pay less than $70 you are doing well. Try Aliexpress if you want to see HUGE price markup... Ebay don't seem so bad..
They also made a AT 386 version. Mine's floating around the lab somewhere.
Hey Adrian, I had the same issue with my A1200 030.
After a whole day, the system tried to boot and was just on halt.
The second time it was fine and for the rest of the day.
The Amiga is recapped and in great shape, so I was going crazy.
Found the issue though, it was the new SanDisk SD card.
I went back to Kingston and the problem vanished, at least in my case.
yes, the image on the Amiga side was really slow but it worked. If I remember correctly from my Amiga computer store days the bridge board would only work in Amiga 2000's and 4000's. Wow I forgot about the Amiga 3000. Usually when we had issues with the bridge board the edge connector was dirty and needed to be cleaned.
Does anyone else think it funny when he says, without further ado lets just get into it, and then the intro starts for about `15 seconds of further ado before he gets into it? It's cosmic irony.
amiga's do support 5 1/4 in drives natively through the amiga drive port
It would seem that Commodore's habit of not keying floppy drive cables applied to all floppy drive cables used in Amigas. (The 3 1/2 inch floppy drives were somewhat infamous for not being keyed, and often slightly difficult to check visually when being inserted into the drives. Fortunately, being one pin off didn't send voltages to anything that couldn't handle it. The machine wouldn't initialize, though.)