Articles from Techtravels Amiga Blog

Cause of original instability and boot problems on the original A500 identified

So the very first A500 I had been testing on since the beginning of the project had a Bug Katcher installed.  It turns out that I wasn’t really using it, but I left it plugged in anyways.

I’m not sure electrically what the exact effects of having that installed are, but removing it caused all of my instability and boot issues to disappear.

I was able to boot the amiga (10) times in a row from a cold start without an associated hang.

Cause of original instability and boot problems on the original A500 identified

So the very first A500 I had been testing on since the beginning of the project had a Bug Katcher installed.  It turns out that I wasn’t really using it, but I left it plugged in anyways.

I’m not sure electrically what the exact effects of having that installed are, but removing it caused all of my instability and boot issues to disappear.

I was able to boot the amiga (10) times in a row from a cold start without an associated hang.

Sweet success, card works 100% in different DUT(Amiga)

So I think the Amiga 500 I was testing with has problems.  I’m not sure precisely what or why but

Today, I dropped my new A501 replacement card into a known-working Commodore Amiga 500.  It fired up immediately no issues with booting, everything worked, no wonkiness, memory tests passed 100%.  This amiga has an accelerator card, and I was able to run 300 tests of pretty much the entire memory space on the card in about 5 minutes.  Everything worked without error.

I’d like to get more data points here before I call it DONE, but it looks GREAT to me!

Logic Analyzer probe loading seems to fix boot issue

While I had my logic analyzer connected to my memory card tonight, I noticed that I no longer had the white screen hang on bootup problem that I’ve been plagued with since this card came in.

As a matter of fact, it was booting up about 100% of the time.

I disconnected my HP logic analyzer probes, and all of a sudden, the Amiga won’t boot any longer.

It seems as if the impedance loading of the probes have been POSITIVELY affecting my circuit….slowing down the rise times and fixing whatever issue was in place.

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