Added some new photos of the populated PCB for the Commodore Amiga A501 memory replacement card.

Find them on the main project page here.

This week saw the long awaited release of DigiBooster 3 for AmigaOS4 by APC-TCP. I bought the download version yesterday from their webshop, so lets took a look at it on the X1000.

Somewhere, over all the place

Image found at oz.wikia.com

A few months ago I started playing with the new Dopus 5.9 Magellan II Beta for AmigaOS4 on the X1000. Work has continued on a daily basis on improving the software, with kas1e and others working hard on it! I downloaded the latest nightly update version of Dopus 5.9 this week and played around with it this weekend to see what has improved:

Hi all and Happy New Year 2014! I am back from my trip to Japan, and fired up my X1000 for the first time in 2014 to find out a new game has been released for AmigaOS4 - Ace of Hearts!

Below is a label diagram of how the PCB is handling a read from the Amiga. (and partial theory of operation here too). As of 1/18/14, Schematics are coming.

I've been running some more Mauve-tests in the java.io package. The tests in java.io are mostly running, beside these:

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.

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.

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!

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.

Τι θα ήθελα μέσα στο 2014, πέρα απο υγεία, αγάπη κτλ κτλ:

- να πάρω το πτυχίο απο το ΕΑΠ. Είμαι πολύ κοντά, λίγο ακόμη αίμα και φτάσαμε.

- ένα ακόμη μέλος στην οικογένεια

- μειον 5 ακομη κιλά. Έχασα 8 δεν θα σταματήσω τώρα.

- να βρίσκω χρόνο να πηγαίνω για τρέξιμο κάθε μέρα. Ότι καλύτερο.

- να ασχοληθώ με Android.

- να αγοράσω Raspberry Pi.

- να ξαναγυρίσω πάλι πίσω στο linux.

Ο καταλόγος δεν τελειώνει. Να δούμε,

....

So I’ve written some assembly in the monitor software I’ve been using, and I’ve just created a large loop to see if I can get the card to fail.

I’m still having plenty of problems on bootup, but everything else is checking on.  So I’m not sure what the cause is, but I’m double checking that the memory system is reliable over a large number of reads/writes.