It was like pulling TEETH getting the memory out of a GVP SCSI board...

[eightbit]

I finally received an A2630 68030 accelerator today for my beloved Amiga 2000! MY A500 is still faster (about double as fast!) but I was on a mission with this A2000 just to get it to be enjoyable...and now it is! But I ran into a bit of a dilemma regarding memory.

 

I have a 4MB Commodore card in this machine, a GVP Impact II SCSI card with 4MB (four 1MB SIMMS) and now introducing this card with 2MB already soldered on I knew was going to cause an issue as the A2000 has the 8MB maximum for memory as we all know. Add it up and I had 10MB.

 

At first I tested it with all of the cards and memory it expecting it not to boot...maybe give a yellow screen. But it booted right up and showed 6MB of memory. It was completely ignoring the 4MB on the GVP board.

 

So, easy solution. Remove two of the 1MB SIMMS from the GVP board and adjust the jumpers to allow the board to apply only 2MB. Yeah, easier said than done!

 

The GRIP on the SIMMS on these boards is tremendous! Maybe being attached for 25 or so years doesn't help either, but it took help from my wife to hold back both of the little plastic tabs and a needle nose to literally yank those chips out! Trust me, I tried every other possible way I could think of but that was definitely a two person job! Holy crap. What in the world were they thinking?

 

Anyhow, no damage to the board, the plastic pins or the RAM I removed (I used a cloth around the needle nose of course to avoid damage/scratching. If anyone is looking for 1MB SIMMS for these boards let me know, I have two I don't need now

 

 

So, to end the story, 8MB is detected, accelerator working like a champ, the Amiga is all closed up and now its time to have a beer!

Edited June 29, 2017 by eightbit

[+save2600]

Nice!

[eightbit]

Nice!

 

 

You know, when I was a kid I had an Amiga 500....but never an Amiga 2000. It was a pipe dream to own one of these as a kid. My parents would have never gone for it.

 

That said, it has been an all new Amiga experience for me never owning any big box Amiga. I had to read a lot and learn a lot on my own regarding upgrades, equipment available and how to upgrade it properly. I have a long computer history/background which helped, but how different things were. Really interesting doing this stuff. I really learned a lot about the Amiga I did not know. I highly recommend a big box model like this to someone who wants to delve further into the Amiga. I have gained a whole lot of respect (well, a lot more than I previously had which was a lot to begin with!) for those people who developed this hardware.

[+save2600]

Yeah, the Zorro standard was/is pretty amazing. True PnP without having to worry about DMA/IRQ contention. Or too much configuring or fussing with drivers in order to get things to work. Usually just need to remember a couple of things about memory limitations is all, but that's typically it. I started to write about GVP RAM being proprietary above, but realized you were just talking about RAM on their SCSI card. On their accelerators, you need GVP specific RAM, which can be a costly PITA to track down.

 

But yeah, love my big box Amiga's. So much so, that I no longer even have any of the wedge models. Have a CD32 with an SX-1 for the AGA stuff if I care to monkey about with such a config. Have given serious thought to letting it go though, since between my accelerated A1000 and A2000, my new little computer room is getting quite cramped with Amiga goodies.

 

 

[eightbit]

Nice! Yes, I love the big box Amiga's myself. And I feel your pain regarding lack of room. I don;t even have a dedicated room for my computers at all. I use a piece of me and my wife's bedroom much to her dismay. I had to gut one of the walk in closets and that is where most items are connected. Other stuff sadly sits in boxes until I find a creative method of hooking them up. I suspect I will be forced to sell some of it simply due to lack of space. But not my A2000