eightbit Posted January 12, 2018 Share Posted January 12, 2018 No sooner did a really nice and generous AA member donate this to me and it had to die. This was really strange...maybe someone has some ideas.. In my A2000 I have the original PSU, MegaChip, ECS VGA, Kickstart rom 2.05, GVP Impact II+ 8MB card, and previously the A2620 with 2MB of memory. Due to Zorro bus memory rules, only 6MB was active on the GVP for a total of 8MB when booted into Workbench in 68020 mode. Ok, so now that you have an idea of the setup, the only thing I was missing was a SCSI drive and I ordered a SCSI2SD card. I installed it the other night onto the GVP card and inserted a pre-made microSD card with Classic Workbench. It's the image I made and I know it works...not to mention I have set this up with the same hardware before But, it would not boot. Either I would turn on the Amiga and the LED on the SCSI2SD would blink once and nothing, or would be solid on, or nothing at all. I started messing around with the SCSI2SD settings to no avail. Since I never used this particular GVP card for SCSI devices before (this card was given to me recently) I swapped the ROM to make sure that was not an issue. Yes, I have spare roms for lots of random boards I read about issues with the A2620 and memory configurations on the GVP Impact II+ so I tried alternate settings like only 4MB of memory. In every case the screen would be black while the card did nothing and then after a period of time the kickstart screen would show up. I gave up for the night. The next morning I couldn't even get the kickstart screen to show. Just a black screen. Then I thought about it. As much as I did not want this to be true I removed the A2620 and bingo, the GVP card and SCSI2SD came alive and started immediately booting into workbench. I tried reintroducing the A2620 to the AMiga, cleaning the contacts and reseating it, but no...black screen (after the Individual Computers screen comes up) in every case. To be fair, the person who gave this to me said it was completely untested...but what kills me is that it WORKED right before I added the SCSI2SD. I even removed the GVP card entirely and still the A2620 will not work now. I am just out of ideas and am about to chalk it up to Murphy's Law. Any ideas? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eightbit Posted January 13, 2018 Author Share Posted January 13, 2018 FALSE ALARM! I came home tonight determined to get this to work and scrubbed the CRAP out of the connector. Popped it back in and it works! Guess I didn't clean it good enough the first time around. Thank God! I did find it has a bug with the Impact II+ card however. You have to drop the ram on that card to 4MB for this card to work properly with it and read the proper amount of ram. I dropped it to 2MB, and with 2MB on the A2620 and 4MB on a card I thought I had to use for I am Zorro bus maxed to 8MB and everything works great. I am really glad I didn't give up on this! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R.Cade Posted January 13, 2018 Share Posted January 13, 2018 Unfortunately, things that mysteriously work and then don't work usually don't stop that behavior. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eightbit Posted January 13, 2018 Author Share Posted January 13, 2018 Unfortunately, things that mysteriously work and then don't work usually don't stop that behavior. Well, if it dies again I will just bite the bullet and go for a TerribleFire. But I am going to give this a workout over the next few weeks 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+OLD CS1 Posted January 13, 2018 Share Posted January 13, 2018 I am also glad to see you did not give up. You built a nice little system. What version of the SCSI2SD did you get? As I recall from VCF last year, the v6 fixes some speed issues with Amigas with the latest firmware. The v5 works fine out-of-the-box but a little slower. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eightbit Posted January 13, 2018 Author Share Posted January 13, 2018 I am also glad to see you did not give up. You built a nice little system. What version of the SCSI2SD did you get? As I recall from VCF last year, the v6 fixes some speed issues with Amigas with the latest firmware. The v5 works fine out-of-the-box but a little slower. I opted with V5 not because of any other reason than I am familiar with it (I've used it in three separate projects already) and more importantly I can get it to function I guess the old thought process of "stick with what works" will never leave me I do wonder what speed people are getting with the V6 model though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+OLD CS1 Posted January 13, 2018 Share Posted January 13, 2018 I opted with V5 not because of any other reason than I am familiar with it (I've used it in three separate projects already) and more importantly I can get it to function I guess the old thought process of "stick with what works" will never leave me I do wonder what speed people are getting with the V6 model though. I dig it. I have a few v5s, as well. I have a v6 that I have not yet installed but we ran tests on it at VCF on my 1200 with a Blizzard 1230 SCSI. I cannot remember what speeds we hit with SCSIBench but I want to say the video got posted on YouTube. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eightbit Posted January 13, 2018 Author Share Posted January 13, 2018 I'll have to look for that vid. I know another reason I didn't go with the V6 was the price. It is almost double the cost of the V5. But, if the speed increase is substantial it might be worth it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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