I have been working on this GBA1000 rev1 board for some time now. I thought to share with you this project as I finally received all the missing parts to complete this. (took a couple of months to source a working LSI1024 but that's another story...)
The board assembling was done a bit backwards, as most of the connectors and sockets were soldered first. (not the best move...)
Soldering the SMD resistors, capacitors etc. near the connectors got a bit trickier now.
Had to be careful not to torch the plastics.
After the SMD parts had arrived I began to solder the tiny resistors, capacitors, beads etc. to the board using a temperature controlled iron with chisel tip.
It took a couple of days to solder those SMDs. It would have been easier and faster to use a hot air gun but didn't want to risk melting the plastics near the parts.
Next it was the time to solder the FAST ram chips.
Nothing special really, took a couple of hours to put them in place.
Soldering the TSOP chip was the toughest one but it was quite simple in the end really.
What I did was I first soldered one leg of each corner of the chip to the board just to keep it in place. Then I put a plenty of liquid flux on the legs and a small bit of solder to the chisel tip. After that I just touched the legs with the tip to solder them. None of the legs got short circuited thanks to the flux. It took about a minute to solder one side of the chip. The other side was a bit harder because the sockets were in the way.
After soldering some random missing parts, the board was almost ready. The next step was to program the GAL chips and the LSI1024 using an eprommer.
Only the Boot ROM (TSOP chip) doesn't need to be programmed beforehand. You program it when the board is running.
After programming the chips, the old Amiga 1000 motherboard was replaced with the new GBA1000. For the mass storage I used a Compact Flash card connected to the 44 pin IDE connector.
I switched the power on but did it work?
Yes sir, it sure did. First took a quick SysInfo test.
The FAST memory was allocated in the 24bit area.
In order to get the FAST memory to the 32bit area, you have to program the Boot ROM using the software found on the Georg Braun's website. Below you see the files you need for programming the ROM.
First I erased the ROM using erase_flash tool. Then I wrote the program using GB_A1k_8MB_RAM command.
After programming I connected a jumper to the S5 switch in order to activate the Boot ROM.
Ran the SysInfo to check the changes.
The last thing to do was building the DIN-VGA connector for the monitor. Here's the connection diagram.
Don't forget to short the RGB, HSYNC and VSYNC pins on the SV3 connector to allow signals pass from the flicker fixer to the DIN connector. I used jumpers for this.
Some things to note about building the board:
This was an interesting project. I wish you well with your GBA1000 board projects, there should be a flock of new boards coming soon..
The board assembling was done a bit backwards, as most of the connectors and sockets were soldered first. (not the best move...)
Soldering the SMD resistors, capacitors etc. near the connectors got a bit trickier now.
Had to be careful not to torch the plastics.
After the SMD parts had arrived I began to solder the tiny resistors, capacitors, beads etc. to the board using a temperature controlled iron with chisel tip.
It took a couple of days to solder those SMDs. It would have been easier and faster to use a hot air gun but didn't want to risk melting the plastics near the parts.
Next it was the time to solder the FAST ram chips.
Nothing special really, took a couple of hours to put them in place.
Soldering the TSOP chip was the toughest one but it was quite simple in the end really.
What I did was I first soldered one leg of each corner of the chip to the board just to keep it in place. Then I put a plenty of liquid flux on the legs and a small bit of solder to the chisel tip. After that I just touched the legs with the tip to solder them. None of the legs got short circuited thanks to the flux. It took about a minute to solder one side of the chip. The other side was a bit harder because the sockets were in the way.
After soldering some random missing parts, the board was almost ready. The next step was to program the GAL chips and the LSI1024 using an eprommer.
Only the Boot ROM (TSOP chip) doesn't need to be programmed beforehand. You program it when the board is running.
After programming the chips, the old Amiga 1000 motherboard was replaced with the new GBA1000. For the mass storage I used a Compact Flash card connected to the 44 pin IDE connector.
I switched the power on but did it work?
Yes sir, it sure did. First took a quick SysInfo test.
The FAST memory was allocated in the 24bit area.
In order to get the FAST memory to the 32bit area, you have to program the Boot ROM using the software found on the Georg Braun's website. Below you see the files you need for programming the ROM.
First I erased the ROM using erase_flash tool. Then I wrote the program using GB_A1k_8MB_RAM command.
After programming I connected a jumper to the S5 switch in order to activate the Boot ROM.
Ran the SysInfo to check the changes.
The last thing to do was building the DIN-VGA connector for the monitor. Here's the connection diagram.
Don't forget to short the RGB, HSYNC and VSYNC pins on the SV3 connector to allow signals pass from the flicker fixer to the DIN connector. I used jumpers for this.
Some things to note about building the board:
- You don't really need any special soldering tools to build this. A plain temperature controlled iron with chisel tip, some solder and solder flux is enough.
That's what I used. If you want to save (much) time you could use a hot air gun to solder the SMD parts. - Solder the tiny SMDs first to save yourself from additional trouble. (doh.. icard)
- It takes roughly a week to build the board. Spare two three days for soldering the SMD parts (capacitors, resistors, ...),
a day or two for soldering the sockets, connectors and the rest. And a day for programming the chips and testing the board.
This was an interesting project. I wish you well with your GBA1000 board projects, there should be a flock of new boards coming soon..
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