This has been quite a journey. Saw the A4000TX project at the last Amiga Ireland and found the concept quite interesting. Had been away from the Amiga community for around a decade at that point. Hadn't seen anything like it, and discovered a lot of projects had come to light during my absence. Decided I would like to have a try at assembling my own computer and got to work when I got back.
The build it self went fine. I have professional training with soldering. Some exotic parts took a while to track down which delayed things. The CPU connector was one of them. After a few afternoon hours and a couple of weekends, I had an assembled computer. Bought a Chieftec case to house it along with some expansion cards. Even found a matching black CDTV keyboard for it.
Were quite happy with how things turned out, but unfortunately ran into several problems. Not entirely unexpected. One of the first major ones were inexplicable crashes and graphical corruption. RAM tests were inconsistent in ATK, DiagROM said all was good. After hours of probing around and reading on the subject, I decided to blindly change the NOS RAM chips with another set. I personally don't like to replace parts until I have proven the fault, but were unable to in this case. Thankfully the replacement fixed the issue.
A few others appeard afterwards like boot problems which turned out to be the accelerator card being upset with the faster on-board IDE, random crashes being DMA related due to too much RAM and things like that. Slowly over the next year after the build I ironed out all the issues, but were unable to fully remedy everything. The most annoying one still lingering was that it wouldn't always boot. Piece by piece, I removed every expansion, reconfigured everything to be as stock as possible, desoldered the on-board 68030 CPU etc. Still, it wouldn't always fire up. When it did, it would work just fine for hours and hours until I decided to reboot or power it off and on within a short period of time. Then I would get an illegal instruction error and it refused to boot into Workbench. Power it off and wait a minute and it worked again.
After over a year with troubleshooting I were really grasping at straws and it started to sour my mood with the whole computer. Even got sceptical of hobbyist projects in general. This is unfair and I apologize for the sour mood at the end. Honestly it is amazing what people have accomplished and shared with the community the last decade.
I eventually threw in the towel and contacted hese himself and asked for assistance to figure this out. To which he kindly accepted the task. The motherboard along with some expansions have been packed and shipped to him. The idea is that the additional hardware should help him replicate my setup as close as possible. The box used had stiff double (or triple?) layer cardboard, with an additional layer glued on the inside of the same type to make it very sturdy. The corners were reinforced with some wooden trim pieces. Shield bags for the hardware and liberal amounts of padding. Hopefully everything should arrive in one piece.
This thread will continue as a blog/worklog as hese get the time to look further into the computer.
The build it self went fine. I have professional training with soldering. Some exotic parts took a while to track down which delayed things. The CPU connector was one of them. After a few afternoon hours and a couple of weekends, I had an assembled computer. Bought a Chieftec case to house it along with some expansion cards. Even found a matching black CDTV keyboard for it.
Were quite happy with how things turned out, but unfortunately ran into several problems. Not entirely unexpected. One of the first major ones were inexplicable crashes and graphical corruption. RAM tests were inconsistent in ATK, DiagROM said all was good. After hours of probing around and reading on the subject, I decided to blindly change the NOS RAM chips with another set. I personally don't like to replace parts until I have proven the fault, but were unable to in this case. Thankfully the replacement fixed the issue.
A few others appeard afterwards like boot problems which turned out to be the accelerator card being upset with the faster on-board IDE, random crashes being DMA related due to too much RAM and things like that. Slowly over the next year after the build I ironed out all the issues, but were unable to fully remedy everything. The most annoying one still lingering was that it wouldn't always boot. Piece by piece, I removed every expansion, reconfigured everything to be as stock as possible, desoldered the on-board 68030 CPU etc. Still, it wouldn't always fire up. When it did, it would work just fine for hours and hours until I decided to reboot or power it off and on within a short period of time. Then I would get an illegal instruction error and it refused to boot into Workbench. Power it off and wait a minute and it worked again.
After over a year with troubleshooting I were really grasping at straws and it started to sour my mood with the whole computer. Even got sceptical of hobbyist projects in general. This is unfair and I apologize for the sour mood at the end. Honestly it is amazing what people have accomplished and shared with the community the last decade.
I eventually threw in the towel and contacted hese himself and asked for assistance to figure this out. To which he kindly accepted the task. The motherboard along with some expansions have been packed and shipped to him. The idea is that the additional hardware should help him replicate my setup as close as possible. The box used had stiff double (or triple?) layer cardboard, with an additional layer glued on the inside of the same type to make it very sturdy. The corners were reinforced with some wooden trim pieces. Shield bags for the hardware and liberal amounts of padding. Hopefully everything should arrive in one piece.
This thread will continue as a blog/worklog as hese get the time to look further into the computer.
