A500+ with Solid State Leisure A5000 CPU/Ram Board

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fitzsteve

fitzsteve

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Hi All!

I thought I'd share a few pics with you of a rare board I've been lucky enough to aquire :)

It's a Solid State Leisure A5000 4mb/68020/68881 FPU accelerator that connects to the CPU socket of the A500/2000:

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/a5000

So far it seems to work, with just some basic testing, the Ram isn't auto configuring so I used the tool AllocMem to add the Ram, the 020 and FPU are already there and seems to give the A500 a nice boost.

I have an IDE68k here I want to try and use with it once I read up on how to install that. Sorry for no Sysinfo shot but Sysinfo and Showconfig lock up the system which is strange :coffee:

Anyway, those pics I promised you :thumbsup:

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I used one of these back in the day, and it was awesome. Only problem was that the board is so large that the connection into the 68000 socket was a real weak point (especially as back then my A500 was endlessly being moved about, to and from friends, back and forth from uni etc). You had to get the knack of where to give the keyboard a gentle push when the connection was playing up.

I ended up having to replace the 68000 socket on the A500 motherboard, and kept having to "tin" the board's pins with solder to keep a stable connection, until I finally saved enough for an A4000.

Just last weekend I was trying to get it working again for the fist time in 10 years (having been inspired by the recent discovery of this site and the fact that my A4000 has died!) but no luck so far... All I've done is freshen the tinning, but I think it may need another new socket on the motherboard and / or a new set of connection pins... Tempting to just solder it on directly!

If my A4000 motherboard comes back from Hikey in a good state I may be tempted to sell it on if there is interest here - could be a nice little project for someone with an untarnished 68000 socket...

Steve
 
dougal said:
Very very nice!

I love those huge A500 accelerators :-)
Click to expand...

Many thanks, it is indeed huge :lol:

drutt said:
...but I think it may need another new socket on the motherboard and / or a new set of connection pins... Tempting to just solder it on directly!
Click to expand...

This one has a an extra socket connected, I used some rubber feet to make sure the board stays level after fitting, at this time the connection seems good, I can see the last user has re-tinned the pincs at some point.

I really like this old hardware as it's pretty cool many of them still work after all these years :bowdown:

Good luck with your projects, I hope you can get yours working :thumbsup:
 
Hi All!

Some little updates here installing IDE68k into this A500+ :)

First off I had to connect two cables to the A500+ mobo, this was much easier than I thought it would be as there were empty through holes so I just fed through the cable an soldererd both sides, simples :thumbsup:

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(I cleaned off the excess solder on the second weld already)

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And from the bottom :cool:

Next to install the IDE68k in the A500+ to test for the first time...

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OMG, it worked first time, CWB 68k working like a charm off a 2gb Sandisk CF :thumbsup:

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Next up was to test the IDE68k mounted on top of my A5000 board... :whistle:

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Sadly, no boot here. The HDD LED flickers once like the HDD is detected but then I go to the KS3.1 screen :(

OFC I tried CTRL-A-A but does not help.

Booting off a Workbench floppy the drives do not mount but the CF is detected by HD Toolbox although seems not to have a RDB as it would need to be 'defined new' so I wonder if I can get this going with some hacks...

More to follow :coffee:

Steve.
 
Hi there mate!

Love old boards like this. Never heard of the A5000 card though, but it's a real thing of beauty.

Good work :thumbsup:
 
The problem is how you connected this two devices. If you want to have an IDE68k working with any turbo card in 68k cpu you have to mount the IDE board under the turbo.
 
2E1 BZU said:
Hi there mate!

Love old boards like this. Never heard of the A5000 card though, but it's a real thing of beauty.

Good work :thumbsup:
Click to expand...

Many thanks :thumbsup:

Nikodem said:
The problem is how you connected this two devices. If you want to have an IDE68k working with any turbo card in 68k cpu you have to mount the IDE board under the turbo.
Click to expand...

Ahh, ok I shall give this a try but I don't think the IDE cable will fit, I'll need an angle adapter or such :ninja:

Thanks :)

---------- Post added at 15:09 ---------- Previous post was at 14:38 ----------

Good news :D

I found a fairly flat IDE cable and with a socket raiser the A5000 board just fits on top of the IDE68k and on booting from floppy my partitions showed up, so just popping CWB68k back on the CF and keeping my fingers crossed :cool:

Thanks Nikodem (and thanks Alexh it seems you mentioned this in the other thread and I missed it)

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---------- Post added at 16:48 ---------- Previous post was at 15:09 ----------

Well I've made some more progress, I had serious issues with KS3.1/Workbemch 3.1 as I couldn't write to Disk (required argument missing)

I've rolled back to KS 37.300 and CWB GAAE and Workbench boots and works now but can't run some apps/WHDLoad they just crash out. I swapped the 68881 FPU for a 68882 to see if that would help but no change, in fact it is still reported as a 68881 :o

I'm not sure this board is much use above KS1.3/WB1.3 :(

Anyway some more pics, I'm taking a break from this one now!

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Well I managed to fit everything internally:

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But one little problem:

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Can't close the case :Doh:

Hoping my new 020 CPU will solve some of the crashing issues, will report back on that as it should be with me in the next couple of days :cool:
 
Pretty sure the DMA issues described on that link can be avoided using the right mask settings on your hard drive. If you tell the driver to only use the custom chipset DMA region (16-bit RAM) then it should be as fast as 68k mode? Because the driver will use the Blitter or something? I think most users just set the mask to all FFFFFFFs and so the driver will try to use the CPU to copy data?
 
D.B said:
ptp170 said:
http://www.cucug.org/amiga/amiinfo/reviews/SolidStateLeis.txt
Click to expand...

What a great link. :)

@ Fitzsteve

Brilliant work, really & well done. You should be proud. :thumbsup:

As a matter of interest, have you tried sysinfo without the fast ram enabled/installed?
Click to expand...

@ptp170,

Thanks for the link, I'll have a good read of that later :thumbsup:

@d.b

Many thanks for the kind words, indeed I've tried sysinfo/showconfig without the Fast Ram and they lock up I think trying to identify the CPU.

@Alexh, any tip on what mask to use?

Also the last user mentioned a DMA patch, so I'll have a look for that :cool:

Steve.
 
D.B said:
As you are using 3.1 ROMS, does that mean you have to use the latest version of SetPatch? :unsure:

http://os.amigaworld.de/index.php?lang=en&page=37
Click to expand...

I rolled back to 2.0 Roms and WB2.05 and it is working better now, I'm a bit out of my comfort zone when it comes to all these older Amiga's, I'll have to read up on these links, so thanks for that :thumbsup:

I got another 68020 but it crashes the same :coffee:

Still no joy with WHDLoad with the tool types suggested.

I think this setup will be great for productivity work but not so great for gaming... Workbench it's self is running really nice and smooth though.

So overall it's ok I guess as I have other WHDLoad machines....
 
Hi there sorry to revive this old thread.

Just bought the IDE 68K for A500. Link here:https://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?t=86161

I have both rev 5 and rev 6a A500 to try this to...

Am planning to install ks3.0 Rom and have an 8gb prepped cf card with Betterwb4.0 and whdload.

This Cf card is already tested with kipper's a508 fastmem board which boots successfully.
 
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