Welcome to my 'review' of my towered a1200. Now revived with a new psu it lives again (But read on as subsequent events complicated matters)
.
This machine actually does not get much use these days, but still holds a special place in my heart for various reasons. I have had this board since around 2015, and it runs my B1260 with a lovely rev 6 68060. The crystal is socketed and I have 50, 60 and 80.mhz crystals for it. I run it at 60 because it also has a blizzard scsi kit which I got as part of my quest a few years ago for faster hard drive access.
Historically I had zero interest in towered amigas, and no intention of having one. But then I bid on a boxed tower case on Ebay and was the only bidder, and so got it for the cost of picking it up! It seemed destiny intended for me to tower one of my 2 (at that time) amigas, and so my pride and joy B1260 went in there. With the aid of a few people especially the late Johnim on amibay it came to pass. The mediator, voodoo 3, soundcard, network card, and usb card were all bought from Johnim, who as always was very supportive and a great guy.
Over time I have upgraded from OS 3.9 to 3.2, got the warp3d to work, and got a monitor that can handle amiga frequencies over vga so I have a ratte switch combining the voodoo and regular outputs.
Software wise its very similar to my Checkmate, so I wont repeat that stuff.
So recently the machine just stopped booting or powering up. As I mentioned above a new PSU seemed to have fixed that, but as soon as I congratulated myself on sorting that, other things started going wrong.
Firstly it would not boot - it clearly did the first boot, then blizzkicked the rom but then would not load to wb. After some messing around it became apparent that removing the USB PCI card seemed to resolve this. Now from memory (don't know how true this is) the mediator needs the graphics card in the fourth slot and the network card in the first. so I tried switching the sound and USB cards around in the middle slots, but testing showed that as long as the USB card was not there in any slot, the machine booted fine with the soundcard in either slot.
Hmmm, so I ordered another cloned spider card from ebay.
Whilst waiting for this, the CD drive went mental one day sounding like it was trying to take off. Thereafter it would not recognise any CDs although WB could see the device etc. AND also then my checkmate a1200 keyboard died. As far as I can see the Keyrah inside is dead. I have tried changing cables and using it with my actual checkmate amiga (which has its own identical checkmate keyboard) and the process of elimination and swapping things around points to the Keyrah.) I am currently using an old A4000 keyboard that has some dodgy keys (improved by various cleaning and lead pencil tricks but still not as good as I want) and a spare PC USB keyboard.
New (well, you know what I mean) CD drive arrived from Ebay and is fitted and works, however I am sure the old one used to reduce the bootup delay significantly but this one doesn't, which is mildly annoying - I wonder if I remove scsi.device from the rom if this will solve it - the CD used atapi.device and the SCSI Kit uses its own device driver as well. Maybe I will try that.
Yesterday the new USB card arrived so fitted that, and it made no difference.....but, the machine will boot to safe mode, and so I started tracing the startup. Anyway, after lots of testing I ended up trying the old USB card and despite me not changing anything it now seems to work again. I have no idea. After all that maybe it was a loose connection?
I am going to close this up and put it back upstairs with the outstanding issues of sorting a better keyboard and the long boot delay - (assuming it still boots after I have moved it!)
.
This machine actually does not get much use these days, but still holds a special place in my heart for various reasons. I have had this board since around 2015, and it runs my B1260 with a lovely rev 6 68060. The crystal is socketed and I have 50, 60 and 80.mhz crystals for it. I run it at 60 because it also has a blizzard scsi kit which I got as part of my quest a few years ago for faster hard drive access.
Historically I had zero interest in towered amigas, and no intention of having one. But then I bid on a boxed tower case on Ebay and was the only bidder, and so got it for the cost of picking it up! It seemed destiny intended for me to tower one of my 2 (at that time) amigas, and so my pride and joy B1260 went in there. With the aid of a few people especially the late Johnim on amibay it came to pass. The mediator, voodoo 3, soundcard, network card, and usb card were all bought from Johnim, who as always was very supportive and a great guy.
Over time I have upgraded from OS 3.9 to 3.2, got the warp3d to work, and got a monitor that can handle amiga frequencies over vga so I have a ratte switch combining the voodoo and regular outputs.
Software wise its very similar to my Checkmate, so I wont repeat that stuff.
So recently the machine just stopped booting or powering up. As I mentioned above a new PSU seemed to have fixed that, but as soon as I congratulated myself on sorting that, other things started going wrong.
Firstly it would not boot - it clearly did the first boot, then blizzkicked the rom but then would not load to wb. After some messing around it became apparent that removing the USB PCI card seemed to resolve this. Now from memory (don't know how true this is) the mediator needs the graphics card in the fourth slot and the network card in the first. so I tried switching the sound and USB cards around in the middle slots, but testing showed that as long as the USB card was not there in any slot, the machine booted fine with the soundcard in either slot.
Hmmm, so I ordered another cloned spider card from ebay.
Whilst waiting for this, the CD drive went mental one day sounding like it was trying to take off. Thereafter it would not recognise any CDs although WB could see the device etc. AND also then my checkmate a1200 keyboard died. As far as I can see the Keyrah inside is dead. I have tried changing cables and using it with my actual checkmate amiga (which has its own identical checkmate keyboard) and the process of elimination and swapping things around points to the Keyrah.) I am currently using an old A4000 keyboard that has some dodgy keys (improved by various cleaning and lead pencil tricks but still not as good as I want) and a spare PC USB keyboard.
New (well, you know what I mean) CD drive arrived from Ebay and is fitted and works, however I am sure the old one used to reduce the bootup delay significantly but this one doesn't, which is mildly annoying - I wonder if I remove scsi.device from the rom if this will solve it - the CD used atapi.device and the SCSI Kit uses its own device driver as well. Maybe I will try that.
Yesterday the new USB card arrived so fitted that, and it made no difference.....but, the machine will boot to safe mode, and so I started tracing the startup. Anyway, after lots of testing I ended up trying the old USB card and despite me not changing anything it now seems to work again. I have no idea. After all that maybe it was a loose connection?
I am going to close this up and put it back upstairs with the outstanding issues of sorting a better keyboard and the long boot delay - (assuming it still boots after I have moved it!)
