Conference hydra::amiga_v1

    What did they offer on the A500 Trade-in?
    						Thanks; 
    							Ed
    

    I could get a GVP series II box for the A500 with a 20 meg disk for
    $419.00 if I sent them my old controller.  They only offer this with
    the disk, which I really don't need.  Spirit Tech is offering no
    trade-in.
    

    Disadvantages of the Spirit Tech In-mate: 
    o	You can't plug a new processor like the 14MHZ version from ICD in. 
    Their chip does not have the same geometry as a standard 68000.
    
    o	You probably can't plug in the ICD Flixer Eliminator because the
    daughter board covers some of the same area on the motherboard.

    I have a Supra500XP drive controller with 20meg drive and 2meg of
    memory for sale for $460.00.  You can drop the drive and buy just the
    controller and memory for $350.00.  Memory is expandable to 8 megs
    using 1Mx4 ZIPs or 1Mx4DIPs.  It is populated with the ZIPs now.
    It is available now and I'll pay shipping.  You can buy this, sell
    what you have now, and get a good deal, eh?
    
    mark
    

Flicker Eliminator ?

Is this like a flicker fixer for the 500 ?

thanks
	Mike

    re .-1
    
    I couldn't remember the actual name since I was noting away from my
    Amigaworld collection...The name of the device is "Flicker Free Video"
    and it is supposed to replace one of the chips on the motherboard
    (Paula, Denise, Fred, whoever...).  You take the replaced chip and plug
    it onto the IDC board. An attached cable comes out and attaches to
    either a VGA monitor or multisync.
    
    Quoting from the ad, "FFV is compatible with all software, works in low
    and high resolutions interlaced or not, and has no genlock conflicts...
    Both PAL and NTSC are automatically recognized and fully supported. 
    Full overscan is supported, not just a limited overscan.  Three
    megabits of random access memory are used to ensure compatibility with
    overscan screens as large as the Amiga can produce."
    
    Ad is on page 49 of January 91 Amigaworld.

    I got my Inmate from Spirit Technology.  It was accompanied by a
    preliminary manual and configuration disk (plainly marked as such). 
    Following the instructions, I was able to install the board in about 10
    minutes.
    
    It is a tight fit.  You remove the EMI shield and the 68000 and insert
    the board into place.  If you have a SCSI drive to plug in or a 68881,
    the instructions tell you to plug those in first.  When replacing the
    shield, it will bulge a bit if you have a SCSI cable attached, but it
    didn't seem to be too much of a problem.  I set the DIP switches as
    suggested: One switch specifies the time to boot (long or short).  I
    chose long as I have an ST277N which takes about 10 seconds to spin up.
    
    I initially tested it (again, as suggested in the manual) by plugging
    in the power supply, turning it on (the case is open at this point),
    waiting to see if DF0 tries to read and finally putting in a bootable
    Diskette and seeing if the drive noise pattern sounded familiar (the
    monitor was not connected).  It was scary at first for, although the
    power led came on, nothing happened on the drive.  Then I remembered
    that I had a long boot time set on the switches.  Sure enough, after
    about 20 seconds, the drive started to gronk.
    
    I reassembled the A500 and plugged everything back in.  I booted their
    config disk and configured the ST277N.  The controller seems to think
    it is an ST251 instead.  It did not give actual drive names, but it
    said my maximum high cylinder was 815, not 1242 like it's supposed to
    be.  Since this is Friday night, I decided I could live temporarily
    with a 40 Meg disk, so I restored the HD and this system is where I am
    writing this now.
    
    I will contact S.T. Monday (unfortunately, I am going to school in ALF
    all next week) about the drive size problem.  It is probably in the
    config program.  It is wonderful to see 3 megs of ram show up at the
    top of WB.
    
    Tony

    After fully restoring my disk, I noticed that SID thinks the disk is
    once again 64 Meg.  I don't know what's going on.
    
    Now that I've done that, I'm having problems with DigiPaint3 and Write
    & File.  Write & File is a fairly early version and was grade FLAKY+
    from the beginning.  Now that I have the 1 meg Agnus, it doesn't seem
    to work beyond giving me the first screen.  It has never worked since
    I installed the Fatter Agnus.  I had reduced down to 1 meg of memory at
    the same time and attributed the problem to no fast memory.  Now that
    it has 3 megs, it still won't run.
    
    As for DigiPaint3, I can run it from a floppy just fine.  From the hard
    disk, I get it to start, but it won't load a picture.  It will save a
    new picture and will load any that it has saved since I upgraded, but
    it won't load any picture that was saved before the upgrade.  Since
    it runs from the floppy and loads any picture, I've a feeling that
    somewhere there is a logical I don't have assigned correctly.

     re DigiPaint:  Read the boot disk startup-sequence and/or docs.
     I recall a sethighwater patch or something that DigiPaint might
     be expecting. I think the docs said the fix they provided would
     be in a future update to WB. 
     
     Dave

    re .9:  I think the HighWater program is just to consolidate available
    memory into one big pool.  It doesn't have anything to do with what's
    causing my problem.
    
    On with more info regarding the InMate...
    
    You'll have to do some bending of the EMI shield when you install it. 
    The hole where the keyboard connection comes through will be occluded
    by the InMate board itself.  You will have to reroute the keyboard
    cable around the board and then through the hole.  When you do this,
    you'll have to bend the tabs jutting out from the hole.  It's best to
    just bend them out flat.  The tabs holding the shield down to the
    expansion bus will also have to be bent out of the way.  The board
    occupies that space, too.
    
    After I solved my problem with my disk, that seems to be working very
    well.
    
    See next reply for tomorrow's episode...
    

    I discussed the problem with the HDconfig program only finding 817
    cylinders on the ST277N.  It turns out the the ST277N indeed only has
    817 cylinders.  I was going by info in the Escort manual which says
    that it has 17 sectors per track and 1242 cyl's.  It actually has 26
    sectors and 817 cyl's.  Of course, that computes out to the same size
    disk.
    
    I had problems about track 812, so I partitioned the disk (for
    practice, I created one about 7.7 megs {100 tracks} and one about 56
    megs {from track 101 to 811}).  I left the rest out.  So far, so good.
    
    I'm still concerned about the real numbers on the drive, though.  Does
    anyone have the specs on various SCSI drives?

    re .-* concerning Digipaint... Seems part of the DigiPaint environment
    was on the corrupt part of the hard drive.  This caused it to do
    peculiar things.  It was backed up this way and restored in a corrupt
    condition.  After dumping the entire environment and recreating from
    the distribution, everything works correctly.
    
    END OF SAGA.
    
    Tony

Re .7 & .10:

>    It is a tight fit.  You remove the EMI shield and the 68000 and insert
>    the board into place.  If you have a SCSI drive to plug in or a 68881,
>    the instructions tell you to plug those in first.  When replacing the
>    shield, it will bulge a bit if you have a SCSI cable attached, but it
>    didn't seem to be too much of a problem.  I set the DIP switches as
>    suggested: One switch specifies the time to boot (long or short).  I
>    chose long as I have an ST277N which takes about 10 seconds to spin up.
    
>    I initially tested it (again, as suggested in the manual) by plugging
>    in the power supply, turning it on (the case is open at this point),
>    waiting to see if DF0 tries to read and finally putting in a bootable
>    Diskette and seeing if the drive noise pattern sounded familiar (the
>    monitor was not connected).  It was scary at first for, although the
>    power led came on, nothing happened on the drive.  Then I remembered
>    that I had a long boot time set on the switches.  Sure enough, after
>    about 20 seconds, the drive started to gronk.
    
>    You'll have to do some bending of the EMI shield when you install it. 
>    The hole where the keyboard connection comes through will be occluded
>    by the InMate board itself.  You will have to reroute the keyboard
>    cable around the board and then through the hole.  When you do this,
>    you'll have to bend the tabs jutting out from the hole.  It's best to
>    just bend them out flat.  The tabs holding the shield down to the
>    expansion bus will also have to be bent out of the way.  The board
>    occupies that space, too.
    
	It sounds like it has a lot of potential for trouble with all the
    bending of EMI shields and all the chaffing on the keyboard wiring.

	How is the connection to the SCSI made?  I had my A500 apart at the
    club meeting this last weekend and didn't see any easy way to get a cable
    out of the case except for the expansion port on the left side.  If it
    goes out there, it would be a bit messy.

	It sounds like I can kiss my warranty good by if I get this thing
    installed.  (And yes, the warranty is still intact, in spite of what 
    happened this last weekend.)  Is there anything in the documentation that
    indicates otherwise?

	Sorry you're having personal problems.  That explains why the note I
    stuck on the message board didn't get any response.

>	It sounds like it has a lot of potential for trouble with all the
>    bending of EMI shields and all the chaffing on the keyboard wiring.
    
    Bending is not too much of a problem.  Yes, you need to watch cable
    routing or vibration will cause the shield to wear through the wires
    (particularly in the keyboard cable).  Without constantly vibrating
    parts in the A500, I'm not too worried about anything wearing through.
    
>	How is the connection to the SCSI made?  I had my A500 apart at the
>   club meeting this last weekend and didn't see any easy way to get a cable
>   out of the case except for the expansion port on the left side.  If it
>   goes out there, it would be a bit messy.

    The 50 pin SCSI connection is positioned at the REAR edge of the board. 
    You route the cable out of the back of the 500.  The case and shield
    both have enough give in that area to allow this without problem.  One
    nice thing is they support a SCSI drive up to 15 feet away.  Thus, you
    can run your cable under the computer flooring in your den 8^).
    
    As for warranties, yes, you can surely throw it away here.  Mine was
    way out of warranty, anyway.
    
    
    

    
    re .14
    
    	In the last note :
    
    	" One nice thing is they support a SCSI drive up to 15 feet away."
    
    	The industry standard SCSI specification states clearly that the
    maximum SCSI cable length is 6 meter. It sounds like they are falling
    short fo the specification.
    
    		Steve Peters
    

    Perhaps, but the literature says 15 feet and the techie I talked said
    the same thing.
    

re: -1

.-2 said it was falling "short" since 6 meters is LONGER than 15 feet.

    Sorry, My feet-to-meters conversion machine is broke today..
    
    Tony

Re: .18

>    Sorry, My feet-to-meters conversion machine is broke today..

	6 meters = 19.685039 feet

	There's a hard disk  "review"  in the March '91 Amiga World, 
they tested/evaluated 4 packages for the A500.  GVP came out the
fastest in just about every test they ran, they included ~NO technical
reasons for this.  I'm curious to know if the physical disks, the
controllers or the software drivers were the limiting factors on
performance - and of course, how the relative performance of
those packages could be extrapolated to their A2000 counterparts.

	Reg

PS	Supra 500XP with 40 Meg Connor
	GVP Impact Series II A500+ with 49 Meg Quantum Pro drive.
	Xetec FastTrack with 52 Meg Quantum LPS
	Commodore A590 with 20 Meg (no brand or model mentioned)

Re: .20

The Commodore A590 always (and deservedly) benchmarks poorly because
Commodore ships the A590 with a very fast disk controller with a very
slow ST506 hard disk.

If Commodore just sold the A590 with the same Quantum SCSI disks they
sell with the 2000HD and 3000, the A590 would look very good in tests.
They might even come out on top.

By the way, GVP sells their controllers with Quantum drives.  They,
unlike Commodore, know a good thing when they see it.

    Re: .21

>By the way, GVP sells their controllers with Quantum drives.  They,
>unlike Commodore, know a good thing when they see it.

    They're also using Fujitsu drives (at least for the 40 meg unit). FWIW,
    I posted diskspeed results in note 4164.22 for my unit.

    -Dom