#Accelerator Card
8 messages in this thread
I'm interested in putting an Intel 386/PC Inboard accelerator card in my
Amiga 2000 w/A2088 BB. There is something in the installation guide that
says to "set the RAM on the system board to 256K" which seems to be
something the BB can't do. Has anyone used one of these, and did it work,
and if so, what did you do to make it work? I'm willing to de-solder and
remove the RAM on the BB if that would work.
Thanks,
Kathy
Katherine,
From others who have tried…the Inboard doesn't seem to work with
the BridgeBoard. I don't know if anyone has tried unsoldering any RAM or
if that's even possible to do and still get it to boot.
The only accelerators that are known to work are the SOTA 386sx,
the PCElevator and the Orchid 286e (NOT the tiny turbo). Or at least those
are the only one's I've heard that will work.
Don
Don,
Thanks for your reply. Thank goodness my brother will buy the stupid thing
from me full price! Well, it was worth a try. I'll just have to look at
the alternatives you mentioned. I think the BBList in Library 6(?) says
the SOTA 386i will work. I'm looking for memory cache as much as speed, so
that is more likely than the 386sx, I think.
Thanks again.
Kathy <<– depressed
Be warned that while the SOTA works very well, it has 2 problems; timeserv
and Amouse are not usable. It's a bit of a challenge to install, but
doable.
Ron
Ron,
I can live without the mouse & clock — but what are the difficulties, and
how can they be overcome? Specifics would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Kathy
Kathy, dealing with some 2088 bb's and some 2000's is frustrating already
in that the bb doesn't fit all that well in the slots. In my 2000, the
first bb slot is not lined up with the card guide; if I leave the card
guide in place the bb bends. And if the bb is not perfectly alligned it
doesn't work. I found out today that newer 2000's have what appear to be
much better 'slot sockets' and that the newer 2088 bb's are built a lot
differently; my German bb has extra wires soldered on the back from point
to point, the newer far east bb's don't. I put one of the newer bb's into
my machine (although just received from CBM, that bb had an old rom in it)
and it worked with no problems, while my older bb won't work if you look at
it crosseyed. Now with the Sota added in, it's even harder to get the bb
to work because the sota has an extremely stiff cable going from it to the
8088 socket on the bb, and that pushes things around. To make things
worse, the cheap screws my old 2000 came with strip very easily, and don't
hold boards down well. Whenever I fool with my bb or sota, it usually
takes about 4 hours to get it running again.
If you have a newer 2000 and new bb (try to make sure you have the 3.61
bios on the 2088) you may have much better luck then I've had.
One other issue with the Sota. The reason I was monkeying with it today
was to help one of our fellow Tech members test the 16I memory add on for
the Sota, to see if it worked properly with the newest bios. Unfortunately,
when engaged, using the keyboard locks up the machine if you're using the
16i; if it didn't, the performance might be really good. The person in
question may be sending his 2000 out to Sota to have them see if they can
work out the timing problem they think is causing this (and with even more
luck, the amouse/timeserv problems as well). If this works, Sota would
probably modify either its hardware or software to better accomodate us,
but I'm not holding my breath.
So, to sum up, if you're very good at hardware, you can probably do the
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setup ok. If not, find a good techie to do it for you. Once running, the
Sota is very well behaved in my experience.
Ron
Ron,
Most of your message scrolled by before I digested it,but what I saw seems
like you're doing something interesting, but I don't think it's what is
giving me problems. I believe the major difficulty I'm having is with a
memory map collision. I'm going to call Amiga Tuesday to see if I can get
some more detailed information, and maybe schematics for the relevant part
of the BB.
I know what you mean about the slots. I had to shave off a millimeter or
two from the edge of the modem card I put in mine before it would fit.
I'll reread your msg offline and get back if there's something I missed
answering in this note. Thanks for your interest and encouragement.
Kathy