#Busted Buster Adventure!
29 messages in this thread
The Continuing Adventure…
When last we left our adventure I was wondering whether my A3000's
SuperBuster was busted or not. I had recently purchased a GVP
Spectrum EGS Graphics Board, and although it showed no overt signs of
severe DMA related problems, the speed of WB cloned 256 color screens
made me think that a Buster transplant was needed. After exchanges
here, I ordered a rev. 11 SuperBuster (along with another 4 MB of Zip
memory inorder to get my A3000 up to its 18MB max). After some time,
I reduced my A3000 down to its individual parts. I flipped over the
A3000 mother board inorder to find the hole below the Buster, which
was there for easy removal of the chip and… Surprise, Surprise…
NO HOLE! The motherboard had no holes, the only way the Buster can
be removed is with some rather specialized extraction tool, which I
didn't own! Oh well, after inserting the new Zips into my A3000 I
hurriedly put the whole darn thing together, made a few random
incantations to ward off any fatal connections I could have
erroneously made, and turned on the machine. Since my A3000 is my
only fully functional machine, obviously the procedure went well, and
the "patient" survived the operation. During the procedure I chose
to set the Spectrum's jumper to attempt a Zorro III type connection.
I have yet to see any problems in the hours since the procedure, but
I haven't seen any appreciable speedup when attempting to run a 256
colot WB clone screen. I still can not definately state that my olde
Buster is really busted!
In the next few days I will be testing my system, to ascertain whether
there are any performance problems, now that I've switched the board's
jumper from Zorro II to III.
Does anyone have the name of the chip puller I'll need to do the Buster
switch as well as a "cost effective" source? I truly dread the idea of
disassembling my Amiga again, so it will depend on performance and cost of
the extractor.
And for the record, I don't know about all A3000 mother boards, but
some (especially… MINE) don't have any holes below the chip sockets,
inorder to make extraction possible without the right tools!!!!!
Gee… no one said the care and feeding of computers was easy, but this
is getting ridiculous <g>!
// ** Commodore **
\X/ -<Comment left to the reader's imagination>- -RSL-
Roy;
Yike! That is important news. I happen to have the tool but had not
heard that they were MBs out their without the holes.
I think that most suppliers have the tool available. I got mine quite a
few years ago and don't even remember where it came from now. I think
that it will run in the $10 to $15 price range.
-bill
Bill,
Well… maybe my motherboard was a custom job <g>. So far all I've
noticed from running my Spectrum board at a Zorro III configuration is
some residual pixel junk after menu's are drawn and erased on a 256 color
screen. I'm hoping that the seemingly slow speed of the Spectrum board is
due to my olde Buster. Perhaps after I get the right extraction tool, and
some extra energy, I will go thru another total disassembly.
Atleast my Amiga survived undamaged by its severe surgery <g>!
// ** Commodore **
\X/ -<Comment left to the reader's imagination>- -RSL-
>At least my Amiga survived…
Yes, there is that! Even though you know better, sometimes you can't help
but wonder if these machines aren't "out to get you."
Doesn't the Spectrum manual talk about performance?
-bill
The Spectrum manual gives very technical specs that are best case
numbers, and really don't give the user a feeling for how fast it
should take for something like screen re-draws.
I think that computers are very much like the old days of cars,
where the user didn't consider it a commodity that usually worked,
but a full time avocation that the owner HAD to know a lot about,
inorder to either fix it himself, or spend a great deal of money to
pay "experts" to do it for him. Most likely some day when computers
become commodities like toasters, we will all talk about the good
olde days of the giants, and mourn its passing <g>!
Oh well… to better days <g>!
I miss the old core memory and deposit switch — NOT
Yeah, when you could actually see the core magnet 'bits' on the board, I
miss those days, tooooo — NOT
Robb
I still have an old booklet from the Atomic Energy Commission about the
REAL old mainframes complete with core memory. I first got computer fever
when I read Popular Electronics' Altair Computer "Do It Yourself" article.
I can't believe how much I would have loved to have an old teletype as
I/O! I'm disgustingly spoiled these days (and look forward to getting
more and more spoiled in the future <g>)!
I really should get my olde slide rule gold plated and mounted on the
wall…
// ** Commodore **
\X/ -<Comment left to the reader's imagination>- -RSL-
You wouldn't have loved an old teletype… You could read your printouts
as they were being printed!
Now, the earliest input terminal I ever worked on was a Badout (sp?)
teletype. (You could read as it was printing, and have time left to do
other things… Unique thing about these, was a 5 bit word!) We had a
couple of these where I went to High School. (Actually tried using them
with an 8008 homebuilt computer.)
Bob Comer — Flying high and fast with my A1200HD'030 on Autopilot!
From Cheyenne, Wyoming U.S.A.
Plus you could tell long it had been printing (even if you weren't around
when it started) by the strength of the smell of hot oil.
There is one very good thing about those old machines though. As long as
you kept them oiled, nothing short of a direct lightning hit would take
one out.
-bill
I'd forgotten about the oil smell!
They were reliable though… (I din't much like the paper tape punch we
had on one of the teletypes. It jammed to much.
How 'bout the machines these things were hooked to, The first one I worked
on was a PDP-8e. Oooooo, 4K of RAM, and a 30M fixed disk, high speed
paper tape reader, and a teletype. I think it costed around 30 grand too!
(I can thank that machine for getting me started though!)
Bob Comer — Flying high and fast with my A1200HD'030 on Autopilot!
From Cheyenne, Wyoming U.S.A.
>(I can thank that machine for getting me started though!)
I bet there are time when "thanking" is not one of the things that you
have foremost in your mind 🙂
I have an old friend that wrote an assembler, linker and finally a fortran
compiler in TECO!
-bill
I later went on to "enjoy" using teletypes as the principle I/O device
of my University's HP3000 Mainframe! Not only were they slow, but
they were noisey and they broke down VERY often <ah… the true "Days
of the Giants">
Humm, we must be about the same age; both fossiles 🙂
I even had a teletype… only took me about 4 years to get rid of it!
Actually played with an old Altair once (when it was the rage). Before I
was able to buy any sort of computer for myself, a friend loaned me a
PDP-8.
Recently drug out the old slide rule. Even remember a little bit about
how to use it! Actually I have several but the "mainstay" was an old
Picket N4ES.
-bill
Butting in & speaking of REAL fossiles, I always kid about my father dying
(83 in 1983) with his slide rule firmly in hand. Old habits are hard to
change ;^}, though I know he would have loved my Amiga and gone ape over
MathVision.
Gracia
I still have my slide rule! Sitting by my computer as a matter of fact.
Don't remeber how to use it though… (I was just learning how to use it
when the first fairly cheap calculators came out.)
Bob Comer — Flying high and fast with my A1200HD'030 on Autopilot!
From Cheyenne, Wyoming U.S.A.
You should put that slide rule under glass with a little sign –
"In Case of Buster Failure – Break Glass"
🙂
-Jim (Burroughs 5500 via 110bps TTY)
We have something like that where I work now, only it's an abacus. 🙂
Bob Comer — Flying high and fast with my A1200HD'030 on Autopilot!
From Cheyenne, Wyoming U.S.A.
Well, I'm a doddering olde 38 years myself <g>.
I played with teletypes later on when I attended NYU (I finagled a
Physics account to use their HP3000C Mainframe). Prior to that I
could only hack vicariosly thru my issues of Popular Electronics,
Byte, and Creative Computing. We had access to computers in my High
School, but a little clique of math club types wouldn't let anyone
but them touch it (a regular high school high priesthood <g>). I got
back at them by outdoing them all in calculus class, which insured
that I would never see a computer during high school (but it was
worth it <g>!
In my senior year at NYU I got to do some research with a PDP-11,
unfortunately my Prof didn't know more than how to turn it off, and
on, and load programs from paper tape, so I never got a chance to
develope much experience with the beast!
I haven't seen slide rules being sold in decades, I guess our old
ones will be collectors items in time…
When I was in college (about 15 years ago now) I remember the big
slide rule sale at the local book stores. Less than 20 cents on the
dollar, as I recall. Not many takers, either. <G>
Roy:
I have (or I should say had) a TTY possibly still in a friends garage out
on LI in NY. I'd love to get another one down here to hook to the Amiga
just for the fun of it!
// -Mike Schiller
\X/ AMIGA! On AutoPilot in sunny Fort Lauderdale
Mike,
Gee… either you're nostalgic or masochistic <g>. I find the
perpetual din of my numerous hard drives and computer fans rather
annoying at times, I can't imagine what the clacking of a teletype
would do to me!
I suspect that I'm a little of both! 🙂 Currently I have my A3000, and
a 486/66 running NextStep both running 24 hours a day in my bedroom,
and also have an old AT&T 3b1 sitting on the dining room table (soon
to be moved into the bedroom as well once I make room for it!) that's
going to be running 24 hours a day as well. At the moment the fan
noise is at a tolerable level (for me at least), adding the 3b1's 2
fans (it's really a 7300, the true 3b1 only had one fan) should about
drown out the clacking of an ASR33!
Gee… you're "fan noise tolerance" must be a lot better than mine.
I had my A3000 in my bedroom before I switched all my software over
from my olde A1000, but I found the ambient noise very annoying (I
now have my A3000 in a room next to my bedroom, and find it necessary
to close the door of that room, otherwise I would have difficulty
nodding off at night. The one thing I liked about Steve Jobs, was
his strong desire for his machines to be able to run without fans
(and thus their noise) being required – unfortunately he had to
change his mind. One of the many positive things going for portables
is the very low noise they generate. With all the text files I seem
to be reading these days, the idea of scrolling thru them quietly,
while reclined on my sofa is a very nice idea <g>!
I'd worry about thread diversion, but this thread has already
diverged about as far as it could, so I'll ask how you find NeXtStep
(speaking of Jobs). It seems to be positioned as a very user
friendly object oriented layer over a powerful Unix OS, but I would
assume that the software base is smaller than for an Amiga <g>!
Humm….it's actually the other way around, 3B1's had 2 fans,
7300's had 1 fan. I had a 7300 around here for a while…it only had
one fan. It belonged to the dept., we bought it in the '84-'85 time
frame, long before they decided to call them 3B1s.
Put a CD in your system & listen to music while you work. Occasionally you
might want to run at least a few data ROMS through it, just to keep from
feeling guilty.
Phyllis — Jim's better half
I've tried running regular CD's thru my system, but I seem to have
a little noise on it's line when the CD handler is fetching data from
the CD. I already have my computer room wired up to my main Stereo
system in the other room, complete with an IR interface to run it
from my computer room, along with a pair of Bose RoomMate speakers,
so using my CDRom player for generic CD's is redundant for me…
Roy, Is the Rev. 11 Buster the latest version? I'm thinking of buying a GVP
Spectrum and I'd like to find out where you were able to buy the Buster from.
Tim Carter
Yes, the SuperBuster I purchased was a version 11. I called
Software Hut (tel. 800-93-AMIGA) week after week until finally they
got a shipment in! I just got a chip puller for the Buster (a PLCC
puller), so my journey for the "ultimate Zorro III" A3000 is close.
Unfortunately I also took a heavy duty pratfall yesterday and twisted
my ankle, so rather than stripping my A3000 down to its motherboard,
I will be taking life easy this weekend, perhaps next weekend I will
gather up the energy and replace the chip. Whatever happens I will
leave messages about the operation here on CIS (unless of cause I fry
my computer in the attempt <g>). Presently I have not noticed severe
problems using the Spectrum as a Zorro III on my A3000 without the
newer Buster except for some screen "garbage" left behind after 256
color screens render menu's. Stay tuned…