Troubleshooting

Unstable setup

While designing and printing the parts for the case I also did some hardware testing to see that everything works as expected. First I upgraded the Blizzard's SIMM memory module from 16MB to 64MB and after testing it to be working I played a bit, at that moment, just released Tiny Bobble game. For some reason the game would always freeze in early phases when the turbo card was connected. Also I couldn't get the Workbench to load from the HDD. I didn't really have time at that moment to debug what caused those issues so I though that maybe the game just doesn't run properly yet with 68030 and my Workbench install in the old HDD was failing. I was going to make a new installation to CF card so I didn't want to start to check how to fix that.

However later when I was testing things again I run to more stability issues. I had made an WB 3.1.4 installation to CF card with WinUAE/FS-UAE and tested that with the Amiga. I got constant lockups and many times the machine didn't even boot. When trying without turbo I could boot to a game or to Workbench so I thought that there was something wrong with the 1230-IV. I tried to resolder the oscillator and actually ordered a new one so I could test if that was the culprit. I tested all the different combinations and I had been writing a long post ready to be posted where I went through all the observations and things that I had tested. After proof-reading it for the last time before posting, it occurred to me that the first reply would probably be asking if I had correct voltages. I had tried different PSUs, and I hade measured the output of both to be steady 5V, but I hadn't measured the voltages from the mainboard. So I measured it from the floppy power connector and it was way too low, around 4.68V.
It took a while before I understood what was happening. The PSU adapter that had built from a cheap ATX extension cable had very lousy wiring. With light loads the wires were enough to deliver enough voltage, but when the load went up there wasn't just enough capability to keep up. So I bought new wires and rebuilt the adapter again and the problem was solved.


CF cards and DVD drive

Another problem that I run into was with the CF card and DVD drive. I already knew that if I want to have the DVD drive in the same IDE channel with the CF card, the DVD drive must be one with firmware that has slave settings. The primary/slave setting in the slim drives seems to be non-existing. Instead the selection is done in the firmware. So I needed a drive which was slot loading, with eject button and PATA compatible connector. Luckily I actually owned one already. That was a Samsung SN-T082 that I had bought for an old Apple MacMini while back. So I put my 16GB Transcend CF card into primary as master and DVD drive as slave and run into read errors while loading Workbench.

I studied the subject from forums and in many answers for similar problems there was comments about bad CF-card adapters for the IDE bus. I checked my all three different adapters and none of them had anything extra except voltage regulator so I figured out that it couldn't be the issue here. CF card interface is basically just IDE interface without anything extra. Studying some more I found out that the primary/slave option in CF card is not actually very well implemented in the normal consumer cards, they usually are meant to be the only device in the bus. Instead the industrial cards are better in that area. So I was about to order a new industrial card. But I remembered that I had actually ordered another 16GB Transcend CF card that was still unopened in its package and I gave it a try and what do you know, it worked just fine. The cards share the same model number TS16GCF133 but the newer one on the left in the picture below worked fine. To be sure I bought another one with same looks and it seemed to be working also fine with DVD drive in the same bus.



Then I installed the EIDE'99 software to have the second CF card working in Workbench. It did work but there was problems during the boot. Very often after loading the EIDE driver into memory from startup-sequence and the automatic reboot Amiga would stick into boot-loop. I could see the blue lines from the Blizzard, then quick flash of the IDE LED and instant reboot. That continued until powering of the Amiga for a while. Sometimes it would give software error that didn't really tell anything. I tried to figure out what was the problem but I couldn't find a reason for that. Fortunately I found out that Idefix'97 atapi driver didn't need the reboot on loading and worked just fine with the EIDE'99 adapter.

So now I had working setup with two CF cards and DVD writer in the primary IDE bus.

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