Amiga upgrade after over 20 years with ACA500+ and Workbench 3.1 HD install

[jcrubin]

After receiving my long awaited package from Individual computers I do an unboxing, preparation and installation of my new ACA500+ upgrade for my Amiga 500+.  This first means actually doing a downgrade first, removing the old acceleration and re-adding the original 68000.  I first make sure everything works after the downgrade before installation.

     Following a brief exploration of the menu I choose F7 which allows for a boot with all of the workbench disks mounted virtually so that a hard drive install can be accomplished.  So I add a CF card into the boot side and continue.

     I did not choose the correct CF card for this, nor did I choose the best partition strategy,  but this was a first go around, something I will correct in the next video.

     Ive learned that the ACA500+ never seems to be able to do a successful software reboot, always getting a green screen of death. This is not a major issue though.

     The boot to workbench was a success, and booted quickly. I then attempt to put the second CF card in just to see what happens and it is detected without issue, though only 4 gigs are shown in workbench.

     The next task is prefs, where id display mode I find that HIRES works rather nice through this RGB/HDMI conversion setup, so another win!  I then go through the rest of the prefs quickly for good measure.

    This is the point where I start with some basic software installations moving it from linux with the aux card starting with

lha.run and moving the lha68k to the workbench:c as lha.

     The second install was sysinfo.lha which i first extracted on the cf card first for testing.  This also allows me to see the tour of sysinfo showing this computer outperforming an amiga 1200 stock 68020. I then go through the rest of the tour of sysinfo.

     Satisfied with the structure, sysinfo is moved into the correct location. But i know that the partitions are wrong and I am bothered as I keep noticing that I only have 512k of chip ram. So its time to do some hardware troubleshooting. I wonder what happened to the fatter agnus?

[jcrubin]

In this video I investigate why the computer is not registering the full 1 meg of ship ram even though there is a fatter agnus chip installed.   It would seem some hardware modifications were never completed towards this effort so all of these years later it will need to be accomplished.  This will allow testing of the baseboard upgrade to see if this was a success.

    The baseboard also sees a new battery for the RTC, which i didn't realize would cause an issue with the new system.  Now the answer seems simple, but it wasn't so easy at the time to figure out what the problem was.  It seems if there is any corrupt RTC data the ACA500+ will not detect the clock so the data must be purged.

     With the current batch of hardware issues behind me, I continue with my software installation project.  Ive opted to restart the software installation project as the first run was a test only.  This time with a better partition schema.  I go through partitioning in greater detail.

     Im starting to notice that the AC500+ does not soft reboot gracefully, often crashing both when the amiga initiates reboot or when the A+A_CTRL is accomplished, I will be asking the developer about this.  I have adjusted a setting in the main menu that is supposed to help with this ASYNC to SYNC.

     After the setup of workbench I demonstrate the installation of WHDLOAD and its prerequisite software.  The first pre-req is adf2disk. Then I installed MUI just because,  followed by installer.

     With WHDload I do a practical demonstration of the main install as well as how it was designed to be used as well as how it is generally used by the masses.

[Ampera]

Ugh, I need an Amiga, but the bank doesn't have the bux to do that. I guess this is the time when everybody who had one, wants one again, so I have to wait for this period to be over, if ever.

[ebastler]

Ugh, I need an Amiga, but the bank doesn't have the bux to do that. I guess this is the time when everybody who had one, wants one again, so I have to wait for this period to be over, if ever.

Being much younger than the typical “I had an Amiga back then” guy, you are in luck. You might have to wait another couple of decades though... ;-)

[jcrubin]

This was my Amiga back then, though.... It sat in the box for 20 years.... I pulled it out last month after reconditioning the power supply