Category: Amiga

  • Finalizing Amiga 4000D (…for now)

    Finalizing Amiga 4000D (…for now)

    Finally all 3D printed parts are ready, time for assembling everything together.

    Gotek, 3.5″ Floppy and DVD-ROM mounted to my new 3D printed drive cage. When putting cage in, you can move it few millimeters to right so SD extender cable has plenty of room to slide inside.

    Moment of truth, putting front bezel back. And it fits perfect!

    First Firebird daughter card which provides 4 PCI slots, 4 Zorro slots and 1 Video slot. In video slot I have the Scandoubler daughterboard from Cybervision 64/3D, it just has superior image quality compared to native output or any VGA-adapter connected to it, even OSSC. I modeled bracket for it, as the original stays with the Cybervision card. You can find that also at printables.com.
    Above that sits S3 ViRGE display card, but funny enough, its only purpose in this setup is to provide DMA memory for other PCI cards.
    And on top there’s USB host card with NEC chip from which the USB extender cable goes to front face of Gotek.
    On backplane you can see the HDMI and Ethernet bracket with extender cables. They’re routed back to Z3660.

    And believe it or not, case closed! Eagleplayer playing Das Boot, Ami-Back taking backup to NAS over SMB2, which btw works just great! 100MB+ backup in five minutes or so.
    And the black box you see on top of Amiga, is a passive audio mixer I quickly built. As I now have AHI audio besides native Amiga audio, I wanted to have them both to play through same AMP input I have, so no switching inputs for sound.

    Schematics for the mixer are pretty simple, all inputs connected to output through 1k resistor. You could add volume level controls with potentiometers, but as I tested this, both audio outputs levels were pretty much the same.

  • New Gotek bracket with SD card reader

    New Gotek bracket with SD card reader

    As Amiga 4000D doesn’t have too much spare space in front for additional gadgets and connectors, I decided to model completely new 3.5″ Gotek mounting bracket with 0,91″ OLED display, rotary encoder, additional USB port and SD card reader slot. You can find it at printables.com. My first model ever with Fusion 360, so the model file itself is kinda mess, sorry.

    I had to remove Gotek LEDs and buttons, which are redundant because of the rotary encoder, to fit the USB extender there. It’s just fixed to the PCB, possibly you could add normal PCB USB connector there, but didn’t have one available. This seems to work just fine. Other end of the USB cable goes to USB PCI card with NEC chipset which has 4 external and 1 internal USB port.

  • Fitting Gotek with SD card reader to front

    Fitting Gotek with SD card reader to front

    Like I said, things has to be done properly. As Z3660 limits the length of sd card extender (150-200mm), it can’t be routed to the back. I already has designed Gotek carriage in place of second 3.5″ floppy drive with additional normalk USB-connector. I decided to modify that a little and add sd card holder below the OLED screen. Here’s first prototyping.

    And as you can see from the picture, I had to make and redesign the whole 5.25″ / 3.5″ drive bay, as there’s no way to route sd card extenders cable through the original carriage. But that’s how these projects usually go. Above model is by LinuxJedi and you can find it at Thingiverse.

    A4000D Front drive bay is ready, final version currently printing. You can find it at printables.com. Had to make quite a few revisions, I first thought that Gotek would go on lower bay but then I found out that that won’t work with my only floppy cable and its orientation, the DF0 device has to go to bottom slot. So I made new revision which has all screw holes for 3.5 drives and passthrough for SD card extender on both bays.

  • Project Z3660 accelerator

    Project Z3660 accelerator

    Next soldering project, Z3660. PCB’s arrived from JLCPB partly populated as you can see from the picture. Bottom side and all the connectors was my job.

    And fully populated board, including 68LC060 CPU.

    And as I like everything to be done properly, I got really nice bracket for HDMI and Ethernet connectors.

    And cables routed behing daughtercard to the Z3660 HDMI and Ethernet connectors.

  • Amiga 4000D restoration and tweaks

    Amiga 4000D restoration and tweaks

    Quick recap what I’ve done to this day with Amiga 4000D. Found this, mostly by accident, from local ‘ebay’ for 200€. Just by pure luck, it was located next to my home town only 30 minutes drive. As I could promise, I’ll be picking it up in less than an hour, it was mine. Poor guys inbox must have been filled in just minutes.

    It was in running state, but by no means it was fully working unit. And for extra 20€ I got (faulty) 68040 CPU card and for 150€ fully working Cybervision 64/3D. Inside there was 68EC030 CPU card.

    And as expected, it had the most common faults. Leaking caps, varta damage around RTC and broken SIMM clips. Couple traces around audio circuit was also busted with opamp. But nothing special.

    And here it’s running fully equipped for the first time. 3D printed sd card carrier for easy swap.

    And as you can see, already new addon waiting to be assembled. It’s PCI daughtercard designed by Hese, so instead of only Zorro or ISA cards, I can add PCI cards to add networking, USB, Graphics card etc.

    Daughtercard assembled and programming firmware with Raspberry Pi as JTAG. Did this before soldering rest of the connectors so it would be easier to debug, if the card wasn’t working.

    And then some real life testing, CV64/3D is found and so are NEC USB card and RTL8xxx network adapter.

    But then I learned after this point, that to get those PCI cards to actually work, I’d need some PCI graphics card which would then provide DMA memory for most of the other cards to work. Oh well. I did find some 20€ S3ViRGE PCI card afterwards, but before that I already learned about opensource Z3660 project which is basically CPU accelerator, RTG (graphics card), Soundcard, ‘virtual’ SCSI emulator etc. And I was sold, but more about that in next post.

  • Caffeine OS for z3660 accelerator

    How to modify Caffeine OS to run on z3660

    First extract caffeine partition from the image CaffeineOS_Storm_9311.img (with Linux below. In Windows I guess you can use Win32DiskImager, install WSL and use dd as above or download Windows version of dd command)

    Use kpartx to make disk and partition loop-back devices for easy partition extraction:

    jusii@lucifer:~/Downloads$ sudo kpartx -av CaffeineOS_Storm_9311.img 
add map loop12p1 (252:1): 0 2299904 linear 7:12 2048
add map loop12p2 (252:2): 0 118235136 linear 7:12 2301952  # Caffeine partition

    Copy partition 2 which contains Caffeine OS to separate image file:

    dd if=/dev/mapper/loop12p2 of=CaffeineOS_z3660_9311.hdf bs=4M status=progress conv=fdatasync

    Run FS-UAE / WinUAE with the extracted image as file hard drive. After running Caffeine initial setup go to DEVS:Monitors and delete file emu68-VideoCore without this I just got some garbled and empty WB screen

    Copy image to z3660 sdcard partition 2 under hdf and edit z3660cfg.txt
    Copy kickstart 3.1 to kicks directory and edit z3660cfg.txt

    Insert into zTurn and boot

    MakeLink in s:startup-sequence gave some error code, ignored it for now and just edited it out.

    ed s:startup-sequence and reboot

    Quick test and ran tiny bobble with whdload.

    Next ‘butchered’ version, ie 3.9 -> 3.2.2.1 with the provided script.

    This might be easier with WinUAE as Caffeine OS fat partition contains ready config file to boot Caffeine OS with Windows and WinUAE. First grab latest TheButcher.lha from Pedro. I extracted this to directory and added directory as Directory hard drive in WinUAE for easy access. You can also copy it to WB, extract there etc.

    When you have WinUAE configured with Caffeine OS (sdcard or file hard drive) + TheButcher, then just start WinUAE, do initial setup and run the butcher. And the rest you can follow from above, extracting partition 2 etc. And make sure you have correct kickstart, 3.2.2.1 (47.111) in place.

    Then with Linux and FS_UAE. Pretty straightforward too. Just go with the same instructions as with non-butchered versio. Only 2 differences comes when you first run Caffeine OS from extracted image.
    In here too, put extracted TheButcher directory as Directory hard drive. You also need to provide Caffeine OS FAT32 partition as USERFAT volume, or TheButcher won’t run! (you can Alternatively edit TheButcher script and delete all USERFAT related stuff from the start).
    But might be easier to just make another Directory hard drive containing FAT32 partition files. Like this:

    (see your 1st partition loop device from above):

    sudo mount /dev/mapper/loop12p1 /mnt
mkdir ~/FAT32
cp -R /mnt/* ~/FAT32

    In your FS-UAE configuration file you have to name FAT32 volume:

    hard_drive_0 = CaffeineOS_z3660_9311_work.hdf # My extracted Caffeine OS partition image
hard_drive_1 = <path to your fat32 directory>/FAT32
hard_drive_1_label = USERFAT

    Now Caffeine OS and TheButcher will be happy. I think even Caffeine Update should work.
    And then same as with non-butchered version. Copy Caffeine partition image to sdcard and edit z3660cfg.txt accordingly.
    Rest of the z3660 setup should go as normal, haven’t tried installing ztop, rtg etc yet.