Hi!

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BloodyCactus
Lexington VA

Posted Wed Apr 04, 2018 9:06 am

Heyups! I'm BloodyCactus... One of those crazy Australians now living in East Coast USA. Commodore was a great figurehead in my childhood.. C64s, 128s, Amigas..

Life being so crazy, I have been sitting on and hoarding my bounty for the last 5 years but soooon, so very soon, I will be building my GBA1000 board, and will be back into having a physical Amiga once more (I have morphos on a g4 mini but... its not the same as a A1K!)

Right now I'm probably not going to do the 68060, Thylacine USB, and PicassoII boards for the gba, I have all the pcbs and parts, but I think I'll be stock 68030/50mhz+68882 for a while. I have no great rush to need an 060, and not really sure what I'd do with the usb (maybe it would make file transfer easier...)

I'm keeping an eye out for a nice 1084s D1, but I have a multisync LCD that can do 15khz.. But the D1 can do 80columns mode of the C128, other 1084s modes cannot do that.. It would be nice to get rid of the 1902A and have one monitor..

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EzdineG
Springfield, MO

Posted Wed Apr 04, 2018 5:24 pm

Welcome to the board, sir!

It would be great to hear your story once you've completed the build. I've been considering building a BGA1000 board myself. The main detractor for me would be gathering the parts; can they still be reasonably attained today?

As I've discovered, even with a 68030, IDE and some RAM the A1000 is still severely hobbled by the lack of chip RAM. Would be nice to have the opportunity to use more.

Good luck!

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BloodyCactus
Lexington VA

Posted Thu Apr 05, 2018 5:03 am

Thanks mate! Im going to try and document my GBA1k build, since its pretty involved. I need to roughly

- sort thousands of components
- create checklist from bom
- build mobo
- flash all gals + lsi
- rebuild + recap a1k psu
- check/clean/rebuild floppy drive
- cleanup a1k case

I'm still debating the 060+picasso2 board, mostly because they go hand in hand, I'd prefer to just have the P2 board up and running but it needs the 060 which has 128mb on it which would be nice but seemingly overkill for what I'd want to mess around with. So I may only do the usb thylacane board. I dunno at this point lol!

As for obtaining GBA1K parts today most should be ok, there are some that require ebay but most can be got from mouser / farnell / digikey. There are some oddball parts you need to get from a donor 500 (the DB23 connectors etc.), the more common parts are easy to get from ebay (CIA chips, Paula etc).

Might be harder to get chips like Amber but the flicker fixer part does not require to be built (however if you run the picasso2, you need the amber circuitry I believe...). The correct pinout 2mb Agnus is getting harder to get but there is one or two on ebay I think right now.. they do pop up from time to time.

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McTrinsic

Posted Sun Apr 15, 2018 1:14 pm

Hi,
welcome! It's always impressing for me to see someone build something like the GBA from scratch. Can't do this on my own.
As for the thylacine- it's crap. Don't do it. If you need USB you might rather connect a VarIO or a Buddha to the front slot, though the latter one is a bit tricky. To the clockport of such cards you could just add a RapidRoad. Or go for an XSurf4Phoenix. It would unfortunately rule out a GFX adapter unless you build a mechanical bus board. The special XSurf should still be available from iComp at special request, i. e. via eMail.

The recent GFX cards for the A500 might the fit to the front slot of the GBA.

Have fun and let us know about your progress!!

Cheers,
McT

User avatar
BloodyCactus
Lexington VA

Posted Sun Apr 15, 2018 2:16 pm

Thanks, yeah my only interest in the thylacine usb is for ram sticks for transfer (not sure the stability of a usb wifi on the thylacine)... Ideally I want a network card, but thats not going to happen :) I'll probably look at a plipbox or something I guess. Eventually I might look at doing the 060 board and graphic card.. but not for a while :)

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Mon Apr 16, 2018 1:50 pm

Well the network card is there, just drop an email to iComp.
Said card also features a clockport, so you have USB via a RapidRoad as well.
Or just go for a VarIO on the front slot, these should be real cheap on some forums and also feature a clockport for e.g. USB.

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A1-X1000
Toronto, Canada

Posted Fri May 18, 2018 2:59 pm

@ BloodyCactus

good luck on the hoarding of miggies for future use and drool over the GBA1000 <3





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