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TheGoose

Posted Tue May 01, 2018 6:24 pm

It's really the coolest computer project - I have one too, early blue version. Following this. Please share your parts and GAL solutions.

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mattsoft

Posted Wed May 02, 2018 4:52 pm

Indeed, this is a very cool project. If I were only 1000% better at soldering I'd be all over this.

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Bulletdust

Posted Mon Jun 25, 2018 2:46 pm

I love the GBA 1000's! Any updates on this project?

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Dynamic_Computing

Posted Mon Jun 25, 2018 5:08 pm

McTrinsic wrote:
One comment: ditch the Thylacine. It's crap. Really. You could better get a Zorro card with a Clockport and add a RapidRoad. Or try to source a USB-Zorro-Card such as the Highway or maybe even the Deneb, even if they cost a lot. I don't know if the XSurf runs in the same slot as the Thylacine or if it fits. If it did that would probably the way to go as it has high-speed USB _and_ Ethernet
I have the mini-Thylacine and I am pretty happy with it. I agree that it is slowing - only USB 1.2 and I can only get about 350kb/sec from it, but it is reliable and recognizes almost anything I plug into it. What are the advantages of the other one you mentioned? Are they just faster?

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McTrinsic

Posted Mon Jul 02, 2018 10:01 am

The 'native' USB hostadapters are easily 2-3x faster.
I remember a discussion on a1k around the time the GBA- Thylacine was made. It supposedly throws lots of errors in the background and keeps the CPU busy.
But still it's faster than e.g. a VarIO with a RapidRoad which will deliver ca. 250kb/s max.

A Deneb costs a fortune (400-500€) bus can do up to 2,5MB/s. Similar the XSurf with a RapidRoad, although the latter is notably slower.

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BloodyCactus
Lexington VA

Posted Wed Jul 04, 2018 6:00 pm

Updates? not much really. One of the ferrite beads I had that needs like 80-100 or something, I had the wrong spec, so I had to get some more from mouser, usually I get stuff from mouser once every month or two so I wait up a sizeable list. So, now I have the correct ferrite beads.

Other than that, just slowly soldering it up every night, I do a few before every other night. Right now just busy, got the pinball world matchplay championship coming in a few weeks so doing some extra practice for that to improve my world ranking, increasing my kendo practice (the sport, not the javascript framework!). kids on summer vacation etc.

Just debating if I will solder paste or use the iron for the ram chips... probably going to be a lot quicker to hot air all 16 at once that futz about with the iron trying to drag solder and wick clean them...

aaah life! lol.

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mr.t.guru

Posted Tue Aug 07, 2018 7:09 am

I built the GBA1000 + TK02 68060 and Graka3.3 boards last year.
You really don't want to be hot-airing anything on that board. Especially 16 DRAMs together, as you could warp the motherboard.
Yeah they are a shit design. A lot of things on the GBA1000 were a shit design, especially choice of parts and placement of some parts. The trimmer capacitors are a nightmare to find... seriously what was the guy thinking, they were obsolete back when it was designed, as were some other parts. I fitted common trimmer caps and slightly modified it so they fit better. The rev 5 board fixed a lot of the problems including nice TSOP RAMs that are easy to solder from the top and use of more modern CPLDs instead of that god-awful obsolete Lattice 1024 thing, but unfortunately the guy clammed up and didn't release it.
For those CY7C1049D RAMs.... I just soldered them on one by one. Yes it was a pain in the ass but better than warping the motherboard.
Then just wick off the excess solder after, isopropyl it and it looks nice.
Most of the pics I found while building it were just shit quality and no help at all. The locator at amigawiki.org is great but is a stock top view without parts. If you need to see how it looks when finished in 20MP glory just say and I can take some pics with my Nikon B700 and upload. I can also point out the places to make small changes so it's easier to build it using common parts.. mainly around the 2 trimmer cap areas.

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Tue Aug 07, 2018 4:01 pm

Yeah they are a shit design. A lot of things on the GBA1000 were a shit design, especially choice of parts and placement of some parts.
Yeah, so here's the thing. I doubt you'd say that to Georg Braun's face. Or maybe Andrew Wilson, a fellow Aussie, over the Phoenix board? What point would that serve? To insult people trying to make our lives better? You're obviously very intelligent and talented, but I don't think we need to go acidic.

We are a tiny community here and we like it to be a safe place, a place after work to get together and hang out and talk about one of our common passions - Amiga, Commodore, hacking, "maker-ing," retro-computing and retro-gaming in general. I think about these "waste of time" topics way more than I probably should, but it's a place that brings me and others here a lot of happiness.

So, even if you didn't like the design 100%, let's at least show the creators of the boards (or whatever) some respect for trying to solve problems their way. It's a lot easier to tear things down than build them up from scratch.

I'm pretty sure in the next year if (hopefully) the Rejuvenator comes back to the market, I'm going to be called a complete idiot and total ass from people all over the world that I've never met. The board will be called complete crap and a waste of time and money. And there will be lists generated about all the things wrong with it, for that I am sure. Heck, we already know some of them. Some will quickly forget all about the engineering miracle it provides and only focus on the short-comings.

But until someone else creates something it's what we'll have. I do plan on releasing all of our files for other smart folk to improve upon the original (and our) hard work. Creative commons, etc. And you know what? Take a screenshot of this: I will bet you money others will take those files and try to charge for future revisions they make to them no matter how minor (and possibly just to print them out verbatim). That's kind of what we seem to have in parts of this big, beautiful, and sometimes self-inflicting corrosive community. It's bizarre. But I also know a small subset will keep the spirit of our original intent intact and move things forward for the community at large to enjoy. I know, because I've become friends with some of these people. Heck - you may become one of them.

But man. Let's be cool. Let's try and change the culture. Everyone here is here because we were looking for a place to hang and not find all the negativity. There's so much of that out there already. Let's spread the Amiga Love, friend.

Cheers

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mr.t.guru

Posted Tue Aug 07, 2018 11:35 pm

Fairly typical reply. Quite funny in fact, I got a chuckle out of it. You are blinded by Amiga magic, you need to look at it from the other side. I do not own a Phoenix so I have no reason to criticize the guy who designed it. I built a GBA1000 and the Picasso II card and the 68060 card, I did therefore I know. You have not built one and you said yourself you don't have the skill to build one so you know nothing about it.

It is human nature that unscrupulous people will feed on the work of others and sell it. There's unfortunately nothing that can be done about it. Well there is something. Take for example a certain German forum where a lot of Amiga magic happens. It's a very difficult place to navigate if you don't speak German. Now let's say someone wants something that came from there and the design is free but can't get the gerber files because they can't navigate the site or even do a simple search because even search terms must be in German. They look for another way to get it. Someone who speaks both German and English happens to have some and takes advantage of the situation and sells them on ebay for double the price and that person sees it and buys them because they think there is no other way. The solution is pretty simple... that forum should speak in English so that the other 95% of the population can get involved too. But they choose to lock it up in German only so it creates an avenue for abuse. I'm sure you are thinking this is bullshit, but it is proven and documented over time that doing something in English provides more exposure than any other single language would. Proof example is ABBA. In a documentary, it states in the very beginning their manager suggested they must sing in English to be a success.... the rest is history. Publicity is the solution, then if everyone knows it can be had for free (well for the cost of the PCB manufacturing plus parts) they won't buy those overpriced items, they will source them from the origin and those unscrupulous people will go somewhere else in search of money. MAME is anoher classic example where they got it right. This program is so huge that everyone who is into arcade games knows about it and knows it is freely available. There is almost no one selling it natively. Well, except the Chinese who ripped it off and sell custom PCBs which emulate 100's or 1000's of games on an Arm processor for just a few dollars and plugs directly into an arcade JAMMA harness. But those things are actually well priced and quite a nice solution for a home arcade so they are popular and accepted.
The 2nd part of the solution to shut down abusers is a web site repository that contains all of the freely available projects so people can find them without having to search the internet across multiple sites and forum threads that are sometimes 50 pages long. Much like now if you want hardware info on Amigas you go to bigbookofamigahardware.com, but for Amiga PCB projects you go to... ummm....

Regarding the GBA.... If someone builds something that EVERYONE wants, then makes it even better with a revision 5, then doesn't release it and pulls the revision 4 off the market just because they are some kind of power tripper, how do you think the people who want it will feel? They would feel like they were screwed over thats what. That is exactly what Georg Braun did. He abandoned the Amiga community. He basically told everyone to go take a running jump off the crumbling Amiga bridge. He was not trying to make our lives better, he was trying to make HIS life better. But due to the costs involved making such a large PCB is out of the question since it would be about $1000 for 1, so he had to get other people involved to get the cost down. By the end of the rev 5 board he also wanted one too, but again the cost was a problem so he had 10 made at the reasonable cost and sold them to others so he could get his rev 5. It's all there on an Amiga forum where posts can't be edited or deleted after a couple of hours, thus making a permanent history of the GBA1000 saga.

I specialise in reversing stuff, taking poor designs or designs where people didn't think enough (nearly all of them) and making them better. Companies making stuff are under pressure to release a product so they can be excused for releasing an unfinished product. But private projects should be better. I take 20 years worth of arcade PCB experience and use the good ideas from them in designs. I have seen over 20000 PCBs in my time. I know which parts are cheap/easy to find and which parts to avoid. There's a lot of projects to choose from because most of the small projects out there have at least some issues. For example there's a (not common) SD2IEC project and the guy picked a SD card slot that is non-standard and costs $10 and is only available from Mouser. Really a dumb choice since any common SD slot costs about $0.50c. I just happened to get some of the PCBs for free but because of the cost of the slot they are too expensive to build compared to a complete build of say a ShadowWolf 1.2 build (~$10). Rather than toss them in a drawer unused, I modified the design by cutting traces plus disconnecting the copper flood fill under the slot because it was a silly choice non-standard +5V plane. The 5v power plane is a hilarious design error because the card slot runs at 3.3v so there is no need to have a 5v power plane anywhere near the slot. Making it ground like most designs have would have made the modification so much easier. So after disconnecting it I converted that area to ground thus allowing me to connect the SD slot cover to ground because it acts as part of the card insertion circuit and fixed the problem by re-wiring the slot. The entire design of a SD2IEC should not cost more than about $10, yet we know of places that sell the SD2IEC for $50 or more. Later I may do a run of PCBs with these changes so people can make one for about $8-$10, but probably I'll release my own dual AVR design on a smaller PCB. I have done similar things with many projects, including the GBA Rev 4 design. I may even produce a batch of boards since the JLCPCB price of $300 for 10 pieces isn't too bad.... about 4-5 times less than the price of GBA1000 motherboards being sold on ebay..... and Georg himself created that problem by clamming up and pulling it off his web site.
You can ignore all of this and pretend that the world is a pleasant place where everyone loves everyone, but the truth is it's not all roses and caviar and ignoring the real things happening out there and not trying to right the wrongs in this world is not helping anyone.
Anyway, if you check my web site you'll see what I have been doing for ~20 years....
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mattsoft

Posted Wed Aug 08, 2018 10:28 am

mr.t.guru - So, are you going to do a run of improved GBA1000 boards? Sounds like you're kicking the idea around. I'm sure you'd easily be able to get enough people interested if you do.





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