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Viewsonic E70f with Amiga 3000?

NF6X

NF6X

Veteran Member
Joined
Sep 9, 2013
Messages
1,569
Location
Riverside, CA, USA
I hope that my question here is not too dumb...

I have a nice Amiga 3000, which came with a non-working Commodore 1950 monitor. I've been trying to fix the monitor, but I have not succeeded yet, and I'm not very good at fixing CRT monitors anyway (this could just be a mental block about poking around near high voltage).

Anyway, I'm considering giving up on fixing the 1950 and replacing it with some different monitor. I have an old LCD monitor that works with my A3000, but it just looks wrong sitting on top of the machine. Now I'm kicking myself for getting rid of my old Viewsonic 17 many years ago!

I'm looking at a NOS Viewsonic model E70f as a possible tube to use with my A3000, and I'm wondering whether it might be a good match for my machine. Assuming that it's not dead-in-box, that is. ;) I understand that the built-in flicker fixer circuitry on the A3000 make it less picky about what monitors it'll work with vs. other Amigas (like my old A1000), but since I didn't pay much attention to the Amiga family from a time when the A1000, A500 and A2000 were the only models until I got the A3000 very recently, I feel a bit out of touch in that area.

Thanks in advance for any informed opinions!
 
The A3000 really is an amazing machine. The world really lost out first when the A3000 didn't come with AAA and second when Commodore turned down Sun Microsystem's offer to buy A3000UX's and rebrand them as the next big thing in workstations.
 
I haven't done a lot with my A3000 yet, but it seems like a really nice machine. Back when I was still using my A1000, I fell in love with the higher resolution of the Sun workstations I used in college, and I upgraded to a Sun 3/60 with an accelerated framebuffer out of a rackmount Sun3 machine (making it what would have been a Sun 3/60GX if they ever marketed that configuration) and a big 19" monitor. Then later, I upgraded from that to a Pentium 90 PC when Linux was starting to take off, and stayed in the PC/Linux world until I got fed up trying to get a (#*^%$ DVD to play under Fedora Core and jumped ship to the Mac world. :)

Now that I've caught the retrocomputing bug, I figure this A3000 will make it fun to explore the alternate history in which I stayed in the Amiga camp until the end.
 
Well, it's not too late, the end isn't here yet. Get a Cyberstorm PPC and a Mediator, OS4.1, and you're modern. :p

Or, one of these. :inlove:
 
NF6X said:
Anyway, I'm considering giving up on fixing the 1950...
Click to expand...
Never give up! Never surrender! :) Ray Carlsen can possibly fix your monitor. And I'm down in the Riverside area once or twice a year for the SC3 Arcade Party in Claremont. The next party is sometime during the spring, and I'll be transporting C= goods for Ray to repair during the summer. (Ray is up in southern Washington state.) So, if you want me to transport that monitor to Ray, just give me the word. (But first verify that he can repair it; send an e-mail to rcarlsen(at)tds.net )

FCUG celebrating 33 years,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://www.dickestel.com/fcug.htm
 
Unknown_K said:
WinUAE has some PPC emulation now.
Click to expand...

But, last I heard, it doesn't actually work yet. And when it does, it will be able to emulate a 233MHz 604e; not a 1.8GHz PA6T. Nor will it emulate the "Xena" whatever that is worth. It also won't likely have the hardware throughput of the A1X1000.

In any case, I've used WinUAE, and sure, there are times when the raw CPU speed and the virtually unlimited RAM are nice, but I'll take a real Amiga at 200MHz with 134Mb RAM over the most powerful emulated machine, especially one operating within Windows any day.

I'm typing this on a WindowsXP machine right now. Why? Because my CyberstormPPC gave up the ghost. The day I get that working again, you will find me typing here on an A3000UX again.
 
RobertB said:
Never give up! Never surrender! :) Ray Carlsen can possibly fix your monitor. And I'm down in the Riverside area once or twice a year for the SC3 Arcade Party in Claremont. The next party is sometime during the spring, and I'll be transporting C= goods for Ray to repair during the summer. (Ray is up in southern Washington state.) So, if you want me to transport that monitor to Ray, just give me the word. (But first verify that he can repair it; send an e-mail to rcarlsen(at)tds.net )
Click to expand...

If he doesn't, and freight isn't cost-prohibitive, I'd sure volunteer to have a crack at it. I've been in a TV repair mood lately for some reason anyway, and that would be fun.
 
Well, this thread has been a lot more lively than I anticipated! I welcome the diversions from my original question.

I went ahead and ordered that Viewsonic E70f. At least for the time being, I'm tired of messing with the 1950! Maybe I'll find new gumption to take another stab at it later, or maybe I'll have somebody else like Ray fix it or help me figure out the problem, or maybe I'll pass it along to somebody else like KC9UDX (packing and shipping it would be the biggest stumbling block for that). But in any case, chatting about neat old machines is fun!

My monitor's symptom is that there's no vertical scan; just a single horizontal line near the middle of the screen. I can shift the line up and down a bit with the vertical centering controls, so at least the vertical coils and final driver transistors aren't all completely dead. I was delighted to notice that when driven from my A3000, even with just a single overlapped scan line, the copyright notice on the menu bar is nearly readable in the brightness variations of that single line! [giggle].

I have a scanned service manual, but it's pretty light on theory of operation and description of the circuits. I identified part numbers for a couple of the chips in the vertical circuit, sourced replacements from eBay, and tried blindly replacing them. I found a filter cap near one of them that had seeped electrolyte and replaced it, too. The very few voltage measurements in that area suggested by the manual look correct. I poked around measuring junctions of all of the BJTs and diodes in the vertical circuitry without finding any bad components. I don't enjoy probing around while the set is powered on, since its physical design doesn't allow access to the bottom side of the main board without complete disassembly, and the top side of the board is partially obscured by the CRT and all of the associated pointy high voltage bits. The manual doesn't provide much guidance about what waveforms I should be looking for anyway, and I don't have a lot of CRT monitor repair experience to draw on yet.

If Ray has experience working on these rebadged AOC monitors, maybe he would be able to offer some hints or suggestions without needing to transport the monitor up to him? I bought two each of the two chips I tried replacing, and I still have one of each in reserve. I can dig out my notes if needed to post the part numbers and reference designators of the parts I've already tried replacing.

So, it'll be swell if I can fix the monitor after all, but at least that Viewsonic that's on the way should let me move monitor fixin' to the back burner.
 
BTW, I went ahead and emailed Ray as suggested. I can't reasonably expect anybody to do component-level debugging of a monitor failure via email, but maybe he'll stun us all with an amazing feat of remote diagnosis anyway? :)
 
KC9UDX said:
But, last I heard, it doesn't actually work yet. And when it does, it will be able to emulate a 233MHz 604e; not a 1.8GHz PA6T. Nor will it emulate the "Xena" whatever that is worth. It also won't likely have the hardware throughput of the A1X1000.

In any case, I've used WinUAE, and sure, there are times when the raw CPU speed and the virtually unlimited RAM are nice, but I'll take a real Amiga at 200MHz with 134Mb RAM over the most powerful emulated machine, especially one operating within Windows any day.

I'm typing this on a WindowsXP machine right now. Why? Because my CyberstormPPC gave up the ghost. The day I get that working again, you will find me typing here on an A3000UX again.
Click to expand...

Good for you. I just never seen the reason to spend all that cash for a barely supported PPC machine. Now classic 68K Amigas I can get into and I have a bunch. Working Amigas monitors are a pain to find anymore, luckily the 3000 series can use a normal VGA.
 
RobertB said:
For OS 4.1 FE running on a X1000, you'll have to contact Amiwest and CommVEx attendee, Dave "AmigaDave". He can proudly tell how it runs on his machine. If you want his contact info, just ask.
Click to expand...

Thanks, but, frankly I don't wanna know. I'll want one all the more! It screams on my lowly 200MHz 604e. AmigaOS is the only OS I'm familiar with that gets faster with every release. Sadly, I got to use 4.1 for about 5 minutes. My 68060 came unglued during installation.
 
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