ClassicHasClass
Veteran Member
OK, bumping this thread.
Over the weekend I turned to my own AM-1000E and AM-1200 (both with dead hard disks) to see if I could get them to boot with the disk images on a BlueSCSI. The short version is yes, with some adjustments: disable SCSI parity, disable SCSI-2, Xebec quirks, enable unit attention. But this upgrade turned up in the AM-1000, which I was not expecting: an Interlink Systems' 68030 accelerator board. I thought it was weird on the self test that it reported 8MB of memory, which sounded enormous for an AM-1000. And, well, it's all on this board as SIMMs. In fact, the jumpers suggest it can take up to 16MB of RAM (!!).
There are some very weird things with this unit, however, the major one being that it freezes trying to start memory parity. I disabled this by monkeypatching the INI right on the disk image and it will boot to the dot prompt, but JOBALCing more than one job will cause AMOS 1.4 (at least) to report a corrupt "0.0" version number.
The AM-1200 has its own issues: at least one bad port and I think its 5.25" floppy drive is probably messed up. I need to reecondition it. But it works where the AM-1000E fails, above.
I suspect there is a driver for the accelerator and I bet it was on the Maxtor SCSI drive that came with the machine, but the Maxtor is super dead. It seems to have terminal stiction and won't respond to any of the typical voodoo tricks; it tries hard to spin up, fails, and immediately powers down. Could be a bad motor. I could try to gin up a stub driver to turn on the '030's I-cache (the SYSTEM word does not indicate that AMOS 1.4 has detected it as an '030) but I don't think that would fix the PARITY issue.
Does anyone know of a driver for these? Interlink Systems seems to be long dead, at least that incarnation of it. Or maybe I just get a regular 68000/68010 and see if the problems persist.
Alternatively, I wonder if AMOS 2.3a could sense and configure the card. The only problem there is that this AM-1000E has the old B00 boot PROMs (pre-B02), so it can't boot an extended format image. If someone has a working AMOS 2.3a disk image suitable for a BlueSCSI or ZuluSCSI, I'd sure appreciate it. Otherwise I guess I'll have to piece one together and see if it will start from a tape streamer.
Over the weekend I turned to my own AM-1000E and AM-1200 (both with dead hard disks) to see if I could get them to boot with the disk images on a BlueSCSI. The short version is yes, with some adjustments: disable SCSI parity, disable SCSI-2, Xebec quirks, enable unit attention. But this upgrade turned up in the AM-1000, which I was not expecting: an Interlink Systems' 68030 accelerator board. I thought it was weird on the self test that it reported 8MB of memory, which sounded enormous for an AM-1000. And, well, it's all on this board as SIMMs. In fact, the jumpers suggest it can take up to 16MB of RAM (!!).
There are some very weird things with this unit, however, the major one being that it freezes trying to start memory parity. I disabled this by monkeypatching the INI right on the disk image and it will boot to the dot prompt, but JOBALCing more than one job will cause AMOS 1.4 (at least) to report a corrupt "0.0" version number.
The AM-1200 has its own issues: at least one bad port and I think its 5.25" floppy drive is probably messed up. I need to reecondition it. But it works where the AM-1000E fails, above.
I suspect there is a driver for the accelerator and I bet it was on the Maxtor SCSI drive that came with the machine, but the Maxtor is super dead. It seems to have terminal stiction and won't respond to any of the typical voodoo tricks; it tries hard to spin up, fails, and immediately powers down. Could be a bad motor. I could try to gin up a stub driver to turn on the '030's I-cache (the SYSTEM word does not indicate that AMOS 1.4 has detected it as an '030) but I don't think that would fix the PARITY issue.
Does anyone know of a driver for these? Interlink Systems seems to be long dead, at least that incarnation of it. Or maybe I just get a regular 68000/68010 and see if the problems persist.
Alternatively, I wonder if AMOS 2.3a could sense and configure the card. The only problem there is that this AM-1000E has the old B00 boot PROMs (pre-B02), so it can't boot an extended format image. If someone has a working AMOS 2.3a disk image suitable for a BlueSCSI or ZuluSCSI, I'd sure appreciate it. Otherwise I guess I'll have to piece one together and see if it will start from a tape streamer.
