Sunday, June 30, 2013

A500: A590 SCSI controller mods

Hey peepz.

Since I haven't done anything important (except softwarewise) on my lovely Amigas I though about testing for fun an A590 that I have (which might be the host of my future FPGA Arcade or not).
As I didn't have an external PSU to test it, I thought of performing the Selfpowered mod as the well known website clearly explains:

This is how the mod looks on my A590



As I don't have a SCSI HD and because I had a spare PCD-50B SCSI Multicard Reader so I thought about attaching this instead :)
Ofc in order for all LUNS to be fully recognized (and not only the first LUN that is the PCMCIA port) you need to switch the Pin 4 of the Dip switch to ON!
Manual as long as BBOAH say that it's reserved but Mechware after fiddling around he realized that Pin 4 enabled parity!

Anyway, I put some spacers by cutting some hotglue material (lol) and glued them in place. It doesn't look bad :)



After upgrading my Version 6.6 EPROMS to 7.0 (regards to my Willem) we were down to business.
Success, Power led opened and also my custom ClassicWB 68k booted just fine! :)



Time to remove the humongous thick Fan and put a silent Scythe/Kaze 40x40x10mm fan instead.



And voila. Mod is ready and A590 works like a charm :)



Here are some screenshots from the ClassicWB 68k running on my A590.






Dunno if I'm gonna keep that in the future, but at least I know it's working properly.
Only annoying part is that A590 blinks 30 times before CF boots but I guess that's something to do with searching through the other SCSI ID and LUNS which I haven't tinkered on how to disable (if possible).
Also I haven't put any passive termination which might be the cause as well (sorry I didn't have 25pin terminator handy).

That's all for now :)