Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wasatch!uplherc!esunix!blgardne From: blgardne@esunix.UUCP (Blaine Gardner) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech Subject: Re: Expansion boxes vs 2000 slots Message-ID: <1427@esunix.UUCP> Date: 7 Aug 89 14:19:49 GMT References: <18498@gryphon.COM> Organization: Evans & Sutherland Computer Corporation Lines: 41 From article <18498@gryphon.COM>, by rickf@pnet02.gryphon.com (Rick Flower): > Well, I've had a few people send me messages (you I'm sure know who you are > (:-) ) about the pals possibly needing to be grounded to make the ToolBox work > better, and I just wanted to add that they ARE grounded and that didn't help > much at all.. I'm in the process of having the PAL's completely replaced and > I will see if that helps at all (I'm suspecting that it won't!). I must say > that I'm not too impressed with these "ToolBox" types of hardware... One more thing to try is swapping the 68000 if it is not a Motorola part. I've had an ASDG Minirack C (unbuffered parital Zorro I box) with a 2M RAM card on my 1000 for over two years without any problems. Then last month I added a Spirit Tech. clock (similar design to the Spirit internal RAM board, but just the clock) and the system became completely unreliable. It would crash anywhere from Kickstart, all the way up to running a random application. I was ready to toss the clock board in the trashcan, but I gave Spirit a call, and after hearing my tale of woe, they told me to come down so they could take a look at my system. They suggested the PAL grounding, but I'd already done that with no effect. Their next step was to replace the original Hitachi 68000 with a 10 MHz Motorola part. Surprise! The crashes went away completely. The Spirit tech didn't have any good explanation of why the Motorola part fixed everything, just the observation that they'd had this "fix" work a number of times in the past. My own guess is that the Hitachi and Signetics (also supposed to have the same problem) 68000's don't provide the same kind of fan-out that the Motorola 68000 does. Now this is obviously a hack and a kludge, not a real solution to the problem, on the other hand, if it works, it's hard to argue with it. I was pretty leery of this fix, but I've tried everything I can to crash the system, and it is still stable. Swapping the CPU will be easier than swapping the PALs, so you might want to try it first. -- Blaine Gardner @ Evans & Sutherland 580 Arapeen Drive, SLC, Utah 84108 Here: utah-cs!esunix!blgardne {ucbvax,allegra,decvax}!decwrl!esunix!blgardne There: uunet!iconsys!caeco!i-core!worsel!blaine (My Amiga running uucp) "Nobody will ever need more than 64K." "Nobody needs multitasking on a PC."