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The Day The Music DiedOne man`s struggle to get a working Amiga |
In the previous installment of this epic(!) drama, I broke my Budgie, found out I had a duff motherboard, found out I had an ATAPI noncompliant CD ROM drive, and sent it to Wizard Developments for repair.
Anyway, the guy tells me he ran it from the 25th September to the 30th, with the accellerator in, flawlessly, until on the fifth day it crashed. So now he`s trying it with a Magnum accelerator. Another five days. Oh good. And even if it runs fine with the Magnum, that means it`s the Viper that`s wrong, and because according to First Computer there is nothing wrong with it, and strictly speaking there isn`t, they won`t give me a refund.
There`s always the chance of First Computer bowing down to my demands, since I think I`m in the right : they sold me the board, claiming it would work with an A1200, it didn`t I want my money back. Or, I could sell it second hand, and get a much lower price for it and lose money. Which is not exactly a free flowing commodity
"Ah yes. I think we have a partial solution. Basically..."
Basically,
Although I initially got the board for my birthday (28/7/96. Also good for gifts/donations!), the warranty of one year that comes as standard with all First Computer products should have been renewed with each succesive replacement.
Hopefully, I would get the money, and I`ve been working out what I could get with £169.99
A 68040 sounds nice. Most unrefined member of the 680x0 series, IMHO, but still a worthy chip to be inside my shrine (!). Or I could go for the same amount of processing power (33/68030, albeit with MMU and FPU), and a luverlly 16 megs of ram. Or, then again, I could skimp on the ram, get 4 megs, and save some money for registering all those things which as of yet I haven`t. Of course, knowing my luck, which if you`ve read all of the story, you will, intimately, I will get the cheapest equivalent accelerator. Or, indeed, one of the stock of Viper MkII that they may not have sold.
But I eventually decided that it was time.
I opened the box, and just won the ensuing battle with the packaging they had put in it; very funny stuff, kind of like dry cardboard pasta. I opened the original Amiga Magic pack box, and found no details of the repair work. So, I went of again and phoned Wizard, told the guy to fax me with the details.
Had dinner, then came back. A friend came over. The tension was building, slowly but surely.
I plunged. Cabled it up, and flicked the switch.
Wheeeee . Powers up. Flicka Flicka. Checks disks.
..................................................
Nothing. No Hard drive LED flashes. No comforting hard drive spinning up sounds.
I reboot, again nothing happens.
So, I take the machine apart, thankfully not invalidating the warranty, since the tech bloke had put it one the side of the case. I think he had done this because he wasn't quite finished. The Eyetech buffered interface that had been there, connecting up the hard drive, wasn't there, I knew that since I had seen it in the outer layer of packaging.
You would expect that the technician would have realised that without the buffered interface there, there was no connection between the hard drive. But no!, there were just two cables, with a connecting 44 pin ribbon of air connecting the two of them.
I removed the longer cable, and connected it up. It did nothing. I was beginning to get seriously worried. Again.
I changed cables, removing the shorter one and putting the longer one in. And this time, it booted. Time for me to reconsider atheism, since someone up there does like me. Well, not enough so that I could always have a perfectly functioning amiga, but you win some, you lose some.
My friend was beginning to get worried at my constant tantrums and spare ecomputer parts/screws lying around the room, and he was relieved too when the Amiga booted. Had I been paying attention at the time, I would have noticed that the vibes in the room had become slightly more positive.
So, it seemed I had a semi functional Amiga. Semi functional? Yes - how can any Amiga be fully functional without any Fast Ram and a nice processor?
I decide, that for today, I while try out the accelerator. The technician had said that it lasted for around five days before it crashed. I doubt it while last five days, but at least it is a chance to check Issue 7 on Voyager and transfer some files while I had memory to examine them.
First up, TFX, from the CUCD. Unbelievably, and out of character, I take the time to copy all the 11 720k disk shaped chunks of flightsime and copy them on to my hd. When it gets there, I find I have precious little disk space, but I procede with the installation anyway.
Firstly, the join script, which un lzxes all the files, and joins some together. I watch the title bar
of my Orinoco
partition carefully.
93% full, 94%, 96%, 98%, 99%, 100% full, 600k free, 100% full 134k free, and then I ctrl C the decompression process. But, rather sensibly for most people, it has deleted the original archives as it goes along, to free up space.
Not in my case. I try out TFX anyway, what with the config thingy. It recommends, with an 030 inside, remember, that I should set the detail level to low. I really regret not getting an FPU now. I bought it [the accelerator] before I was bitten by the bug and became a bit of a renderhead.
After the config, though, zilch. It returns me to Workbench. I try running the executables directly, but it complains that the file is not executable, and yes, the executable attribute is set. So I give up on what could be the Messiah of Amiga gaming. Bloody religion!
Ahnywhay, I proceeded to play around with the accelerator. Seems to be okay.
Join me next time and find out!
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