February, 1999. Kyoto, JAPAN. I live in Japan and in Amiga terms, it's quite isolated...you just cannot jump in the car or on the train and pop down to an Amiga shop. I realise that this is now universal but it is more so here in Japan. I use my Amiga in my work which involves producing a monthly magazine in English and Japanese. I use the Amiga exclusively to achieve this admittedly with the help of Shapeshifter 3.8 Luckily, Japan has a lot of computer shops crammed with all the latest hardware. There are also a few "parts" shops and these have been my mainstay in developing my A4000T to it's current level. Here, below is how my A4000T is setup, I have also included some digitised shots of the interior and exterior of the A4000T. My apologies for the bad focus of the digitised pictures. the video camera used is of inferior quality. My A4000T - HARWARE : ACCELERATOR : Cyberstorm MkII 68060 running at a very stable 60Mhz (my 060 doesn't like 66Mhz). Overclocking to 65Mhz (there are oscilators available, but rare) might end up being the most stable. (Overclocking the CsMkII is exceptionally easy) Fan: I found this in a little parts shop. It's made by Hoshino Industries, fits the 68060 perfectly. It is called the "WynDyn". It runs silently. MEMORY: As you can see from the picture of the MkII card I have filled all four memory slots on the MkII. There are 3 X 32mb SIMM modules 60 &70ns) and one 16mb SIMM module. I have a further 16 mb of 4mb SIMMS on the motherboard. Total memory: 128mb. BATTERY-CLOCK: The A4000T comes installed with a BR2335 3 volt, 23mm Lithium battery. Contrary to what news groups state, the holder is NOT a "replacement type". The battery HAS TO BE soldered at least to the bottom contact on the motherboard. This battery was designed to last the life of the computer, (mine hasn't :) it is quite hard to find and so far, only "Rayovac Co." supplies an identical replacement. There is also a "BATT" input on side of the motherboard which supposedly allows a battery holder with lead to be plugged in. But it didn't work for me. I snipped (carefully) the old dead battery from the upper and lower battery contacts on the motherboard and having bought a PeeCee type replacement battery socket and a CR2025 3 volt battery I put some Velcro on the back of the battery holder and attached it to the frame at the front of the A4000T's case, near the rear of the ZorroII/III slots. It works perfectly and if I need to replace a battery it will only take as long as it takes to get the cover off the case. ACCESSIBILITY NOTE: In the stock A4000T which has been "shoehorned" into a big PeeCee tower, there is a "stabilising" ramp type of affair that runs from the front to the rear of the computer and with memory SIMMS installed on the Cyberstorm, it actually "contacts" the SIMMS. It also makes a simple operation like adding a SIMM module or changing a hard drive a nightmare. I couldn't live with this so I cut away the most of it from the edge of the hard drives cage to the rear of the case. As long as the case is not "twisted" or "stressed" unusally with the cover off, there are no ill effects. The case itself is very heavy duty steel and once it is in place and tightened up, it becomes an extremely rigid box. Now I have very good access to most of the motherboard, Cyberstorm and hard drives. HARD DRIVES: In the A4000T's internal bays there is room for two hardrives with support frame and guides. I managed to connect a third hard drive to the top of the cage (you can see it in a couple of the pics. Top-most drive. It just fits in there!). I taped some non-conductive film to the underside of the drive and it is anchored quite securely the the edge of the floppy drives cage. I have the original Seagate 1.2 Gig drive, a 3.2 Quantum Fireball (3mbs transfers) and an NEC DS-2110S, 2 gig drive which I ripped out of a Mac "external" type. It is the fastest at over 4mb per second. CATWEASEL MkII: Having had an Amtrade high density floppy drive which never worked from the first week of operation I can't live without this baby. It is the latest model for both A1200 and A4000(T) and DOESN"T USE A ZORRO SLOT!. I have it mounted, well out of the way of everythinhg else, with Velcro strips at the rear of the A4000T case near the power supply. It plugs directly into the A4000T's IDE port, from there any IDE/Atapi devices are connected to the MkII. There is also a floppy connector and one extra IDE connector on the board. The board is excellent and performs as advertised (more later on this) but the docs are not specific about connection so if you buy one, connect it as stated above. I connected a brand new TEAC PeeCee floppy drive (as the manula recommends. DO NOT USE MITSUMI DRIVES) but I bought a shorter cable as I do not need to conect a 1541 drive or third floppy drive. The Catweasel MkII will read and FORMAT Amiga 880k, 1.76mb (more later on 1.76mb). It will also read and format PEECEE 720k, 1.2mb and 1.44mb. It will Also read/format Macintosh 1.44mb disks as Shapeshifter3.7 onwards has direct support for the Catweasel. (SS/Pres/floppy/) FORMATTING AMIGA 1.76MB: I couldn't get a good, error free format using the workbench "FORMAT" command but curiously, the FORMAT commend in Dopus 4.12 works like a charm. In the Catweasel MkII manual is a tantalising tidbit about "BootCat" which sadly is not present on the install disk. It would supposedly allow booting from a Catweasel 1.76Mb disk. This appeals to me as I would then be able to make up a monster bootable Dopus disk with all the bells and whistles. That kind of Dopus would be like the Norton Tools for the Amiga. Jens Sconfield, the creator may release this in the future. I hope so. Verdict: Excellent value, saves a Zorro slot. Very good support from the developer. CdRom: Currently I have a Mitsumi M120T Atapi 12 speed CdRom which I have running under "Atapi PnP" (the authors kindly made an A4000(T) specific version). All I can say of this is that "It works pretty well". I have MasterISO and the latest Yamaha 4-4-16 CdRW drive will be replacing it soon. IOBLIX: This board has been developed just at the right time. It certainly promises to be the most versatile of any Amiga board. It comes with the following... 2 x fast IEEE compliant (bi-directional) parallel ports and a Parallel Zip driver! (As shipped, only one parallel port is connected. You simply need to buy the chip and plug it in to activate the 2nd port.) WARNING: The extra parallel ports are not designed for hardware that was SPECIFICALLY designed to run with the Amiga parallel port which has +5 volts on pin 14. You can set a jumper and solder a diode near it and then the parrallel port will be Amiga compliant. 4 x fast serial ports. Other boards may allow faster conection speeds but I'm happy with 115.2k 1 x (yet to be implemented) Infrared port. When that arrives I'll be buying a Plam Pilot :) Two other modules are planned and 10Mbit Ethernet will be the first with maybe 100Mbit following later. One other module is mentioned on the homepage (http://www.rbm.de/) about a "Catweasel-like" module to allow the connection of cheap high density floppy drives. Currentlly I have two parallel ports and three serial ports activated. Verdict: Excellent value for money. Lots of support arriving. Frequent updates. NERIKI (Australian) DESKTOP GENLOCK: Getting old now but does it's job very well. I often have it connected to my A2000 (030) with two Panasonic S-VHS video decks and a Panasonmic editor DKB RAPIDFIRE ZorroII SCSI card: The A4000T comes standard with the A4091 scsi-2 controller but I have a "finicky" Microtek Scanmaker V600 32bit scanner which always gave me trouble when booting on the A4091. Now that it has it's own scsi card (Shared with the Iomega Zip) it runs trouble free. The Rapidfire allows up to 8mb of memon the card and you can also attach a 3.5" hard drive driectly to the card too (but use the A4000(T)'s power supply to power the drive. VERDICT: Does it's job as advertised, very well. Note:The dkbscsi.device is in the chip onthe card. To use the Rapidfire, copy HDToolBox and rename it, now add "SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=dkbscsi.device" (do not include my quote marks :). Now you can set up any scsi devices connected to the Rapidfire SCSI card. VLAB INTERNAL VIDEO DIGITISER: Until the recent upgrading of digital cameras, the VLab definitely the most efficient way for me to obtain good images for inclusion in the magazine that I produce. The card is ZorroII and has two composite (RCA) and one S-VHS connector on the rear. Likes: It will make animations and saves in 24bit Dislikes:The S-Vhs connetor does not work and to get the best from the card I have to boot from a bootable Zip with the Retina Z3 EMU, memory hungry graphics system. I will be replacing this with an Olympus Camedia 1400L digital camera now that we have software for it ("ephoto.lha"). (email me for the address) MODEMS: I have two modems. My original and favourite is the SupraExpress 288 Fax/modem. This modem is a joy to use. I flashed it to 33.6 using Shapeshifter. I particulary like the Network Status displays on the front which show your connect speed and what processes are taking place while online in real time. On the other hand..although it is very fast, the SupraExpress56k cerytainly reflects the cost cutting and "Windows Mentality" that infiltrated Supra after it was bought out by Diamond. In FTP downloads, depending upon line quality, I get anything from 3,800bps to 6,500bps using the SupraExpress56k. Half that using the beloved Supra 33.6k. PRINTERS: I have two, both Hewlett Packards, a HP5L and a HP6l. Both are connected to the IOBlix parallel ports with IEEE1284 bi-directional cables. The HP6l has a 4mb proprietry memory SIMM which is very expensive but worth it. These printers are 600dpi and with RET activated they emulate 1200dpi if you have the memory. I use Turboprint6 (Turboprint7 on order!) in preference to Studio in Pagestream3.1b and the resulting pages are stunning. When I introduce the Olympus Camedia digital camera for images, the end pages will be a quantum jump in quality for our magazine. VERDICT: If you only need black and white then these are the fastest laser printers I have come across. No postscript...maybe I'll get that later. MICROTEK SCANMAKER V600 32bit SCSI SCANNER: This scanner was pretty expensive but as they say in publishing.."Garbage in, garbage out", I had little choice, 32bit is nice. The SCSI bits on board seem to be non-standard and as mentioned earlier, it now resides on it's own DKB Rapidfire scsi-2 card and boots up very quickly. Oddly enough, Scantek (AMinet) works much more efficiently that Microtek's own scanning software, ScanWizard, which, under Mac (SS) shuts down after each scan! It has a termination on/off switch a SCSI ID selector and two scsi connetors. Also, this isprobably the only scanner for Amiga that supports slide scanning as there is a special "slide scan light" cover which plugs into the rear of the scanner and Scantek has the "Sldescanner/flatbed/ option in it's menus. Supposedly, the tube in this model is immortal BUT you can't turn it off! Once the scanner is on, the tube is on too for that session. VERDICT: Very good -- excellent scans. I would probably buy a 12bit Canon in retrospect. GRAPHICS CARD - Retina BLTZ3: I often wish that I had bought a C64 card which is supposedly the fastest card ever made for 68k Amiga.. but I'll settle for the second fastest. I have overclocked the card from 32Mhz to 40Mhz (safe range. 48Mhz might be possible) I have 4mb of video memory on board. It works with CybergrapX Versions 2 and three, also with Picasso96 PD versions. DEFINTE LIKE! : Macrosystems who made the RetinaZ2 & Z4 and Vlab cards also made a video switcher which works extremely well. Assuming that you have a multi-synch monitor (I have a 14" Electrohome) you connect the Amiga video and RetinaZ3 vidoe lines to the box and stash it some where out of sight. Now when AMiga video is detected (even under CybergraphX and Picasso96 {I helped out there :}) the display will be correct! SOFTWARE INSTALLED IN MY A4000T: OS3.1: Phase5: 060 libraries with Cyberpatcher and CyberMap. CybergraphX: Version 3 (Version 4 coming) Pagestream3.1b (waiting for version 4 to be released) Shapeshifter: Version 3.9 (both English and Japanese versions of MacOS7.6.1) Excellent! DpaintV: (Waste of money except for quick animations. Imagine3: Excellent results but steep learning curve. Hate the interface. MasterISO: Waiting to buy the Yamaha 4-4-16 RW CdRom AsimCDFS: As I'm using an Atapi CdRom presently, this too waits for the arrival of the Yamaha drive. Turboprint6: Very good, easy interface, very configurable. Have ordered Version 7. Studio: Ok, but like Imagine3, it is a real pain to setup especially if using a ser/par card. PPP: (registeredHolger Kruse's PPP got me online. Sure learned a lot configuring this baby with AmiTCP Demo4. This prog now retired. NetconnectV2: To be honest, lots of programs but I don't need Microdot and AmIRC for this version seems to have bugs..lots of screen lockups. VoyagerNG is pretty good but seems much slower than Aweb3.2 In the latest upgrade (release 2) the AmiTCP Wizard works but doesn't actually go "online" for more than a milisecond..so if the connection fails later..it will never know..and the connect scripts etc are useless. Jusdging from the Netconnect mailinglist posts there is still a lot ot be done. I think that it "could" be the difinitive Internet package for Amiga but needs a "Dummies" button. Miami: Demo version> I include this as a comparison to Genesis AmiTCP. Miami interrogates my server sand comes up with the fastest, most efficient connection ..and it works every time. In Genesis I have to manually enter a "dial script" for connection, even after using the Wizard, of the same modem, a SupraExpress56k). I will be ordering Miami SSL for sure if only for the secure connections for online shopping and the "controllability" . Aweb3.1: This is currently, IMHO, the best and fastest browser for Amiga. I wish it had the very intuitive "cut and paste function that VoyagerNG has (Aweb3.2 has it too but it is menu driven. Scantek: (registered) Scanner software for Microtek scanners. Good support, lots of updates. Works well. CrossMac: Couldn't live without it (unfortunately, can't use it with Catweasel Mac 1.44mb drives on the AMiga side) GpFax: Greg Perry & Johnathon Potter prove that they can program :) I use it often and it performs magnificiently. I create my faxes in Pagestream3.1b Dopus4.12: Bought this years ago and still absolutely love it. My current setup reads just about every graphics format known to man. Dopus5: I must be just an old fuddy-duddy. I can't get used to the new regimen of the Dops5 - Magellen. I often wish that Dopus4.12 had an "open extra window" option, just one or two would be sufficient :) Parnet: Networking softare for the Amiga. Parnet uses a special cable and connects to the Amiga parallel port. It uses the host/client protocol. Programs can be started remotely. Other Amigas hard drives and other connected media can be accessed though programs like Dopus or as windows on the Workbench. My A2000 (CSA Derringer 030/32mb/OS3.1) which my two children use to study and play games with, is connected to the A4000T via Parnet. Very good, well thought out, value for money program. IDEAS FOR THE A4000T: Since buying the IOBlix I have realised that even using two, "fake", "two up" backplane panels, I don't have enough slots. (The IOBlix has "ELEVEN" possible outputs!) I don't understand why RBM didn't put at least one "two up" (one parallel + one serial output) on the IOBlix's own backplane panel..but I will be doing exactly that next at my brother-in-law's factory using a very expensive computerised milling machine :) Also, just above the backplane panels on the back of the Amiga A4000T case, there is a fairly large, unused area which, if one had a "notcher", could be used exclusively for IOBlix outputs. I reckon I could easily cut out the space for 2 x parallel ports and 4 x serial ports without degrading the integrity of the A4000T case in any way. CONCLUSION: The above is my A4000T Amiga system, it puts food on the table here by way of producing (very efficently) a monthly magazine but more importantly, whenever living in Japan becomes overwhelming, I boot up and escape. The other day I took a stroll though downtown Kyoto's computer shopping district (Terramachi) and couldn't help but notice that there was not a single computer on offer with anything less tahn a 360Mhz cpu (mostly Celeron).. that is depressing but when it comes down to it.. in real terms I can pretty well achieve "most" of these computer's functionality on my A4000T. My A4000T is performing at it's optimum operating level. When you consider that the AMiga 3.1 OS comes on about 6 x 880k floppies... compared to 40 million lines of code for WindowsXX...I often get things done faster. I wait with baited breath for OS3.5 and more importantly, the next generation Amiga which I will certainly be buying. I'll be around for a few more years yet :) Lets hope that it brings the same quantum leap that the A1000 and Amiga did way back then. I extend my sincerest thanks to all those altruistic Amiga programmers, developers and dealers. When Commodore dumped us, you guys not only kept us going but lifted our compatibility., functionality and speed to levels that Commodore only promised but never delivered. Also thank you to all the com.sys.amiga.xxx and AmiIRC friends who have helped me over the years. I am still a complete 100% Amiga nut. Michael Wilkins (Australian) Kyoto, Japan E-mailto: michaelb@mbox.kyoto-inet.or.jp Michael Wilkins, Kyoto, JAPAN Email: michaelb@mbox.kyoto-inet.or.jp A4000T / CsMkII / 060 / 60Mhz / 2chip / 128fast / IOBlix / A4091 & DKB RapiffireSCSI / 6Gig / RetinaZ3 / VLab / HP6L&HP5l / MicrotekV600 scanner / Zip/Hard Drives:6Gig / CatweaselMkII / OS3.1 / Atapi x12CdRom / VLab Internal.