Hey all.
I have an A5000 that I've had since the '90s, I've kept it intending to get it up and running again (in part to play Elite some more). I had a bit of time over a decade ago but other than confirming it still powered up and not managing to get the ethernet card I acquired fully working I ran out of space for it and time to mess with it so it got put away again.
Stumbled upon this board recently and reading posts about leaking battery corrosion made me go "Uh oh" and go check on it. The battery had asploded but it looks like I got away fairly lightly, corrosion on pins 5 and 6 of the cmos and corrosion on the case of the crystal for that circuit. Cleaned it up, removed the cmos and the crystal, checked continuity and added some wires from the vias to pins 5 and 6 since the traces are so tiny and I'm not convinced they will be ok long term. Waiting on parts to replace those two and I'll fit a battery holder with 3x nimh AA batteries to avoid it happening again.
In the meantime... I'm sure people have already worked out what module versions are optimal, if there are replacement (or 5th column) ROM images with all the best things already put together that would save me a ton of time (especially for ethernet having read some posts here of peoples struggles to do that). Any pointers? Presumably things have change a bit since NewLook was the current big thing.
This seems like a one place to start but I read about that and then the ArcFlash project and then how to build ROMs and a bunch more yak shaving... and I forget where I started.
viewtopic.php?t=14110&start=150
On a related note, what are folks using to flash EPROMs these days? Something that could flash for the EtherLan 550 would seem to be useful for
https://www.stardot.org.uk/forums/viewt ... 4&start=30
The machine started life as a 33MHz A5000 with 4Mb of RAM, has a simtec 4->8Mb RAM upgrade and I slightly overclocked the CPU back in the '90s. I've got an Acorn SCSI card, a high speed dual serial card from "The serial port" (I used this and a long serial cable to connect to the Internet over SLIP many years ago), a ColourCard Gold and an i-cubed ethernet card with both 10base2 and 10baseT (looks like an EtherLAN 550). I've ordered an IDEFS card to have more storage.
I have an A5000 that I've had since the '90s, I've kept it intending to get it up and running again (in part to play Elite some more). I had a bit of time over a decade ago but other than confirming it still powered up and not managing to get the ethernet card I acquired fully working I ran out of space for it and time to mess with it so it got put away again.
Stumbled upon this board recently and reading posts about leaking battery corrosion made me go "Uh oh" and go check on it. The battery had asploded but it looks like I got away fairly lightly, corrosion on pins 5 and 6 of the cmos and corrosion on the case of the crystal for that circuit. Cleaned it up, removed the cmos and the crystal, checked continuity and added some wires from the vias to pins 5 and 6 since the traces are so tiny and I'm not convinced they will be ok long term. Waiting on parts to replace those two and I'll fit a battery holder with 3x nimh AA batteries to avoid it happening again.
In the meantime... I'm sure people have already worked out what module versions are optimal, if there are replacement (or 5th column) ROM images with all the best things already put together that would save me a ton of time (especially for ethernet having read some posts here of peoples struggles to do that). Any pointers? Presumably things have change a bit since NewLook was the current big thing.
This seems like a one place to start but I read about that and then the ArcFlash project and then how to build ROMs and a bunch more yak shaving... and I forget where I started.
viewtopic.php?t=14110&start=150
On a related note, what are folks using to flash EPROMs these days? Something that could flash for the EtherLan 550 would seem to be useful for
https://www.stardot.org.uk/forums/viewt ... 4&start=30
The machine started life as a 33MHz A5000 with 4Mb of RAM, has a simtec 4->8Mb RAM upgrade and I slightly overclocked the CPU back in the '90s. I've got an Acorn SCSI card, a high speed dual serial card from "The serial port" (I used this and a long serial cable to connect to the Internet over SLIP many years ago), a ColourCard Gold and an i-cubed ethernet card with both 10base2 and 10baseT (looks like an EtherLAN 550). I've ordered an IDEFS card to have more storage.
Statistics: Posted by pir — Mon May 06, 2024 9:01 pm