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From: mph@behemoth.phx.mcd.mot.com (Mark Huth)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech,comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: A2620
Message-ID: <11066@behemoth.phx.mcd.mot.com>
Date: 13 Jun 89 00:30:59 GMT
References: <45@iisat.UUCP> <542@cpsc6b.cpsc6a.att.com>
Reply-To: mph@behemoth.UUCP (Mark Huth)
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Distribution: na
Organization: Motorola Microcomputer Division, Tempe, Az.
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In article <542@cpsc6b.cpsc6a.att.com> crs@cpsc6b.cpsc6a.att.com (Chris (Nyuck! Nyuck!) Seaman) writes:
>
>I've had my 2500 since early March, and I am more than just happy, I'm
>ecstatic (sp?).  I use a 'PC' at work, with 4 megs of RAM, 386/387 combo,
> ... good things about 2500

That's all well and good.  I too, love my Amiga - when it works.
Since installation of the 2620 board in my system, I continue to
experience a lot of random crashes.  What I'm trying to do is find out
what is wrong.  It's great to run about three times as fast as the
68000, but if I have to reboot every 30 minutes it doesn't do a lot of
good.

This weekend I experienced the following:

	4 Gurus while running Lattice 5.02 (could be the compiler,
	since most unexplained crashes are during heavy compiler
	activity)

	3 Instances of machine lockup - no action

	2 times we just went right to the reboot, no guru.

	2 instances of screen corruption

	1 instance of what I call the ammusement park syndrome -
	everything goes off at once - DF2: was a hopping and a
	twisting, the printer was printing out garbage, the screen was
	corrupt, and the select lights on both a hard drive and DF0:
	were locked on.

All of the above occurred while multitasking and running Lattice
compilations with different disk, include, and source locations (ram
or disk) and nofastrom.  With fastrom set, I have observed none of
these failures.

Additionally, with or without fastrom and the compiler benchmarks
running, I get occassions when a single key is repeated 10's to
hundreds of times and then a long time goes by before I can delete the
garbage and retype the command line.

I have observed none of these problems when booted from the 68000, but
the loss of 2 meg and 3x performance makes this an undesired
configuration, so I spend little time there.

The purpose of posting this to the net is not to discourage people
from owning Amigas, although I realize that that may happen.  I really
just want to get a reliable system and peolpe on the net are helpful.

Thanks to Mr. Hull for sending me the memory tests.  I have run them and am
unable to get any errors from the memory card or the slow-fast ram.

I have also written a checksumming program to ensure that the ROM
always responds correctly.  So far no errors have shown up.  This is
really a mystery, and probably concerns two or more distinct problems.
I like to do work on the Amiga, but the platform must be reliable.

Thanks to all of you who make the amiga better all the time,
Mark Huth