TF1260-A NEW 68060 Amiga Accelerator board in 2021...time for a firmware update!!!

What great times we are in for new and awesome Amiga hardware being released for our favourite computer and OS! 

I was lucky enough to buy my new TF1260 from www.amibay.com from one of the authorized sellers for Terrible Fire products as up to recently only certain testers had one as it's been in beta for a while. I've recently been enjoying it inside my Amiga 1200 Tower and I'm very impressed with it as it's at par with my Blizzard Cyberstorm MKII in my Amiga 4000 performance wise and actually it surpasses it when I overclock my Rev1 060 from 50 to 62.5 Mhz! Cool part is you don't have to move jumpers, play with resistors on voltage boards etc. overclock the TF1260...all you have to do is open the shell and type "cpuspeed speed=xx" where xx is the speed you want to overclock too....it's rumoured from other TF1260 owners that some Rev6 060's can hit 100 Mhz with heatsinks and fans...personally I'm the type of guy that would rather overclock 'slightly' as I prefer my systems to be more stable than fast but quirky.  Since my full 060 is a Rev1 I'm quite happy with how stable my TF1260 is running 060 specific DEMO's all day long and the 060 itself isn't hot enough to fry an egg on like some old 040's I used to have back in the day lol...I've installed a heat sink on it to be safe.

After watching a great YouTube video from ACILL last night I finally got around to update the firmware on my TF1260 to the latest 'stable' release and run a few tests comparing before/ after results do let's go!

My TF1260 with onboard IDE CF cable attached

oops no JTAG connector on my TF1260 BUT luckily I've got all kinds of stuff lying around in my man cave that have pins on them 😉

 

Quick snips to get the pins off casing

pins sit nicely on the TF1260 with no modifications

did I ever tell you I LOVE solder paste 😁A quick 20 seconds with heat gun at 400 deg.celcius and 35% air flow and we're ready to start flashing!

You'll need a C232HM-DDHSL-0 USB to MPSE cable 3.3V-0.5m as seen in Acill's YouTube video noted above! Follow the links below the video description to download the files you need and how to connect the cable to your TF1260. Once set up flashing my TF1260 literally took a few seconds.

All tests carried out running AmigaOS 3.2.1.

Testing with old firmware at 50 Mhz: 

Testing with old firmware at 62.5 Mhz:

Testing with updated firmware at 50 Mhz:

Testing with updated firmware at 62.5 Mhz:

Quick summary: The TF1260 lost a little bit (1.08MIPS) of overall MIPS/MFLOPS (don't tell your Amiga 500😉) BUT got a nice speed increase (1.17 MB/s) on the onbaord IDE speed and a very significant 2 to3 times read/write speed increase with the onboard fast ram !

and of course the obligatory view of the east end of the man cave at the time of writing this post👍

 

SOLVED !!!Screechy noise and very low sound in my Amiga 4000

First off Merry Christmas/ Happy Holidays to everyone ! Let's hope that 2022 will finally be the end of  this covid virus.

I'm happy to say after a good 3 month period of not being able to sit down in a 'regular chair' (or basically do anything else!) without pain after surgery in early August to repair a fully torn quadricep tendon in my right leg that my Amiga 4000 sound issues have been solved!!!

Thanks to Frank at www.retrorewind.ca the sound issue was an easy fix and YES it was the recently replaced capacitors afterall lol

The issue was the type of capacitors used for the audio caps. Although they worked fine for almost 2 years the ceramic caps used ultimately failed...whether it had something to with polarization etc. who knows but after they were replaced with new electrolytic caps the mods have been flowing beautifully in the man cave once again!

SO take note and make sure you don't see caps like these below on your Amiga when you eventually get them recapped...most of us are just happy to get the work done by a trusted (hopefully) source and don't even pay attention to what was used or perhaps you did them yourself and didn't know any better like me...well now ya know 😉

 
 

 Screechy noise and very low sound in my Amiga 4000

And of course I know I know .......'it's the caps..replace THE CAPS!' ..how many times have we heard/ read that in the Amiga forums over the past 10 or more years since our original Amiga hardware is reaching the age where the original capacitors are failing and that unsightly acid spews all over our precious motherboards damaging traces and other components....BUT this time it might not be the caps or maybe it is....let me explain. 

I replaced all the caps on my MB and original power supply 2 years ago and all was fine until one day last year I decided to try one of the ATX PSU's out on my A4000...don't ask me why because I had replaced the original noisy fan in the PSU and it was running as silent as ever but such is the way my head goes many times in my man cave!? I purchased the ATX adapter tried the 1st ATX PSU and nothing happened so tried another older PSU and pfft bang boom a loud noise and the magic smoke came out of the PSU!%^#@?! Turned off the power to my A4000 and my adrenaline was through the roof with worry about destroying a perfectly great system for the sake of trying out this darn ATX adapter !!! Then the real hysteria came in .....what if my beloved Cyberstorm MKIII was fried too !#@#!@#$%! oh Lord I had a migraine just thinking about it so started immediately taking out my CS-MKIII to inspect it for any obvious damage and it passed the visual, touch, and more importantly smell testing so next step was to plug my original PSU in and try to boot her up without my CS-MKIII and voila thank God and all that is good that she booted up just fine !!!! ALELULIA !!! Plug my CS-MKIII back in again and all good except I got to look at some of my fav demos to celebrate and when I turn on my amp all I hear is a loud high pitched screeching noise and when the demo starts I could barely hear it in the background of the screeching. Unplug the amp, check the cables, have a quick look inside the case and all ok so this is where I'm at and here's a few pics before I take her all apart and have a good luck at the MB

 

 

 

 ..more to follow on this issue hopefully sometime soon but ya never know what goes on inside & more importantly outside the mancave but more importantly I hope everyone is managing ok with this Covid-19 virus pandemic still going on and supposedly stronger this fall then it first was discovered last February so please stay safe !