The first upgrade was to swap out my rather noisy stock PSU and put in the super solid and mostly quiet Big Foot PSU, made in Loup City, Nebraska.
The first thing you notice when you pick it up and compare it to the stock PSU is that this piece of kit is really well-made. It's almost a shame it gets tucked into the case as it's really nice looking for a PSU.The bigfoot 2000 is a 300 watt replacement power supply for the A2000. It's completely designed as a drop-in replacement for the existing power supply so is guaranteed to fit, without alterations to the A2000 case being necessary.
Anyway, I figured last year when I acquired it that since I was adding a couple of extra bits here and there, a little extra juice wasn't a bad thing. Plus the Bigfoot I found was NOS.
It really was a drop in affair and installation was seamless.
Then I turned it on. My video feed, for some reason, was receiving interference. Large bands were slowly strolling vertically across my CRT monitor. I couldn't believe it! Peeved, I turned everything off and picked up my original PSU. I figured, "I'm already this far, I might as well just fix my old one." So I pulled the old PSU apart and swapped fans with a new, high-capacity near-silent fan that I'd used in the past and buttoned it all back up again.
I pulled the Bigfoot out and ... that's when I noticed something I'd never really paid attention to before. There is a little switch on the back of the bigfoot which allows you to swap the voltage! A huge improvement over the stock PSU, I could swap from 110 to 220, and it was set to 220! I flipped the switch to 110 and powered back up. Everything was totally fine!
So, I put my newly refurbbed old PSU on my rack in storage. A win! And my old PSU is ready for near-silent business as a solid backup.
On to project number 2: adding a Kickstart Switcher. Since I was all the way down to the PSU/FDD sled, pulling it up and out the the way was no big deal.
I have two KS Switchers in my possession.
One is from Jim Drew @ CBMStuff. The other is a NOS from ICD called the "Kickback ROM". Honestly the ICD unit looks like something from a highschool electronics project.
- Kicksart Switch from CMBstuff/Jim Drew
Depending on where you attach the clip leads would determine which button you press to activate the other ROM.
I tried the Jim Drew board first. After getting everything in place, firing up the machine would produce a purple screen. This is a color not even identified by C= in their original list of color screens (I looked).
I tried a few different clip lead options (there are multiple locations you can use) and never was able to boot. I little confused, I moved the KS ROMs over to the ICD board instead.
Same result.
With the ICD board instead of clipping to Gary or Paula or CIA chips, there was only one wire. And it was to be clipped to #18 on the CPU.
That got me to wondering. I'm bypassing the CPU entirely because I have the GeForce 030 plugged directly into the CPU slot. I wonder if using the CPU slot makes using the KS Switchers out there null and void? That doesn't really make sense to me with the CMB board, but it would make sense to me in the case of the ICD board. The lead wire going to #18 on the 68000 is going to a chip that is already bypassed, so maybe that breaks things?
In hindsight, I should have pulled the CPU card out and tried again. But since I have no intention of running without that card, it would have answered a question I suppose but not really solved my problem.
Ah well. Can't win 'em all (and it's not like I was dying to have 2.04 running, but it would have been cool).
I'm going to ping Jim Drew and see if he's ever seen this behavior before with other customers over the years. He made the KS Switch, I think, back in 1991.
