ScuzzBlog: Diaries April 2017
Entry 26th April 2017: Post: 1
A1200 Tower Issue
Hi
I have this A1200 tower which is a bit of a beast made from scraps that
I found around the place. Been working generally for nine years I guess.
Every so often though I start to lose the computer. Starts with a
flickering screen. Then failures whilst running and finally just will
not boot. What I do is fold open the A1200 motherboard which is exposed
as I don't have the case on the tower and then I simply press on the
various connectors that sit over the chips and that does the job. For a
while.
Anyway... today I stripped the machine down and tried to establish what
was wrong. Couldn't really find any issues and then by luck I was having
a nose around the ribbon connectors to the hard drive. And there it
was... the ribbon connector had come away. I recall the issue vaguely as
there is red tape holding the ribbon in place. It's broken.
I very quickly swapped the ribbon out and reconnected, together with the
EZKey-board connector which had come adrift and booted up and it didn't
work. Nothing... dead as a proverbial dead thing with a very good reason
for being dead. And then it struck me to check the photographs I had
been taking. It was then that I noted that the ribbon actually flipped
over half way down its length on the original. What threw me was the
connector looked the same as on the original. I struggled a bit as the
ribbon had a tidy tie to keep it, er well, tidy but managed to get the
connector the other way round on the buffered interface.
Whoopee and double whoopee doo doo... Magic. Worked first time. I knew
she would. Anyroadup as they say [ who are these they .. shut up ] I
decided to take some close up images of the A1200 motherboard to see if
I could find evidence of the lesser spotted capacitor leaky thing. Well
known in Amiga forum circles as the biggest issue affecting Amiga 1200s.
I never raise issues regarding hardware any more on the forums as I
always get the stock reply ' recapp ' or what ever.
The machine is now back in the little room running an animation on loop
to test. Looking good.
What next ? Cuppa tea first.
At this point I'm supposed say its an Amiga 1200 EZTower system with Rev
something motherboard, Blizzard whatsit turbo with 32MB RAM. Scan doubly
flicker whatsit and EZkey widget running on a Japanese old stylie
monitor. The OS is 3.0 as I has not changed them chips yet. Also has a
buffy the hard drive slayer interface and some drives, two hard and one
bendy. One of which is from an Austin A35... or should that be Amiga
500... Same thing really. And no outer case... cus that's on the other
table upside down full of disks, or are they discs. Good question.
That's all the tech stuff. What the **ck is in this tea... !!!!!
Pictures on the website probably later this week when I can find my
developing tank and red light.
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