ScuzzBlog: Diaries March 2017
Entry 6th March 2017: Post: 3
Green finally meant go
Hi
Having struggled getting those drives active I decided to
have a closer look at the one Amiga 1200 that wasn’t
responding. This is an Escom era machine and fitted with
the Eyetech 3.1 ROMs. What I tend to do to check the board
is not for the faint hearted and please don’t try it yourself.
So I stripped the computer down to just the motherboard.
No shielding and no bottom support. This way I can check
over the whole board. This one had had a few mods and I
suspect it had been in a tower. It was missing the top
shielding so it could house the 3.5” hd. You recall I got
the disk visible on Graham earlier today.
Next I sit the board on a cardboard surface and plug in a
mouse, an external floppy, the LED lights and ‘ The Power ‘.
This next bit you didn’t hear from me. I then watch the LED
lights as I bend and twist the board and press on the various
components. In this case I had a dead board other than for
a blinking green light. No disk activity. Anyway as I pressed
and bent the board around the ROM chips I was getting a more
stable green light. The board was having power issues.
Next stop was to plug in the monitor. This gave a green screen.
The board was getting past the Kickstart but failing from
that point. So I swapped out the ROM chips to some 3.0s but
that made no difference. Sadly the board is shot. Not even
sure what some of the mods are on the board.
So I retrieved a spare motherboard that I had been saving for
a tower project that just isn’t going to happen and removed the
scandoubler flicker fixer thingy, the keyboard adaptor, the
buffered interface etc. I had to find a mouse port and that was
a pig cus it had different screws to the rest of the back plates.
I plugged the board in to check and got the gentle tick of the
floppy. At least that was working from the old machine. So I
reverse engineered my motherboard removal process and plugged
the computer in. And waited.... Takes while without a hard drive.
Like magic the green had gone and we were good to go. Disk requester
and 3.0 and into Workbench. Heart in mouth as you check the mouse
cus trust me the amount of times I have no mouse control on old
machines.... Check. Next, type in a new drawer entry using the
full width spectrum of the keyboard... Check. Finally find all
the missing case screws and put a sticker on the trapdoor cover
that the machine is working and date. Unplug and slide onto shelf
storage.
So cuppa tea and feel pleased that I had three Amigas and two
floppy drives working today that were sitting idle yesterday and
have just one failure with the external hard drive. Trust me,
I shall not give up on that drive. But not tomorrow. No idea
what I shall do tomorrow...... thinks. Hmmm.
scuzz
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