A.D.A. Amiga Demoscene Archive

Hi everyone...

My Amiga is as good as dead (again), so I am in need of a working one. Does anyone here have, or know someone who has, a spare Amiga 1200 for sale? The closer to Trondheim the better...

I only need the barebone Amiga. My 060 card works fine, as far as I know, and if necessary, I can use the power supply and keyboard from the old one (hence, it doesn't matter which keymap it has). It is also not essential (though desirable) that the floppy drive works.

There was one for sale on eBay (for around $100 plus almost as much for shipping) a few hours ago. It is gone now...

Anyone? It is very hard to do any decent Amiga coding without being able to test on the real thing...

I'm sorry, I'm in the UK so cannot be of assistance, but just out of curiosity, how did it die? do you have a suspicion of actually what went wrong? I've noticed an increase in Amiga deaths...let's hope they aren't all coming to the end of their natural life-cycle :|

If you can afford the storage space, it's probably a good idea to grab yourself a spare while youre at it, in case the other one goes wrong. Same idea applies to your 060 accellerator, they are going to become very hard to find before too long..

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/ will sell you an A1200 without any extras (no OS, no mouse, no PSU) for 117 Euros + shipping. I'm afraid the shipping costs will get quite high though.

Or, there's a machine available at http://www.tradera.com/Amiga_1200-auktion-54145687 . If you are satisfied with just the machine itself, then I can buy it and have it sent to you for 800SEK (the "buy now" price) + ~500SEK shipping (for shipping approx. 5 kg using ordinary postal service).

Sending without PSU/HDD will reduce shipping costs.

I also had a look at amigakit before. Heard a lot of positive things about them. Shipping costs may indeed be a problem though.

I've bought stuff of AmigaKit before and they are really good. Everyone probably knows this but I thought I might mention it as Blueberry was saying that he wanted a working floppy, the Amigas sold at AmigaKit are the Escom a1200, so the floppy won't be compatible with a lot of trackloaded stuff.

How did it die...

Well, it has gotten gradually more unstable, and then suddenly VERY unstable. In its current condition, it usually doesn't work when I turn it on (blank dark grey screen output, capslock reacts when I reboot but power led and screen do not). After about one minute, I can reboot it and it starts up fine (though it sometimes crashes a few times during WBStartup execution before coming all the way up). I can then use it for somewhere between five and ten minutes, after which crashes and returns to its grey-output state. After that, it normally has to be turned off for several hours before working (for a few minutes) again.

This might sound completely unusable, but during the time it has been like this, I have actually managed to test the final version of Sunskin a few times, do several cycle-count tests for the texture mapping discussion here on ADA, and test a compactflash card in an IDE adapter as harddisk long enough to verify that it worked (until I accidently reversed the power plug for the adapter and destroyed the card). Some of these tasks had to be stretched over multiple days, but I managed eventually. :)

As to what is wrong... My previous Amiga behaved much the same way, though I think it never got as bad as this. At that time, I suspected some hardware modifications (floppy- and pcmcia-fix) combined with using a PC power supply to drive the Amiga and a 3.5" HD. This one has not had any modifications, but I have still been using the same PSU and HD. That has come to an end now, but apparently the damage is already done.

As for getting a replacement Amiga, it turns out that Lemmus still has his old A1200 stowed away somewhere in his basement. As I will be visiting him next week anyway, the problem seems to be solved. That is, provided it survived the basement flood that destroyed all my Amiga disks...

Hmm, does anyone know if there is any hope of the data being intact on a floppy disk that has been partially submerged in water for a couple of days...?

See if you hadn't left the UK, I could have given you my spare A1200 just like that. But noooo..

And to my knowledge, the disc itself isn't very sensitive to water. It should be fairly safe to carefully break open the floppy, leave the disc to dry if it's still a bit wet, and then put it in a different case. And of course first priority is to make an image.

About the HDD, one thing to be careful with is drawing power to it through the motherboard, as many people do. The connector on the motherboard is only intended for a single FDD.

The general crashing behaviour seems to be consistent with a failing capacitor or a borderline loose connection. Both can be fixed, but I assume you've already looked for leaking electrolytic fluid, tried nudging everything around a bit and washed the board in alcohol, which rules out all the easily fixed stuff.

I've ordered both 060 card and pcmcia ethernet via amigakit and had good results both times.

it's the caps. Unless you replace them, all amigas with smd caps (a4000-a1200-a600) suffer the same fate. It may still be possible to save your mobo by changing all the caps and cleaning the leaked acid with some kind of neutraliser, but if it ate into some tracks, your mobo is a goner.

replace or have someone replace the caps on your new amiga as soon as you get it. The fact that you buy it 'new' means nothing, they are more than ten years old, they can leak any time.

caps as in capacitors? what's an smd cap?

yes, capacitors. smd stands for surface mounted. there're no drill holes, it's soldered on the surface, and smaller than the drill hole components. I don't know the exact reasons, but these tend to leak more easily than drill hole capacitors.

http://www.niccomp.com/Catalog/smcap.html-ssi

here are some repair guides

http://joj.home.texas.net/amiga/amiga00.html
http://amiga.serveftp.net/audio_repair.html#Capaci tor1

The flood was many months ago, so the disks will be dry by now. Nothing has been done to them except moving the boxes to a dry place. The water wasn't exactly clean, though. There is probably dirt on the disks. Maybe that can be blown away. We will see...

On my previous Amiga, I drew power through the motherboard for some time, but on the current one I have always connected the Amiga and the HD separately to the PSU.

The only things I have tried are blowing and pushing a bit here and there. Regarding all that capacitor/soldering stuff... well, I think I can recognize a capacitor when I see one, but that's about as far as it goes... I might be able to find someone at my work who knows how to do things like this.

I guess washing the board in alcohol should be manageable, but it is probably too late...

hi bluberry!
if you still need a a1200 board(kick3.0) i can bring it to the tum 07 demoparty.its an pal board.

Thanks, aga060, but I got one from Lemmus (which, for logistic reasons, will also be brought along to tUM). Looking forward to have a stable Amiga again. :)

It seems it is my 060 card which is faulty after all. :~(

I have replaced everything except the Blizzard 1260 and it still doesn't work (well, it worked yesterday, but not today). And both Amigas work fine without the Blizzard.

I don't see any capacitors on the Blizzard card. I will have to try that washing in alcohol thing...

have you tryed to disable the 060 cpu(boot with 020 cpu).whats happen during the "booting"?.
maybe you can post your problem at a1k.org(international section) again.
think some of this guys can help you out with hardware repairing/fixing.

a 060 draws considerably much power. do you connect extra power from the floppy port ? my 040 blizzard doesn't even bother booting if I don't support it with some extra juice.

aga060: Do you mean by holding the '2' key during startup? I tried that but with no effect. Apparently it doesn't even reach the time when it checks the '2' key.

coze: I don't think power is a problem. I have been driving the 1260 plus a 3.5" HD with a standard A1200 power supply for many years with no problems. My current configuration (compactflash as HD, no power to the floppy) draws far less power than that. Anyway, it worked fine for a couple of hours when I fired it up for the first time.

if you're using the same psu for many years, then it's quite possible that it's dying (there're lots of capacitors inside psus). and a standard a1200 psu is the most unreliable psu you can use with your system.

besides, 060 cards do not die that easily without a reason. I think you should give it a chance and try a better psu option.

Of course I will give it a chance (or five). It is not as if I really have any choice on that matter. :)

I have tried three different PSUs and two different Amigas, and the behavior is exactly the same: It works perfectly for some time, depending on how long it has been turned off (up to a few hours if it has been off for several days), then crashes once or twice, works for a few more minutes, then dies.

I washed the 1260 in alcohol (isopropanol, since plain, denaturated ethanol ("husholdningssprit") seems to be an unknown concept in Norway) yesterday. This made it work fine yesterday, but it died again today.

During the cleaning, I noticed clear signs of corrosion in one area of the board (on the side without components, between the connector and the CPU). The cleaning changed the appearance a little, and when the board was wet, the electrical traces were clearly visible and seemed undamaged, but it still seems plausible that it is this corrosion that is causing the problems, probably when the board gets hot.

I wonder what could have caused the corrosion. It can't have been leakage from components on the board itself, since the leakage would then have had to flow upwards through the board...

@blueberry: maybe you should post your findings over at amiga.org in the forum. There's got to be someone around who can help out.

Hi,

Blueberry, if you don't mind sending your card to France, you can send it to "Amiga Center". The guy running this company is well known in France as being a hardware specialist. He wiill repair your card for sure.

Just get in touch : Amiga Center

My A1200 is in perfect shape-- I pulled out of the corssbase tonight. I haven't used it since the 90s- and it still works. I'm currently converting all my old mod music over to mp3 on my PC. What a great time- remembering all these old tunes. My A1200 works like new-- it's just a basic system with a Dataflyer 1gig external hard drive. Great machine. I love the Amiga!!!

Well, as it turns out, it seems I now have two A1200s in good shape. :)

I would trade one of them for a working 1260 card any day. ;)

Consider sending your card to JJ Boulet, he may save yours.

well, Blueberry, if you're into party coding (and I'm quite sure half the community will spend the first 2 days at BP that way although everybody hates it) we probably can bring the 1260 of Dirtie's mini-miggy (if I can persuade him :) and lend it at the party place... as action of last resort ;)