ok thanks for that.. yea i figured out it was the left.. now i just hope its ok and it's just my usb adapter that doesn't work well with it. do you know if there is a particularly good usb/ps2 adapter for the A2000 so I know I have something good? I have one coming in the mail because i wanted to have one for my A1200 still.. but sadly it looks like it's the same one that I have now.. could it be that some usb optical mice don't work great with these usb to amiga mouse adapters?
Not really. They connect a little differently, that's for sure. But the principal is the same. They do need power, maybe the power pin isn't connected.
IF the ports were for some reason bad, what chip would be responsible for that and how hard would it be to repair?
Most of the time it's physical damage to the 9 pin connector caused by rage throwing the mouse or joystick. That's a little tricky because you need a fair bit of heat to get the things out of the board. Maybe a broken pin can be bridged, but it's usually a replace job. There are replacements for the port, but the modern ones aren't as solid as the originals.
If you are talking about the adapter getting power OK|, the port is OK, then the mouse pulses from movement get buffered in one chip before being read by Denise. It's nearly always the bufffer chip isn't working. U202 on the schematic (does both ports). the signals are labelled M0V, M0H, M1V, M1H. The type of chip is an 74LS157. The actual connections are listed in the schematic link, Pages "Paula" for the ports, and page "Denise" for where the signals for mouse movement are read by the machine,..
This is all for a Rev 6.2 board, you might well have earlier.
Yes you are correct again the one on the right is the zero drive and what it tries to boot from.. but i have little confidence the disks I'm using. Most are later 2.05 and later OS expecting disks.. i'm using the mono output for now.. which should show anything that comes out of the RGB port right? just grayscale? like if I booted from a lemmings disk (not that i have that game) I'd see everything just in b/w?
Normal for A500 and A2000. Phono composite is grey scale, but colour from RGB port OK.
I haven't tried swapping the drives to see if maybe the other works better? i have a disk cleaning disk I can pop in there to help insure the heads are clean.. the right drive seems to behave healthy. sounds good but yea could be sick.. i've used pressured air to blow out dust from around the area and throughout the Box. Nothing scary came out.. just some acceptable dust bunnies
Not just cleaning, also a little lube on the worm gear that moves the heads across the disk.
Good channel for that stuff (techniques);-
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=gadgetuk164+floppyWell according to the seller the TF cards work like this.. If no 3.1 or newer.. no ram.. no CF card.. and 030 defautls to 7mhz for compatibility.. so yea the card does still "work" without 3.1+ but i figure what's the point if nothing actually improves with it in.. so I'll keep the card out till I replace the rom.. and i have to install the denise scan doubler as well when it arrives
I didn't know about the hot key! I will try that out tonight.. and swap the disk drives on the chance that left drive might be in better working order..
https://defkey.com/workbench-amigaos-shortcutsThe really funky shortcuts let you flip between running programs.