Hi All,
I recently rescued an A600 from a friend. It had been sat in a garage for 10+ years, unused and unloved.
When first powering it on, all seemed well. It read disks, ran demos, keyboard seemed good.
However, on opening it up it became obvious something had been split down the rear grill. I cleaned this up best I could and noticed some minor corrosion on a few tracks. Nothing particularly bad though and conductivity on the traces I checked seemed good.
I then ordered an A604n memory expansion from AmigaKit, an IDE-CF adapter and a 3.1 ROM (the A600 had the original non-IDE support ROM).
This is where things have rapidly gone downhill.
First, removing and refitting the keyboard - the ribbon connector has lost all its black conductive coating. The keyboard matrix itself seems ok, but keys randomly stop working until the ribbon cable is wiggled. It's now practically unusable.
Secondly, the A604n refuses to work. I've cleaned the edge connector several times, refitted the card - pushed it all the way in, left it slightly out - no difference. I'm guessing there's perhaps more corrosion than I thought
So, I now have an A600 which can correctly talk to the IDE interface, but a broken keyboard and no way to add more RAM. I had an accelerator and Indivision ECS planned for this too.
I can't see any new keyboard membranes available and without additional memory this will mostly be pointless anyway.
Worst case scenario, find an old keyboard, replace original ROM, sell as a gaming machine. I'm just sad I had so much planned for this machine
If anyone has a spare keyboard/membrane or any other suggestions regarding the memory issue - I'd be interested in hearing from you!
Steve
