OK, I've got 23 Amiga 500's - now what?

[starf81]

Here's another question for you all ... should the startup screen (the hand/disk screen) have a purple background, or is my 1084S monitor faulty?

It is correct for Amigas with Kickstart 2.0 and following but that screen is animated (a disk enters into a floppy drive...  there isn't any hand).
Otherwise, the previous kickstart versions (1.0-1.3) shows the hand with the disk on a WHITE background.

Alex

[giantweta]

Dodgy screen then. Oh well. :/
I've got an old Acorn AKF40 hanging around that I might try - might have to disassemble the 23pin plug to make up a new cable though because they're impossible to find here.

I guess my next question has to be, where can I get a copy of Kickstart/Workbench 1.3 so I can boot these things?

[TheMagicM]

I guess my next question has to be, where can I get a copy of Kickstart/Workbench 1.3 so I can boot these things?

buy it on ebay or have someone close to you help you out.  I'm sure someone here can mail something to ya.  If they are stock Amiga 500's, I'd ebay them all if you're not interested in playing around with one.

[glitch]

Hi,

    Completely off topic.  I realized you were from New Zeland with the "weta" in your account name.  Peter Jackson's special effects shop was Weta Digital or something like that...  Great... now WTF is a weta?  (Almost afraid to ask)

-G

P.S.  We spell it "Colour" up here too...

[odin]

Trust me....you don't want to know. You certainly don't want to do a google picturesearch on 'weta'...

[weirdami]

Yeah, you might just need to push the chips back in and maybe spray some canned air through things. I heard about a technique that involved twisting and bending the case to eseat the chips, but I don't know if that really works. Anyone know about that?

[glitch]

Ewwww!

[6]

23!  and I thought 4 was excessive.  But $20 is a good price, especially.

Do the Commodore Drop.  Pick the A500s straight up 6-8 inches and drop them flat on a solid surface, maybe a couple of times.  Then try them again.

6

[giantweta]

dropping from a height ... ahhhh the subtle approach!
Hey it's worth a try.

So is Workbench 1.3 is still a jealously guarded bit of commercial software? Or can it be downloaded onto a PC from somewhere and then be written to an Amiga-spec floppy disk? I assume this is where RAWrite may come in handy.

[alx]

So is Workbench 1.3 is still a jealously guarded bit of commercial software? Or can it be downloaded onto a PC from somewhere and then be written to an Amiga-spec floppy disk? I assume this is where RAWrite may come in handy.

You cannot download it for free, I'm afraid.  If you want to emulate an Amiga as well then Amiga Forever comes with the images, however putting them onto an Amiga disk wouldn't be nice; the Amiga has a more flexible floppy controller than the PC, with the result that the PC cannot write to Amiga disks.  Unless you've got a working Amiga that can read PC disks, then it wouldn't be possible.  If you just want to check that the systems are working, then you could grab any bootable disk, like a demo, but again you wouldn't be able to write it to disk.  I'd have thought that you'll need to go looking round for the physical disks.

[PaSha]

One of the machines has Commodore A500 written on the case - is this a special version?

Nope, it's just newer than the others.

There's one A500 Plus - unfortunately it's not one of the working ones.

The A500 plus has 1 MB of ram (as opposed to 512kB in the A500) kickstart v2.04 and a slightly better chipset. And as already mentioned, an onboard clock with a battery that's probably leaking.

What's usually the problem when the power light flashes and nothing else happens?

http://ftp.uni-paderborn.de/pub/aminet/hard/misc/errormessages.txt

http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/aminet/hard/hack/Amigafix.txt
4) Green Screen; 10 short 1 long power LED blink
      a) clean and re-insert Agnus chip

I know I've seen a larger list of 'blink-codes' somewhere, but I couldn't find it.

A couple of the machines had green power lights, most of them were red. What's the significance of the colour?

red=older ones
green=newer ones

-Paul

[giantweta]

PaSha wrote:  

-Paul

Thanks Paul, the flashing lights, screen etc info is great.

I found a bootable copy of TextCraft Plus and booted up a couple of the machines successfully. At least I can test them to some extent now.

I had a look at the A500 Plus board - yup, leaking battery and  green corrosion on all the pins around one of the recessed chips, and brown on some of the resistors (rust?). It's not looking good!

I'm wary of cleaning/scrubbibg the boards with meths/vinegar/meths/water ... how careful do I need to be to avoid getting various bits wet?

[Argo]

Beowulf Cluster!?

[bloodline]

Argo wrote:
Beowulf Cluster!?

:roflmao:

[AdMartin]

Getting bits wet is no problem, as long as you're 100% sure they're dry once you turn the power on. I think I read in an old thread here that some people would wash complete motherboards and then let them dry and allegedly it worked fine! Though, maybe I read it somewhere else... and don't hold me responsible if something goes wrong... :-P

[giantweta]

AdMartin wrote:
Getting bits wet is no problem, as long as you're 100% sure they're dry once you turn the power on. I think I read in an old thread here that some people would wash complete motherboards and then let them dry and allegedly it worked fine! Though, maybe I read it somewhere else... and don't hold me responsible if something goes wrong... :-P

Hey, what have I got to lose?! I'm sure I'll get the hang of it after the first 4 or 5 attempts to ressurect the dead ones. By the time I get to the currently working ones that probably need a clean too I just might know what I'm doing!