Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: koaftder on June 21, 2004, 09:05:53 PM
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The other day i was cleaning my appartment, and i moved a few things out onto the porch to free up some space in the living room. I set my amiga 1000 on the railing ( i live on the 2nd floor ) and the wind blew it over the edge, so it fell 2 stories and landed on concrete.
The case was definately destroyed, and there were several fractures on the motherboard, one of which pretty much went down the entire length of the pcb.
Over the course of a few days, i managed to repair all the traces on the pcb. Several ic sockets were destroyed, so i had to solder the dip chips right in, probably better that way anyway, wont be having any socket oxidation issues in the near future.
The amiga 1000 did manage to survive, but the floppy drive inside of it didnt, but i have a few spares, so no worries.
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Sold it.
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Bought it :insane: :juggler: :furious:
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So, let me get this straight. Your Amiga fell two stories, landed on concrete, destroyed the case, destroyed the floppy drive, cracked the motherboard, and damaged chip sockets.... And you REPAIRED IT? damn, that's dedication.
I never did anything too stupid to an Amiga.
I destroyed some data once by being in a hurry. I was swapping SCSI drives around, and didn't realize I hadn't properly terminated the chain. The backup I had made was corrupt. I didn't realize the termination error or test my backup before reformatting the master, though. d'oh!
I blew a CIA chip on my old A500 by hot swapping a parallel port digitizer. Simple enough to fix, though. Ended up costing me like $10 for a new CIA. As lessons go, it was a cheap one.
That's about it, really. I've been pretty fortunate through the years.
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I dumped an entire 16oz soda into the vent holes of my running A1200. IT SURVIVED!
The soda ran across the top of the floppy drive and then pooled on the bottom of the case. Had to take it apart and give it a good cleaning before I could use it again. :-o
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Selling my A600 was the worst decision i've ever made.
I miss it dearly.
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Didnt backup my A3000 about 2 times..lost it all..3rd time, I started backing up my system.
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I dropped a load of lemonade into a C64 (cleaned up fine ;-)), and wedged my C128 into an overstuffed wooden box under the bed - which was fine until my other half jumped into bed, it broke off 6 keys :-(
It's easy to make a silly mistake if you're in a hurry or tired, but at least you made the effort to put it right!
Not so much stupid as bizarre was when my Sister fell on my Vic20 when it was sat on the living room carpet, the case was cracked so me and a friend rebuilt it into a case made of (glued together) lego, where it lasted for the next 10 years until I found a nice one to replace it ...
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Nothing so extreme! Sounds stupid but very easy to do things like that! Glad you managed to repair.
I always used to hotswap mouse and 2nd joystick and also printer/scanner etc. Always got away with it. Bet I wouldn't now, though!
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OK, I think I can win this one hands down...
I was stationed in Belize, Central America for 12 months back in 1990 and took my trusty old A2000 with me. It was hot, humid and there was no air conditioning. This was not the best environment for an expensive computer system to be running in.
After many months of faultless operation, the A2000 started blowing its PSU fuse at irregular intervals - sometimes once per week, sometimes twice a day. As a result, I kept a stash of spare fuses in my desk draw and simply replaced the blown one when necessary.
One day, I was busy writing a rather important letter using Final Writer when the fuse blew. I checked my draw and found that I had no spare fuses. Being in a rush, rather than do the sensible thing and run over to the electronics section and grab a handfull more, I decided to bodge the repair and jam a paperclip across the contacts on the fuse holder...
I switched on, the Amiga came to life, Workbench loaded and I was about to launch Final Writer when a huge flashes of sparks, flames and smoke poured out of the back of the Amiga. Needless to say, the PSU had actually caught fire and I classed my A2000 as "BER" (Beyond Economic Repair).
As a result of this "bodge" I then had to order a new A1500 from the UK and transfer my surviving components from the A2000 to the A1500. To this day, I have NEVER used a paperclip as a fuse again :-)
Oh, and I finished the letter using a good, old manual typewriter...
Did I win?
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I managed to go through several Amiga models without much of a problem.
However... :P
I had bought a brand new A1200 (this was when they first came out). It was too much of a pain to get a real 2.5'' HD at the time so I opted for a 3.5'' external HD box. It included a special cable that connected to the A1200's internal 2.5'' IDE hearder. So everything went fine and dandy. There were a few times when I reorganized my room and moved the A1200, A2000 around. Then, one faithful move, I plugged the cable in backwards. This wouldn't be a BIG deal with most IDE connectors, except that this special cable had power running on some of the pins...
So I plug everything in and "poof" the A1200 refused to boot up anymore. Luckily all I ended up doing was frying my HD. Unfortuantly, a "cartoonist" friend of mine was working on a picture with deluxe paint on my system and it got lost.
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I poured a full mug of coffee across my A1200 while it was on. Oops. It flooded the whole thing, and I ripped the power cable out of the back as soon as I realised what I'd done. After a pretty intense clean out it did work fine...
...but only for a week. After that, one of the serial chips cooked itself & bubbled up inside. ook. Whatever caused that killed the whole machine, it wouldn't boot. I replaced the chip with one from a broken A1200 motherboard I had spare, but still no go - it was utterly dead.
dana
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that_punk_guy wrote:
Sold it.
I'd like to second that...
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My A1200 took a flying lesson when I was trying to figure out my IDE interface and CD-Rom. Having to leave for work any minute I was rushing (bad idea) and balanced my amiga on the edge of the desk, still holding the cable attached to my Amiga I turned to reach for the CD-Rom or PSU and yanked it off the desk. :-o
Yikes. I lost the top quarter of my harddisk; it would just freeze up when trying to access the last gig.
Luckily the rest of my hardware survived and I think I've mentally blocked out the other falls my Amiga has taken.
Oh and blowing up something by swapping cables round when it's turned on will never happen to me!!! :-D
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A couple of things spring to mind.
1. Years ago, I hacked my A1200 into a PC tower case,but the floppy cable was too short to reach the floppy drive.
I was desparate to get it running that night, and need the floppy to format the HD..
I didn`t have any spare IDC cable laying around to make one, all I could find was a reel of speaker cable.
So, I set about doing a "cut and shut" on the original floppy cable, and used 17 pieces of speaker cable to extend it..
Then it came to extending the floppy power ( no idea why I didn`t use the AT PSU..) and hacked some more speaker cable onto the floppy power connector on the A1200.
Turned it on, all was working well, but the floppy seemed a little slow. Then I noticed the lovely smell of burning plastic
I looked inside the case, and the floppy power cable was on fire :-o
Luckily the whole setup survived.
2. The same crispy A1200, powered up sat on desk..
I needed to grab a disk from a shelf high up above the desk, so being the impatient idiot I am, I stood on the desk to reach it...that`s when I learnt how fragile chipboard desks can be !
The A1200 hit the floor with a thump, then I heard the HD reset and Workbench came back up on the monitor. I really thought that the HD would have suffered some damage from the fall,but it`s still working 7 years on :-D
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Simple things like not putting a cover over the Amiga when people are trying to do the electrics, with bits of plaster flying everywhere as I try to circum-navigate Hockenheim for the 27th time.
It creates an unusual sound to the boot-up sequence, with everything going as normal, then the hard drive spins faster and faster, making an increasingly worrying sound before you opt to turn the damn thing off.
Computer vacuum cleaners are under-rated, in my opinion. It's turned out to be a lifesaver twice now.
Of course, wiggling the Squirrel SCSI adaptor to fit the CD-ROM into the PCMIA slot so much that eventually one (ONE!) pin breaks in the PCMIA slot, rendering gigabytes stored on CD useless. Noooooooo!
Thank heavens for WinUAE. I could play Superfrog again (except then my Virtual grand Prix CD was too scratched! After 2 years of waiting to play it again! Augh!)
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I decided to execute a file called VIRUS that I found on one of my floppies once. Hmm, wasn't my smartest move. Luckily I had a backup of the RDB on floppy.
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Hum,
I once put in new ROM chips into the wrong slots and tested them with a finger to see how hot they would get...
And i didn`t notice them glowing red - i burnt my fingers...
(er, handy if your a safe cracker).
Luckely i switched off before they melted the board, and amazingly they worked afterwards...
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Ripped out the external floppy disk on my old A500
while it was on. i had done it a million times,
the million and 1th time it destroyed the CIA.
poo poo poo.
Everyone get a PEG II
it's the future of amiga.
regards
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Bought a new 300W PC-PSU for me A1200, switch the +5 and +12 by mistake. I was not looking on the manual carelessly. Switch on. !!>poof
It took me a month to find a new mobo. The replacement mobo was an Amiga Inc. My old floppy(1.76MB) didn't work. I had to re-wire the mobo for the old floppy to work. I found a shcematic of the connection to make the panasonic drive to become high dens. Instead, I followed the comparison of the original C= design. Switched on. It booted. Worked since. Wheew! :-)
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Back in 95 I knocked a 64oz big gulp of coke into the open/empty 5 1/4 bay on the front of my A2000 while it was on. The screen went red as I was yanking the power cable out. I opened up the case, turned it upside down on the floor. I put two fans on it for 2 days. After that it powered right back up like nothing happened!.
:-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o
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The wackiest thing that happened to my Amiga was when I was cleaning
it with kitchen foam.
The letters of the keys wore off, it's now a partially naked Amiga!
Oh, and I remember when I couldn't get my Blizzard 1230-IV to fit in
the trapdoor expansion, Power Computing reccomended I cut the
shielding around the Zorro slot. Why I don't know but it looks like a
war zone in there.
My clockport cover also snapped off and rattled about inside.
:-D
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Used a "modem cable" (no, not *null*modem) to transfer data between my old A500 and fresh and new A4000D, because it was "shorter" than my null modem cable (though I could run it at >51600bps). Very stupid, because the Tx/Rx wires were not crossed and the power lines were routed. Fried the soldered CIA of the A4000 immediately. Very stupid.
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adolescent wrote:
I decided to execute a file called VIRUS that I found on one of my floppies once. Hmm, wasn't my smartest move. Luckily I had a backup of the RDB on floppy.
While not the most harmful, that's definately the stupidest thing so far :)
Myself, I decided to wire up a fan for my a4k/ppc while it was turned on. Amazingly only my harddrive (my only harddrive and no backup, sigh) got destroyed.
Non-amiga related we tried reviving the hd, though. It gave these click noises and refused to spin up, so we decided that it probably just needed a little more power to snap back on. Giving a hd just 13 volts made the chips on it become big, round, smelly and smoky.
Sincerely,
-Kenneth Straarup.
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I once tried boost an A1000 by putting in a 16MHz 68000 and soldering a 14MHz clock signal from the custom chips.
Didn't work oddly enough (the CPU and chip set are very closely coupled so it'd never work, but I didn't know that then...).
So I put back the 68010 and it worked fine :-)
Heh, I was doing overclocking back in the 80's!
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Changing the resolution of my MicroVitec montior from PAL to A2024 to see what would happen, not a good idea... :-o :-(
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Stupidest things I've done... I wanted to take a picture of the inside of my A1200 (with a 3.5" disk installed inside ontop of the shield), so I opened the top and let the keyboard stay plugged in and stil in the top cover so it looked like an open book so to say. Positioned myself in front of the machine with camera, repositioned myself and must have moved the rugg (computer was on the floor) cause the next thing the keyboard slided out of the holes in the topcover and landed on the harddrive witch started to make stupid sounds and never worked since.
Another stupid thing was not that long after. Satt in front of the computer (about a meter away) on a air mathress and playing a game while finnished of a beer. Being a bit woosy I jogelled with the bottle a bit and at first it was no problem... 2nd or 3rd time around i dropped the bottle... it bounced of the mathress and smached into the monitor... luckily it only took a small chip off the monitor glass but everytime I use that monitor I'm reminded of my stupidity. ;)
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Not realy something I did but I borrowed my 1950 monitor to a friend. His A3000 had the scandoubler module on and installed a CVPPC also with scandoubling on sending out 4*15Khz to the monitor made to cope with max 35Khz. Needless to say it didn't end well for the monitor (sounded like a popcorn maker and all the "good blue smoke" left it). :(
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Replaced each individual key with another keyboard.
*Hey, it was a great idea then, but the touch to it sucked.
Then probably trading off the accelerator card for some PC hardware, big mistake, but who cares though, probably pick up myself a 060 accelerator and make it even better. :-D
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First...I was halfway through my first year in electronics at school. At this time i was "of course" an expert... (yeah right!) I wanted an extra floppy drive on my first A500. I already had a msx-spectravideo computer wich i opened and removed the floppy from. I then soldered a cable myself from the floppytastion to the ext. drive. on the back of the A500. Then powered it up and smoke arrived. The lare two resistors between the two 8520 chips inside the amiga was burned up.
Second... I made a wooden case for my A600. Pretty nice if i may say so myself... Only thing i forgot, keyboard. An adapter to an external keboard was not awailable at the moment. After a LOT of searching i gave it up.
So there... :-)
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During a game of Cannon Fodder I made that cup of coffee and poured it through the vents like it asked.
Kidding. :-)
The silliest thing I did was replace it with a PC. Since then the A500+ has sat in the cupboard 95% of the time. :-(
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that_punk_guy wrote:
Sold it.
Aye! :cry:
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I was in the middle of linking up my 1200 with my PC. The Amiga was switched on, and so was the PC. I attached the laplink cable to the Amiga, and the I proceeded to attach it to the PC. Not thinking about the Amigas somewhat different parallel port, and being somewhat clumsy when trying to attach the cable to the PC, sparks was emitted from the backside of the pc, it turned itself off, and a smell of burned electronics filled the room...
Fortunately it was only the PC motherboard which fried, and I got a new one claiming it "just died on me". :)
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Oh and I once lugged the machine setup outside and onto the garden table to enjoy outdoor gaming but of course it was a nice sunny day and I could hardle see what was on the screen and so I lugged the lot back indoors.
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Ive done may stupid things to my Amigas............................Particularly CD32's!
This is one story (The WorsT!) My brother had just given me a Power PC Mac with a G3 processor in it........................since i don't care much for macs...I was wondering if there was anything I could snatch from it and put it in My CD32 wich had an SX32 pro at the time.................well, I noticed that the G3 Processor upgrade looked identical to the SX32 connector that plugs it into the CD32........and since Amiga was beginning to go to PowerPC at the time.I thought "hmmm these connectors must probably comply with a certain standard, so I am sure this G3 will certainly give my CD32 a SUPER burst of power!....so I did the NON logical utmost stupidity and connected the G3 card into my CD32's expansion port..it fit perfectly...........except when I switched it on.there was no TURBO mode as I had hoped....but there was Smoke and Snap Crackle Popping sound..........................................Ahhhhh to my total relief.......only the G3 card was damaged and my CD32 was ok............My bother was pissed that he ever gave me that...........G3 cards were super expensive at the time............and yet I was more glad that my less costing CD32 survived..I could care less about the G3.
Love my Amiga darn it!
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Where do I start?
I've misaligned a floppy power connector in my tower; the cable melted with a cloud of disgusting smelling smoke. Everything (except the melted cable, of course!) worked fine once connected properly!
I have also - stupidly - put an 8mb expansion board into the A1200 slot *the wrong way around*... how I managed to get it to stay there I'll never know (brute force, probably) - but it made a funny noise when I switched it on (and off again very quickly)... but the memory card never worked again.
I've connected things to the 2.5" IDE header incorrectly a few times; never any damage, though - touch wood.
What else? Tripped over joystick leads, tugging the plug out of the socket? Again, never any damage fortunately.
My 1942 monitor died for no apparent reason, as did my A2000 (looks like a diode on the mobo burned out) :-( I don't think that either of those were my fault, although I'd just been cleaning all the dust out of the A2000...
I seem to recall destroying an A1200 mobo (accidentally, of course) - can't remember if it shorted against something in the tower, or whether one of the many socket-over-a-chip bolt-on bits wasn't connected properly...
The best one was once after totally rebuilding everything into the tower and connecting it all up, I switched on and nothing happened. Bam - turn off; panicky check to see if anything had melted. Nope. Checked all the connecters - OK. Turned on again... nothing... hmmm...
My heart was in my mouth thinking that I'd destroyed everything, when I realised that I hadn't connected the PSU to the wall socket - DOH! :-) :lol: :lol:
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Most stupid thing, that I did was in the "good old days" of
Workbench 1.2: When my A500 was new to me, I deleted the
"Empty-Drawer" on my original WB Disk and then I didn't know how to get it back...
Greetings,
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Oh man there's so many stupid things I've done to Amigas over time!
I read something about powering an A1200 Motherboard via the floppy power supply header, so I merrily connected an AT PSU and it surprisingly worked. However, the sound output wasn't working properly so I realised it was a bad idea.
Amazingly, the A1200 sufferred no ill effects.
The other silly thing I did was to ignore the slightly strained sound from the chip fan attached to my overclocked '040. One day it detached from the chip and since then I'm presented with a red screen every time I turn on my machine.
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Selling my A1000 and not having an Amiga for a few months before getting my A3000. Then selling that for an Pegasos II All is great with the Peg) and having the person I sold it to while thinking it would be used and cared for my someone that loves Amiga as much as I do part it out and make a nice bit more then I sold it to him for on ebay.
But hey I got my Pegasos II so all is well now!
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Giving ShapeShifer/MacOS a partition past the 4 gig mark. It wrapped round and ate the RDB.
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On my old A1200 I replaced the Kickstart 3.0s with 3.1s and had them offset by one pin because I blatently ignored the arrows printed right on the motherboard. Cooked the accelerator card for some reason :-?
Them chips can get pretty damn hot though I found out!
-Jamie
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The stupidest thing?
I fell in love with the damned thing...
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I let an over-enthusiastic hobbyist connect his A1200 to my A4000T via a Parnet cable that he had made the night before. Well the A4000T refused to boot after that. It was unusual because BOTH CIAs were fried. And I can tell you it was no fun trying to find a guy in South Africa who had spare CIAs, and also could solder them directly onto the mobo. I opened up the Parnet cable and he hadn't grounded it properly. I was not amused.
Annoys me everytime I open the case and see the scars: but the good ol' A4000T has served me well ever since.
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I've done a few stupid things over the years, all of them should've been avoidable.
One time, I was in a rush to boot up my A2000 and I put a floppy disk in upside down. I waited a few minutes for it to boot before realizing I'd the thing in wrong. Amazingly, the floppy drive still works to this day except for the eject button. I've to use a pair of tweezers to take disks out. Over 15 years old and still working.
The other stupid thing I did was throw away the 2mb Chip RAM SIMM from my A4000D. After I'd moved to a new house, the machine wouldn't boot. So, I opened it up and started swapping components to see what was the matter. Somehow I got it into my head that the SIMM was bad and threw it away. That's the only piece of computer hardware that I've thrown away in the last 7 years! It turns out that during the move the case became warped, and I didn't realize it until several days later. So, I'd to buy a new case, and use an 8mb SIMM for chip RAM, and there was most likely nothing wrong with the original SIMM.
Not Amiga related, but I've nearly killed myself several times while trying to wire up power switches on old AT PCs. Always unplug it.
Not as exciting as sparks and flames, and melting chips.
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Stupidest thing I ever did was to plug in a PeeCee keyboard in my A2000. Didn't know any better then, and promptly blew all the keyboard caps. Thanks to Tom D-Tek Weeks, I got it back up and running. Been real careful since then.
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Many, many years ago, I let a friend borrow my A500. When I got it back a couple of weeks later, it turned out his 3 year old sister had jumped on the trafo, repeatedly; it only worked if you turned it upside down (some components were, of course, loose). The stupid thing? Instead of fixing it (another friend had borrowed my soldering iron), I just kept it upside down (some times I had to whack it real hard to get it to work). After some time, it of course refused to work. So, rather than fixing it properly, I "fixed" it with some spare pieces of wire and some tape (don't ask me how). Lots of tape. Needless to say it overheated...
The moral of the story? If someone tells you "Trust me, I'm an electrician", run. Run very fast, and very far...
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Wondering what would happen if I hit the 'Low Level Format Button' in HDToolBox :smack:
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The dumbest thing I remember doing is copying my BACKUP disk onto my MASTER. I lost about a week of work. After that, I started using different colored labels for masters and backups.
The dumbest thing I've ever heard ANY person do... oh, man. A friend of mine had the hard drive for his A500 that plugged into the side. It tended to overheat, so when it started getting flukey, he took it off the A500, and put it in the freezer for 10 minutes to cool it off. That drive survived a few weeks before it died. When he was convinced it wouldn't work anymore, he opened it up, turned it on, and did "spinart" on the platters as they were going at full speed. I'm surprised he didn't take his whole hand off! :lol:
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I buddy of mine managed to press two floppies into the floppy drive! :-\
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The CIAs were the bane of my Amiga-experience. Owing to somewhat careless use of a printer switchbox, I fried them twice in succession on the A500, and managed to destroy both chips on the A4000 by moving the computer about on my table so much that the modem cable worked itself lose. The stupidest thing I did was fry a 2.04 ROM. The pins on those chips are very sturdy, and require some pressure to be positioned over the holes in the socket. I didn't want to use my fingers, and needed something which would bend a lot of them at the same time. So I used an elongated plastic money chip---the kind you use in poker or roulette. Of course, those things are loaded with static electricity...
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I once tried to connect a SCSI harddisk to my IDE connector of my SX-1 by just pressing the 40 pin IDE connector in the 50 pin SCSI port of the harddrive.
My CD32 said boom the SX-1 survived.
that was really stupid :-P
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I once put a kickstart switch I just got from Ve**lia into an Amiga 2000 without having a closer look at it first. Well, the cables were broken and it caught fire instantly. Not only did it smell badly but it fried my Amiga ... :-/
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I once got mad at an a600 and punched it, from that point on the keyboard never worked again and the hard disk would occasionally fail making really loud clunking noises.
As for my a1200t, a micronik busboard blew that up, no fault of mine :(
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I was 10 years old and I wanted to play populous with the data disk which made my team with a commodore flag and the evil`s with an Atari one. When I inserted it, the disk`s little metal cover remained inside my A500`s floppy drive and I tried to remove it with a fork!!! :-o lol needless to say that I destroyed that poor floppy drive and when my big bro returned and saw the disaster he was chasing me around the house and I runned straight to mum :-D
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I axe-kicked my A500 when Gauntlet II froze up on the eightieth or so level. Either the A500 is very durable, or I was just a wussy kid, because I only broke the F1 key, which I later fixed using an old scrap keyboard of some kind. That must have been at least ten years ago.
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I axe-kicked my A500 when Gauntlet II froze up on the eightieth or so level. Either the A500 is very durable, or I was just a wussy kid
The A500's are very durable. Back in the early 90's, I was at a friend's house, and we were playing his A500. It locked up on something or another, and he punched it. Hard. This was WHILE THE UNIT WAS STILL ON!
After he settled down, we opened the Amiga and surveyed the damage. A couple mounts were bent/broken, the 68000 had come completely out and was sitting loose on the motherboard about 5 inches from its socket, the Agnus was completely out, as well. Denise was half-dislodged, as were several other things.
We just removed all the remaining chips and resocketted everything. Applied power, and voila, back to normal. Incredible! So, apparently under some conditions you can rip a 68000 out of the socket while the machine is running, and not damage anything! haha!
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Tried to plug my scanner into the external diskette drive port while the power was on. The ports weren't labeled at the time in my new tower. I had a "brain fart" and guessed wrong as to which port was the printer port. Scanner was supposed to be plugged into the printer port. Some things went "poof" and needed repair.
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I think putting it in storage was the worst. It came out with half the keys all yucky yellow. :-(
The C=64 was saved from discoloration, though. It's brown, the anti-yellow. :-) The VIC chip went all wonky, instead. :-(
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Connected an external floppy drive on my first a500 while the power was still on...
The mainboard was completely f.u.b.a.r. and had to be replaced
...learned an expensive lesson :-D