Blizzard 2060 in Amiga 2000 Problem

[paul1981]

Unfortunatly I didn't get very far. The A2000 (which works ok without the blizzard card in it - to a fashion, rememembering it needed several power cycles) would either just stop dead on a white screen or after getting past the white screen go to a black screen and do nothing at all.
  ljones0

I think this is quite important. Your computer shouldn't need several power cycles to turn it on. So I'd fix that problem first, and then try it with the Blizzard card attached. Sounds like a capacitor problem on probably motherboard and PSU being as they're all so old now. There's also the reseating of the motherboard chips where possible.

I have a flaky A600 which sometimes GURUS on power on, and I suspect it needs new motherboard caps. Problem is I'm at the same time trying to test a memory expansion I bought for it recently that seems to work, but after a guru, I reboot and the memory disappears and I have to powercycle again, which sometimes doesn't always work and I get either a white screen continually or yellow/green, or a black screen which goes all weird and "out of range".

So definitely fix your motherboard issues alone first, as it may well be causing the blizzard to not function.

[paul1981]

No sign of any bulging capacitors though I need to check more carefully.
ljones

Bulging or not, they can still be dried out/defective to the point of causing problems.

On the chip heat issue, the A600 I'm having a problem with has hot running chips, much hotter than another A600 I have. Does anyone know whether this is due to dried out capacitors? Or could it be different revisions of the chips used generate different amounts of heat? Even the 68000 CPU appears to get suprisingly hot. Is this normal? Mind you, I was using different two PSU's so not a fair test...maybe one of my PSU's has high Voltage. I'll have to check that tomorrow...

[paul1981]

Sorry, I'm clutching at straws here, guessing. Don't know why my '060 was reported as an '040.
ljones

Yes, like zipper said, Workbench 2/3/3.1 ShowConfig tool doesn't recognise a 68060 at all, but being as though it detected it as 68040, then indeed your 68060 is working.
To correctly detect the cpu, download and run this program instead (similar to ShowConfig, but more sophisticated, and it recognises the 68060 correctly):

http://aminet.net/package/util/moni/WhichAmiga

Also, do make sure you have installed the 060 libs from the Blizzard2060 Install disk (Systemdisk) (also on the disk is a new cpu command for your "C:" drawer, which can control all caches/functions of the 68060):

http://phase5.a1k.org/index.php?driverslibraries

As for the electrolytic capacitors, they loose capacitance (electrical charge storage capacity) over time. Some failures are short circuits though, but if that was the case you would be able to see it (fried/leaked/exploded capacitor).

[paul1981]

Just working through the stuff to do ....

Cleaned off the connector on the blizzard and CPU slot but made no difference.

With the socketed chips even if they seem firm in their sockets should I prize them out and reseat them?

ljones

You can mate yeah, just prise them out a bit each end and push them firmly back in again.
Be extremely careful though. If you're too scared to do it I'd look into other things first like the caps and the power supply.

Amigakit sells this ATX PSU adapter:
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=998

Amigakit will probably replace all your caps as well if you ask them for a price.