Green screen of death.

[willbloke]

Right , dug an old A1200 out at work , it's got an unidentifiable RAM expansion , with a socket (unpopulated) for I guess an FPU , and a battery , again I'm guessing for a RTC .
With this in place you get a green screen on boot , which checking on the NET is a memory fault.

With the card dropped out it gets to the load WB screen and gets no further .

I'ts got a 4.8G HD , which you can hear spin up , but nothing else happens .

Now forgive me , it's been so long since I used an Amiga that I'm struggling to remember , but you have to get it into WB to check the HD I think ?

Is there any likelyhood the the RAM can be resurrected or is it toast ?

Time to try and locate those old WB discs I guess !

[willbloke]

Ok , both mouse buttons pressed it shows no HD , so I guess that it's borked .

Just found another randon 2.5 HD , this doesn't show up either , could be 2 duff discs (they're bound to be old) or is it a duff HD controller on Mobo ?

The green screen thing is confusing , sometimes it does , sometimes it doesn't :confused:

[willbloke]

Right !

Good here init !:afro:

The trapdoor card is a Power Computing 4M/CLK/FPU PC528 which doesn't seem to be on the Amiga Hardware site ?

I'm using my rapier like mind to deduce it's 4 Meg with a real time clock and a socket for an FPU !

[willbloke]

You need to have a look at the motherboard itself to see if there are any signs of visible damage there. It's possible for a trapdoor expansion to trigger it, but unlikely. As for the hard drives - unless they contain Amiga partitions and RDB, they're not going to show up in the early startup menu, even if they're perfectly good. You need to boot from a floppy with a hard drive prep tool to really see if they're working, not working, or working with a DOS or Windows setup.

Ahh , right , so if it's not been partitioned with WB it won't show up then ?

Let's see if I can find any WB discs !

Woohoo , found some WB3 discs ....

Arrrghhh .
They don't work , drive spins and does the "feed a disc in screen."

Sooo , either the drive is dead or the 19 year old discs are unreadable ....:furious:

I'm not going to let this beat me ...
What about if I build a WinUAE machine , could I effectively build a working virtual machine and swap the HD into the real Amiga .
Is this possible ?

[willbloke]

Right !

One of the other Techs here saw me playing with the A1200 yesterday and said "I've got an old Amiga in the loft , you can have"

Bought it in today , it's an A500 , fired up ok played a bit of Turrican with a dodgy joystick , loaded WB ok .

Went to restart it and that's now got the green screen of death :pissed:

Now I know the A500 floppy is working , will it fit into the A1200 ?

I'd rather get the A1200 working if possible ??

[willbloke]

Just call me magic fingers !

The A1200 is playing ball , must of just needed a bit of a run, it works with the RAM card , detects the RAM card as working , but won't boot from floppy.

Before I killed the A500 it was booting fine , so I know that floppy is ok .
Just tried the A1200 with a game that worked in the A500 and it wouldn't read the disc , so I know the drive is duff .

Will the A500 floppy fit/work in the A1200 ?

[willbloke]

Hi LordSpunky , I did have a quick Google , do you actually have a museum or a shed load of "old junk" :lol:

I've tried it with the A1200 and A500 PSUs , same result.
I do remember that the A1200 PSU was a bit marginal .

I did the old "twist the A500" trick which sometimes re-seats the chips , but same result , Green Screen .

I'll strip the A500 floppy out and try it on Monday .
In amongst the box of bits there was an external drive , also US , now I see you can still get A1200 internal floppies from a well known Amiga spare parts supplier , would one of these fit the external drive chassis as well ?

If I can get it to format the HD , I will shell out for a new HD , are modern IDE/PATA drives compatible with an A1200 ?

I'm not going to let this beat me !

[willbloke]

Yep , that's the one Oldboy .

Is this what I need ?http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=883

It says it comes with an unregistered version of WHDLOAD , how is this limited ?
The A500 came with a few games (Zool , SWIV etc.) how much hassle are these to install onto HD/CF ?

Is this joystick any good ?  http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=52&products_id=610

I used to have a mini version that was ace , but fell apart may moons ago .
Are there any other Amiga joysticks out there ?
Would be good to get 4 player Bomberman going again !

I still need to sort a floppy and hope the WB discs are readable .

What's the service life of compact flash like , don't they have a quite limited read/write life ?

Only other thing worrying me is the A1200 keyboard , the caps lock light flicks on briefly as it starts up , but once running doesn't respond .
Also the CNTRL -A-A reset doesn't seem to work , but then is that only from WB , as I haven't been able to get it to WB yet , it's difficult to know if the keyboard is ok ?

sorry for all the questions , I'm quite excited !!!   :cool:


Oh , one other thing the external drive doesn't work , not sure at this time if it's just the drive or if the whole thing is knackered .
I guess if I get the known working drive out the A500 , I could try it on the interface .

[willbloke]

2 Machines doing the same green screen thing sounds suss?  What monitor are you using ?

I'm not that daft !

I'm using an LG TV/Monitor.

I worked fine through the RF Modulator using composite on the A500 , played a game for a bit , THEN it green screened on startup .

The A1200 has now decided to play ball , can get at the early startup screen fine , but it won't read any floppies , even one that worked fine on the A500 before it packed up.

So I'm going to swap the A500 floppy into the A1200 temporarily , just to prove it's behaving , then I guess it's time to order a replacement from Amigakit , and maybe a CF reader .

[willbloke]

YES !
The A1200 lives !
Put the A500 floppy in and it boots WB3.
Some keys of the keyboard don't work and whilst it will recognise the HD it won't format it , but it is a 11 year old HD .

Is there anything to check before ordering a new keyboard ?
(the ribbon is seated properly as far as I can tell)

News just in , the (new/second hand) HD is formatting !

Wooo !

[willbloke]

Thanks Oldboy !

The fun and games continued earlier , I managed to install most of WB , it crapped out on , I think , Locale (CRC error) , but it boots from HD , so hopefully all is not lost .

I should , in theory , have another set of WB 3 discs somewhere , just a case of finding them !

I had a look in the loft earlier , found an A500 case and motherboard , a gutted A600 and a few original Commodore service notes for A500 , A2000 and A590 !

I should , in theory have another A1200 keyboard because i towered an A1200 years back , but I haven't found it yet . (Used an A2000 keyboard)

Did find the A1200 tower and the A2000 keyboard and a Commodore 1084 monitor , but haven't found the cable yet , will have to make another I guess .

Wow , this is more challenging than a role playing game !:lol:

[willbloke]

Ha !

I work in IT as well , look after about 35 PCs and about 30 Macs ish , but this is much more fun.

Got a placement student who is slightly underwhelmed with the power of an Amiga , until I point out that it's older than him !

There's some kind of perverse pleasure in breathing new life into an old computer .

[willbloke]

Just out of curiosity, How was the green screen problem resolved. If that was mentioned, I missed it.

The A1200 just decided it was happy after all !

I haven't had another look at the A500 as I had to pinch the floppy to get the A1200 going !

Whilst in the loft last night I did find my old A590 , somewhere there should be another A500 to go with it , I doubt if the HD will boot after all these years , but I will try and see if I can get it going .

[willbloke]

I'm glad to hear everything is coming together!
 
What are you going to do with all the other goodies?  I saw you mention an A600 and a A1200 tower?  Those sounds cool and I'd like to know what you got in them.
 
Hardware specs. are my CRACK!:roflmao:

Well , as I had to go over to the dark side in 95 , I never really got into the PPC accelerators and all the rest of the clones/off shoots .

I haven't found the video cable for the tower yet , but from memory it was a plain jane A1200 , with I think an 030 accelerator, 4M RAM, hard drive , 2 floppies and CD-ROM , with an external MIDI interface fitted inside the PC case .
It was never very pretty , because the A1200 is quite long the case was really old and ugly , but worked  ok.

Somewhere I have an A2000 that I was given , not sure if it worked , but I used the keyboard from that for the A1200 tower .

I bought a load of stuff off a guy who used to fix Amigas , that's how I ended up with the A600 , no floppy , might try and see if it'll boot off another floppy ?

I've also got my old A500 with A590 , that's not been run for so long I doubt it'll spin up .
Found a GVP sidecar RAM/HD expansion as well , not sure if that works .
Somewhere I've got a CDTV , but the drive is knackered , I seem to remember that I modded it to work with standard Amiga mouse and keyboard ??

The A1200 that I'm playing with at work at the moment was given to me years back and has sat unloved in a cupboard , the floppies duff , but I've temporarily stuck an A500 floppy in it , the keyboard is also knackered , some lines of the switching are shot so only certain keys work .

I've not found the A2000 yet , I moved house 9 years ago , hope I didn't throw it away .

I also found a few original Commodore service/repair manuals , A500 , A600 , A590 , there's a box of stuff I haven't gone through yet !