Amiga 2000 powers up, but no screen

[adrian82]

Hi folks,

I got an Amiga 2000 from a friend whose son has left it in her flat years ago and it hasn't been fired up ever since.

Now, I brought it to my home and openend the case to check for any obviuous problems (shorted contacts etc) and then powered it on. I have removed the A2090 beforehands. The power-light goes from dim-red to bright-red and the keyboards capslock LED lights up for a second, but the screen remains black and nothing else happens. ROM version is 2.04.

Any hints ? I have plenty of Amiga spare-parts (CPU, ROM, Custom-chips etc), but I haven't started replacing anything yet due to lack of time. I will first need to dust the Amiga and then replace some components (bad joystick port, battery and bad audio-connectors). But if anyone could give me an advice in advance, that would be great.


Adrian

[nishtek]

Try Denise Chip as a starter.

[orb85750]

Sounds as if we may be in the same boat.  But does your system at least recognize the existence of the floppy drive?  Mine does not.

[JimS]

The first step is to press down on all the socketed chips. After time, the chips can get oxidized and can back out of their sockets a bit... giving you poor contact. Just pull the disk bay and apply a little thumb pressure to those chips.

[rkauer]

 Also sack off the barrel battery. It is located right behind the keyboard/mouse/joystick connectors.

 Those little buggers have a nasty behaviour of leaking its contents over the motherboard, destroying it! Just use a small pliers and cut it out, the A2000 don't need it.

[adrian82]

Hi,

yes, I will try push down all the chips today and then replacing bit by bit. Also, I will desolder the bad battery, the rest of the broken joystick-port and the bad chinch connectors. The board will look like new soon . Will take the A2000 to my university's office today. Got a soldering and various tools there at hand (hey, it's a physics department .


Later,

Adrian

[adrian82]

Hi,

okey, it's working again. I pulled out Denise, the 68k and the ROM-chip, cleaned the contacts with very fine abrasive paper.

Also replaced the second joystick-port (the previous owner managed to pull it off the PCB, with only the pins remaining, but didn't do any damage to the board), cleaned everything thoroughly with compressed air, replaced the leaky battery.

Now it looks almost like new. Unfortunately, the RCA-jacks were bent down, because the cables connected to them were to heavy over the time. I unsoldered all 3 jacks but haven't found appropriate replacement yet. All jacks I could found at German distributors don't fit. The original ones are from Hosiden (www.hosiden.co.jp) and they are still available, unfortunately I don't know any distributor in Germany or Europe .

Adrian