malfunctioning a600

[jahc]

My A600 wont play most games I have.. such as flashback and pinball dreams. It runs Workbench software fine, and one old game (Barbarian). I also tried Spaceballs state of the art.. These games run fine on my a2000. flashback ran fine on my previous a600. I've talked to people and they think its one of the CIA chips. I got this A600 off an auction site, but it was months before I realised it was slightly faulty, and I'm not even sure if I caused it when I put a hard drive in it etc. Anyone got any ideas? The games will load but just pause forever halfway through loading.. its at a different point for each game.. the loading just pauses, and the disk drive light stays on.. I've taken out the RAM card, and unplugged the hard drive just in case it was using too much power, but it didnt help. I went to reseat the chips but then realised that the chips were soldered on. hehe.. any ideas guys?

[x56h34]

Are you sure it's not just the 2.x roms incompatibilities with some games/demos?

[TjLaZer]

Try rekicking to KS 1.3 and see if those games work.  If you want I can zip up the files and send that will do this. PM me.

[Roondar]

Actually, I'm pretty sure it's not Kickstart incompatibilties, since I own an A600 and have infact played those very games/demos on it without any problems under Kickstart 2.05.

However, I have two ideas what might be the cause:

1) Faulty drive. Since it stops loading halfway, the drive may be kaput/dirty. The drive can be replaced/cleaned, but be sure to find the proper version!

2) Faulty disks. I had that happen sometimes. A game works fine for a long time and suddenly it stops loading... Unfortunately there's not much to do other than replacing the disks and making a backup copy to new floppies/harddisk.

It could also be tons of other stuff, but if the CIA's/Paula (the chip that handles floppydisks) are broken, wouldn't other stuff also malfunction (like the mouse/sound)?

Anyway, maybe my ideas help :-)

[orange]

I'd say its flakey FDD, too. Probably drive heads need recalibration.
Its very risky to do it yourself, but there is a utility on Aminet for that.