grabbed an 'as-is' A1200 last week. turned out to be an Escom-era A1200HD with 3.1 ROM and a 262mb HD. while it's missing the trap door cover on the bottom, i was pleasantly surprised to see that it had the DKB1202 expansion with 4mb RAM installed. some questions/observations...
- i see there's room for a DSP chip. is the 68882 the only chip that will work with this? are there different mHz ratings to look out for? what will this do for me overall if installed? what's it doing for me as it is (if anything besides the 4mb RAM)?
- i'd like to maybe pull this out and try it in my other A1200 (3.0 ROM) to see what happens, but it doesn't seem like it wants to come out. sure doesn't feel like an A500 expansion that slides out nice, this thing feels like it's soldered in. haven't pulled off the shielding yet to check the connector. didn't seem like it wanted to budge, i wasn't about to force it.
- the battery was starting to corrode, so i pulled it. couldn't see any corrosion on the contacts, should be ok? i'll be replacing this.
- at first i thought the whole unit was toast. powered up to a black screen and a busy HD light. after a while it came up to the 'insert WB disk' screen - won't boot from the HD. one thing i noticed on power-up was a funny videogame sound coming from the unit itself (maybe i can record it if nobody knows what i'm talking about). my other one sure doesn't do this, sounds maybe like a bomb dropping in Missle Command or something. i don't know if this is a power-up sound they had programmed in or if it's trying to say something's wrong.
- i'm able to boot from a 3.1 disk that i have, but don't know enough to troubleshoot from there.
- i haven't tried swapping HD's between units, think this is worth a shot to maybe see what's up?
any advice would be greatly appreciated, still trying to figure everything out. thanks!
-justin.
