A600 problems....

[darksun9210]

Hi all,
managed to get a few things off of ebay for a reasonable price, and got an A600 thrown in for free! always liked the idea of the size of the A600, but never wanted one for all the obvious reasons, but now i have one...

its just your bog standard, 1Meg A600. no hard disk, or expansions. plugged it into the TV, the rom screen came up with the floppy disk "anyone there?" click. all seems fine.
i had a spare 3.1rom for A500/2000 laying around, so plugged it in. switched on, rom 3.1 screen. excellent!
had a floppy with the demo "arte" on it. booted fine. music, graphics, usual stuff. after about five minutes, processor error. guru meditation. rebooted. yellow screen of death. indicates the CPU trapped an error before the system stared. incase it was the rom (i had issues with it in a rev5 A500) i swapped it back to the 2.05rom.
switched on. rom screen, insert disk. hmmm ok. booted arte. little later, guru meditation. pocessor trap error.

got bored, and have been working on my A1200's/house/garden in the mean time.

before i give up and buy a 'new' A600 mainboard (pretty much a whole new amiga), are there any common faults i should look out for? blown caps? dodgy traces?

Thanks for your time...  :-)

[Fingers]

Tried it with any other programs/games aside from the one you mentioned?

I know it won't be the actual demo's fault, but still would like to hear about it...

PZ.

[darksun9210]

i'll try it tonight. i've had to have a shuffle round as my "toys" were "leaking downstairs" into the lounge but i should have some time to do a full health check tonight.

[mike-]

To use an a500/2000 3.1 rom in an a600, you need to bend one of the pins on the kick away. I'll find my manual and post the procedure

[mike-]

hum, wait a minute. thats for an a500
And only rev 3 and 5.

Maybe you need the a600 specific roms?  

[darksun9210]

yeah i was thinking that after i saw "3.1rom - A600" seperate from the A500/A2000 versions on amigakit. but this one is labled A500/A600/A2000. oh well.

i've put the original 2.05 rom back in that it came with, to rule that out as a problem. so it is literally as it came out the factory. i was left with the feeling of "its a bit crashy" and was wondering if there were any generic things to check before i pop the lid one more time :-)
i'll have a play later to see what i can see...

and yeah, i remember that mucking around with a rev3/5 A500 board, run a wire from pin 1 to leg 21 with pin 21 bent away from the socket, run another wire from pin something to your left nostril while standing on one leg holding a goldfish bowl. :lol:

[Matt_H]

You should try more software before writing off the motherboard. My guess is that either that demo is expecting a 1.3 ROM, in which case neither 2.05 or 3.1 will work, or it wants more than 1MB of RAM.

(And yes, A500/A600/A2000 ROMs are all the same)

[darksun9210]

right, i think after two nights of pratting about with this thing i've got it nailed.

you're right, the 3.1rom is compatable with the A600, so thats good. :-) managed to boot workbench 3.1
after more trouble shooting, it looks like the floppy drive is playing up. not sure if it needs re-aligning, or a clean or what, but for some reason, it doesn't like any of my external drives either. not that any of them are "known good", but its a bit suspect that out of four externals, no floppy drive wants to work without throwing up errors.
parallel and serial ports work fine, parnet/sernet work ok. video is good, audio is fine. just that floppy drive producing random "read/write error on disk block xxxx". can usually click ok and it goes away, only that it comes back again on another random disk block. the floppy disks are ok as they work fine in any other machine. just gets a bit tiresome booting workbench off of floppy to have to click OK about 6 or 7 times after sitting through
"gree grunk, gree grunk, gree grunk - can't read that bit, try again? ok, oh i can read it now... hang on, gree grunk gree grunk, no. i dunno what this next bit means either. try again?"

i guess another order to amigakit... :-D

[Tenacious]

It might be interesting to format and load a HD on you 1200 and move it to you 600.

[rkauer]

 Just use a diskette cleaner (if you find one) and you are set.

 No disk cleaner? Carefully open the Amiga, take out the top floppy unit cover and use a cotton swab with some isoproppyl alcohol (99% purity, available in drug stores, depending your country laws) in the reading/writing heads. Wait to the alcohol evaporates and close everything again.

[InTheSand]

darksun9210 wrote:
the 3.1rom is compatable with the A600, so thats good. :-)

Do all the 3.1 ROMs have support for the onboard IDE of the A600, or does it require a specific version? If so, you may find you won't be able to use an internal hard drive with this ROM.

 - Ali