A1200 woes

[BodyHammeR]

Hi there!

This weekend I had the urge to set up my A1200 again to play some games and watch some demos.

After an initial plugging everything in and powering on I noticed two things:

The 2, W, S, X and numerical island 9 keys did not work
The harddisk was dying.

The keyboard was reanimated quite easily with the help of a vacuum cleaner and I was glad to find an old harddisk that still worked.

After reinstalling everything again and rejoicing via playing Pinball Illusions and watching some old demos I remembered that the install disk of my EasyADF thing I got from Amigakit still needed to be backed up to an ADF file.

As soon as I had EasyADF loaded and inserted the disk all hell broke loose and:

I think I saw nearly all error-colours in the last hour or so:

Yellow, Red, Purple, Grey, Dark Grey,

while adding/removing things such as the harddisk, Micronik RCA120 (also tried refitting the SIMM and changing JP2) and refitting the Kickstart ROMs.

Since I haven't got the slightest clue what's gone wrong with this thing all of a sudden and don't know any ways of fixing it (apart from the things I've already attempted) I fear this machine will have to be relocated to the bin :-(

Unless of course someone here knows exactly what to do to keep me a happy A1200 owner?

Please help me out, I only have a A500 with Kick 1.2 left as far as working Amigas are concerned...

[CLS2086]

Hi,
for your keyboard, take it off all screw and use a contact cleaner on the plastic film, but not on carbon contact !!

for the rest :
Take a voltmeter and check how much you have at the floppy PS connector. Under 4.86, you've got problems :
- it could be a dying PSU
- A1200 CMS caps are dead and need to be replaced.

[BodyHammeR]

Take a voltmeter and check how much you have at the floppy PS connector. Under 4.86, you've got problems :
- it could be a dying PSU
- A1200 CMS caps are dead and need to be replaced

Ok I opened the case again, unplugged the Floppy PS connector and measured from there:

At first the machine displayed it's usual blight as mentioned in the first post, after a couple of unsuccessful attempts at measuring (machine keeps resetting, should have mentioned that in my first post as well) suddenly the harddisk kept spinning up and before I could say 'wat krijgen we nou?!' I saw my usual Workbench screen on the monitor.

Anyway the combination of Black + Red wires give me 6.62 Volts so power shouldn't be the issue.

I -am- curious as to why it suddenly stopped working and why it started working again for no apparant reason other than applying the multimeter probes to the floppy PS cable.

'Ghost in the Machine' maybe?

Anyway, I'll turn it off, reconnect the floppy PS cable and close the case and see if it still works.

Thanks for your help so far!

EDIT

Yes it indeed seems to work again after putting it back together.

My A1200 is now happily running Creep by Artwork & Polka Bros (however at the first attempt it crashed/resetted after about 20 seconds). All seems fine now.

I hope it will continue to work fine until the end of the world!

(but I'll get back to you as soon as there are any more/new issues )