I recently acquired an A4000 (with Retina BLT Z3 card, Emplant board, and a Warp Engine '040). The first thing I did was remove the slightly-fuzzy battery; I didn't see any motherboard damage.
I don't have a monitor that will sync down to 15Khz, so it took me a couple of weeks to acquire an A520 and a "VGA Box" that goes from composite-in to VGA out. I've tested this setup on my A2000 and it works fine (although fuzzy, of course).
The video signal chain looks like this:
A4K -> A520 -> composite to VGA Box -> LCD monitor
When I tried it on the A4000, at power-on I get a black screen, then 3-4 seconds later what I can best describe as a purple screen - solid color, no picture.
I tried removing EVERYTHING from the A4000 (disconnecting drives, etc) leaving only the Warp Engine, its onboard RAM, and the RAM that's in the sockets on the motherboard. I also reseated the Warp Engine and all the RAM. None of this seemed to make a difference.
The system has 40.68 ROMs (checked when I reseated the Warp Engine board).
Is this normal behavior? Not having worked with anything but A1000 and A2000s before, I was expecting some sort of kickstart screen with the please-insert-disk animation.
Suggestions on how I can proceed are sincerely appreciated.