A1200 Blackscreening.

[EDanaII]

Just for giggles, I decided to resurrect my meager 'miga 1200. I hooked it up and powered it on and... blackscreen. The power light is on, so I know it's got power, and the image on the display is black, instead of the blue I normally get with no signal.

I booted it up with no mouse, I don't remember if this is a factor. I can't find my original 'miggy mouse, so I tried again with an old serial Kensington mouse -- I don't remember if these are compatible or not -- however, this time I did get the purple "Load Workbench," but only once. Since then, it's been black screening again.

Looking up the color screen codes for the Amiga, I find that a black screen means: passed all hardware tests, so I'm not sure what's going on here. It's been 10 years since I used it, and even longer since I used it seriously. I'm sure I'm forgetting something critical.

Any and all clues, greatly appreciated.

Ed.

[AmiBoy]

I have the exact same problem with my secon un-expanded 1200. I havent even got the Insert Worbench Disk screen though  :-(

I hope someone has an answer

[rkauer]

 Your Miggy have an internal hd? If yes, the black screen is normal when you have a unvalidated partition. Just keep the Amiga on for up to 8 hours to allow the kickstart program to fix the problem for you.

 The Amiga have a proprietary mouse, you can't use any other type of mouse without a converter.

 Other chance is you have a bad PSU, or the capacitors on the motherboard and in the PSU have dried. It's an inexpensive fix, will only cost you a few bucks and some patience.

 Plus: do you use your 1200 with a tv or a monitor? Amiga monitors are 15kHz. Modern ones can't sync to a lower frequency like that...

[Damion]

If you have any type of expansion card in the trapdoor, try re-seating it (and any RAM which may be on it). This has been the cause of a few "black screen" problems for me.

[EDanaII]

Well, dip me in $#!+ and call me a "poopsicle!" RKauer nailed it. While my 1200 did have a hard drive, it wasn't currently installed, so I'm assuming that it was taking it's time trying to validate something that wasn't there. All I needed to do was wait. I have to wonder about this though, I would have thought that, the moment it tried to detect a drive and didn't find it, it would have asked for the WB disk, but... such was not the case. Of course, I may still be misunderstanding the situation.

Oh well, next steps, either find that mouse or get a new one and reinstall the hard drive...


@ -D-

I thought that too and that's why I removed the memory expansion before I tried to boot it, just in case.

Ed.

[rkauer]

 The 3.0 ROM in the A1200 always wait ~15s for any IDE device attached (30s if 3.1 ROM is installed).

[Cheeeky]

I've had this problem and found it to be the pins on the internal IDE connector. A little tweaking and all is well.