Strange A1200 Behaviour!

[manicx]

One of my friends got an A1200 from eBay. It is a model made out during the ESCOM years that is mobo 1 D4 and 3.1 Roms. It is the Desktop Dynamite pack.

The strange thing is that it takes nearly 10 secs until you see the Amiga's boot screen with the floppy disk animation. Never seen an A1200 before that it takes so long.

Second problem I have, is that certain games fail to load whereas the same games work perfectly in every single Amiga I tried including my A1200. A game that I experienced problems is Kick Off 2.

I thought to replace the ROMS with the 3.0 ones (I have a spare set). I replaced them and the result is exactly the same. Still takes ages to get the boot screen and games fail to load (I tried 3-4 games and two of them didn't work).

What can be wrong? I mean, I tried the original Kick Off 2 disk that comes with a boot disk that is supposed to make the game work in every single Amiga out there and still, this A1200 is probably the only Amiga that this game failed.

Can this be a disk drive problem? I tried to connect the disk drive from my fully functional amiga (a mitsui one) to the 'strange' A1200 (it has a panasonic fdd) but it didn't work with it. Then I tried to take my external fdd out of the case and connect it to this Amiga and it was not working either (it was like reading the first track and then going back to the boot screen with the process continue in an endless loop). Thing is that the Panasonic fdd reads many disks already, so I think it may not be it. The Kick Off disk starts to boot and fails after 5-10 secs.

Any suggestions guys? It is really annoying. I took the mobo out last night but couldn't see anything wrong with it.

[bloodline]

10 seconds is pretty good for an 1200 :-)

when I first switched on my A1200 (all those years a go) I thought it was broken, I wanted and waited... and the switched it off, then back on again... stil nothing...

Then after switching it on I left it for about 30seconds and it showed the boot screen... I was very happy :-)

I fitted a Hard drive and didn't have any slow booting problems after that.

Some games have a few issues with the Amiga Technologies  A1200's due to the weird Floppy drive. Check the Aminet for any patches or try WHDload :-)

[lempkee]

bloodline: well he said that it took 12 secs to see the boot menu , hence if he uses whdload (HDD) then he still would have to wait 12++ secs before the machine boots after an poweroff or reboot.

anyway to the poster, try reseating the floppy cable + the power cable to the drive, if you have an hdd and accelerator then i would suggest you to remove thoose to see if its a power issue .

replacing the PSU which came with the a1200 is never a bad idea.

cheers

[lempkee]

oh btw, panasonic and the orginal drives works fine if u switch, just make sure the cables are inserted correctly (can be abit trick on the floppy drive... (power cable) ..

tony

[Linchpin]

Mine takes that long... and its the same board. Well it took that long untill there was a HDD on the IDE bus at least, (when it was in the vanilla case)...

[Linchpin]

Also, if you look at the drive in the a1200, it has a small PCB connected into the mobo for the FDD to connect to. Basically Escom ran out of amiga FDD's and started to use hacked PC ones, whilst there was still stock of the mobo, etc. If you get a Chinon drive from an a500, remove the PCB on the FDD connecter, plug the chinon into the Mobo - problem solved :-)

[manicx]

lempkee wrote:
bloodline: well he said that it took 12 secs to see the boot menu , hence if he uses whdload (HDD) then he still would have to wait 12++ secs before the machine boots after an poweroff or reboot.

anyway to the poster, try reseating the floppy cable + the power cable to the drive, if you have an hdd and accelerator then i would suggest you to remove thoose to see if its a power issue .

replacing the PSU which came with the a1200 is never a bad idea.

cheers

Well, I tried quite a few things:

a) Used the PSU to another Amiga beefed up with a 68030/50 and a hdd. It worked fine.

b) Tried the floppy from my other A1200. Took it out with the cable of my other A1200 and installed i as it was. It failed (other friends verified that they had the same problem).

c) Tried the 3.0 roms (as I said).

The A1200 has no extra memory or hdd. At the end of the day, I didn't know if I have to blame the FDD or the Amiga. I mean, I don't know if it is the FDD. Just made a speculation there.... Thanks.