As you may have noticed from my recent posts I’ve had problems with an Amigakit 8Mb RAM card when I tried to upgrade it with an FPU and I’ve just bought an Amitek Hawk RAM accelerator board to try and sort out my Amiga A1200.
I now know that since the same problem has come up with my new/old Amitek Hawk board, the problem must be with my Amiga A1200 itself!
I received my Amiga A1200 back from a repairer on 27-02-2024. I think my Amigakit 8Mb RAM card must have been in there all the time since then until I attempted the FPU upgrade, which meant unplugging the card. It was one of only about 50 of these cards which were too wide to just plug in through the trapdoor. I had to open up my A1200 and plug it in from the other side.
After I reinstalled this card with the FPU fitted, my A1200 became unbootable. The symptoms were the power light on with a black screen, and it may have shown a yellow screen or a red screen once. I disabled the FPU by moving the jumper back to its previous setting. However, after that, I started having problems with my A1200. It either wouldn’t boot up when the full 8Mb of RAM on the card was selected, or only with a very basic Workbench 3.0 with MUI configuration, not with one of the EAB configurations with a multicolour Workbench, Scalos, etc. The symptoms are a line of corrupt pixels in an Amigashell window during boot, and finally a series of low pitched sounds from the SCART TV with a rhythm that sounds a bit like soldiers marching. The full 8Mb RAM did work occasionally, but eventually not at all. My Amiga still worked without this card, or when it was jumpered to use less RAM.
I was shocked to find the same problem occurring with my old/new Amitek Hawk board! I’ve since cleaned the contacts on both sides of the board using wet wipes, but this hasn’t solved the problem. I’ve got some WD-40, so perhaps I should try that. I’ve also got some IPA.
Unfortunately, I haven’t got an installed and working Gotek drive or floppy drive at this moment, otherwise I could run the Amitek Hawk test software. The video about my new internal Gotek installation says I need posts and screws from my floppy drive to support it, but I no longer have the floppy drive. I may have to mount the internal style Gotek externally in a cardboard box temporarily.
Here are some pics of my A1200 trapdoor edge connector, but from one side only. I can’t get a pic from the other side without removing the board from the external connectors, but I haven’t got the skill to do that. Looking at the full resolution pics, the contacts on the section which has fewer contacts looks dirty, although I've cleaned it. Can anyone see any damage? I noticed that not all the contacts are the same length. The same problem has occurred with the card not pushed all the way in, as well as fully pushed in. Perhaps if I managed to push it in up to a certain point, it may work. I hope someone can tell me how to solve this problem.
