Gayle on the A600 Damaged?

[leirbag28]

 Hi everyone, I just noticed that my external Floppy port does not work on my A600. I checked it because I noticed I accidentally allowed some metal to make contat with the serial and floppy ports at the same time.............so I said to myself "boy I hope I didn't damage anything" so then I checked both the serial (works but sluggish) and the floppy which does not work.

 I am not sure if it was damaged prior to this or maybe because I might have plugged a SilverSurfer adapter ontop of the Gayle chip incorrectly?

 So basically my question is...if the external floppy port is damaged, does this mean the Gayle chip is damaged?

I want it to work because I want to install a Subway USB card via the silversurfer Gayle chip adaptor.

 I tried the A600 without the adaptor and without my Apollo 630 and the eternal floppy still doesnt work.

please help.

[Matt_H]

Isn't the floppy controller Paula's job? Does Gayle really control the external port?

Is everything else working okay?

[leirbag28]

Everything seems ok ecept for the Serial port which seems slow..........I am not sure if its supposed to be that way.....I was trying to use the SCALA ECHO EE100 to control my Video camera through the LANC port but its sluggish and buttons dont react right away........on my SX32 it works fine! (I think the SX32 may have a enhanced serial port?)

 But I do belive it is the job of Gayle to control at least the internal floppy?

[Matt_H]

But I do belive it is the job of Gayle to control at least the internal floppy?

Ah. Nope, that's Paula. Gayle does the IDE controller. (Link)

The onboard serial ports of the Amiga are pretty slow. I don't know if the SX32 has an enhanced one, but adjusting your Serial prefs on the 600 may help speed things up.

[Kronos]

All Amigas, from A1000 to CD32, share the same CIAs, only difference is that package.

One of them caters the parport and the keyboard, while the other does serial and floppy (in combination with Paula).

The slow serial bus might be just due to slow setting in the prefs, but if it is really a HW-prob, and he still has the non-working floppy ....

Problem is you just can't replace the SMD-CIAs in any reasonble way  :-x

[Doobrey]

As others have said, the main culprit is probably the U8 CIA chip, since that handles floppy,serial and half the parallel port.

 The other CIA (U7) also handles a bit of the floppy port,parallel and also joystick ports, So try playing a game to see the port works with a joystick.
 If you can, try printing something. If the joy/mouse ports work OK, but printing doesn`t,it looks like the U8 is faulty.
If printing doesnt work, and you have joy/mouse problems, then U7 could be at fault.
 If both of those work OK, I`d suspect the Paula chip (handles sound,serial,floppy and joyports), does sound play OK on your 600?

I doubt very much that you`ve damaged the Gayle chip. The CIAs are first in line to get blown if you short something across the ports at the back.
If Gayle was damaged, you`d probably have a whole lot more problems than you`ve described, ranging from IDE or PCMCIA problems to even the Amiga not booting..

[leirbag28]

hmm I am gonna have to check.......but as far as I know...........I have never ever had successfull printing on an Amiga....except the A1000 more than 10 years ago using a Hewlet Packard LaserJet III, the culprit may be this program called EnPrint which I bought and installed.......and since all my Amigas use the same copied HD, they all have it. But DSS 8 + always works fine.

 But let me go play with my A600 and see whats up.

[leirbag28]

Nope! everything seems to be working............DSS8+ on the parrallel, they joystick works.....sound works....................serial seems to work....................

only the floppy drive does not (the external one)

Harddrive is fine and internal floppy is fine.

so whats up?

by the way I have a similar problem on my 1200 except in that case its the internal one that doesnt work.....evryting else is fine!

[Doobrey]

Doh, I really should learn to read...
I didn`t realise the internal floppy was working..though you had no internal floppy!

Is the external floppy dead as a dodo? or does the motor spin/light flash but nothing seems to show up?
Does the external floppy work on your 1200?

Looking at the schematics, the only thing different on the external floppy are the addition of 12v,5v,GND,SEL3,SEL2,_RESET and _MTRX lines.
 
If you`ve got a multimeter handy,on the external floppy  using pins 3-7 as ground,have you got +12v present on pin 23, and +5v on pin 12?
 

[leirbag28]

Yeah I do have an internal Floppy and its working fine. And yes the External Floppy is dead as a Dodo.

as for the A1200.........I think the internal does NOT work but the light stays on!  and then the external works perfectly (its like the exact opposite problem of my A600)

I have a multimeter somewhere I think