What is the stupidest thing you ever did to your amiga?

[Doobrey]

A couple of things spring to mind.

 1. Years ago, I hacked my A1200 into a PC tower case,but the floppy cable was too short to reach the floppy drive.
I was desparate to get it running that night, and need the floppy to format the HD..
 I didn`t have any spare IDC cable laying around to make one, all I could find was a reel of speaker cable.
 So, I set about doing a "cut and shut" on the original floppy cable, and used 17 pieces of speaker cable to extend it..
 Then it came to extending the floppy power ( no idea why I didn`t use the AT PSU..) and hacked some more speaker cable onto the floppy power connector on the A1200.
 Turned it on, all was working well, but the floppy seemed a little slow. Then I noticed the lovely smell of burning plastic
 I looked inside the case, and the floppy power cable was on fire :-o
 Luckily the whole setup survived.

2. The same crispy A1200, powered up sat on desk..
 I needed to grab a disk from a shelf high up above the desk, so being the impatient idiot I am, I stood on the desk to reach it...that`s when I learnt how fragile chipboard desks can be !
 The A1200 hit the floor with a thump, then I heard the HD reset and Workbench came back up on the monitor. I really thought that the HD would have suffered some damage from the fall,but it`s still working 7 years on :-D

[The_Power_of_the_Ginger]

Simple things like not putting a cover over the Amiga when people are trying to do the electrics, with bits of plaster flying everywhere as I try to circum-navigate Hockenheim for the 27th time.

It creates an unusual sound to the boot-up sequence, with everything going as normal, then the hard drive spins faster and faster, making an increasingly worrying sound before you opt to turn the damn thing off.

Computer vacuum cleaners are under-rated, in my opinion. It's turned out to be a lifesaver twice now.

Of course, wiggling the Squirrel SCSI adaptor to fit the CD-ROM into the PCMIA slot so much that eventually one (ONE!) pin breaks in the PCMIA slot, rendering gigabytes stored on CD useless. Noooooooo!

Thank heavens for WinUAE. I could play Superfrog again (except then my Virtual grand Prix CD was too scratched! After 2 years of waiting to play it again! Augh!)

[adolescent]

I decided to execute a file called VIRUS that I found on one of my floppies once.  Hmm, wasn't my smartest move.  Luckily I had a backup of the RDB on floppy.

[blobrana]

Hum,


I once put in new ROM chips into the wrong slots and tested them with a finger to see how hot they would get...

And i didn`t notice them glowing red - i burnt my fingers...

(er, handy if your a safe cracker).

Luckely i switched off before they melted the board, and amazingly they worked afterwards...

[mikrucio]

Ripped out the external floppy disk on my old A500
while it was on. i had done it a million times,
the million and 1th time it destroyed the CIA.

poo poo poo.

Everyone get a PEG II
it's the future of amiga.

regards

[gizz72]

Bought a new 300W PC-PSU for me A1200, switch the +5 and +12 by mistake. I was not looking on the manual carelessly. Switch on. !!>poof
It took me a month to find a new mobo. The replacement mobo was an Amiga Inc. My old floppy(1.76MB) didn't work. I had to re-wire the mobo for the old floppy to work. I found a shcematic of the connection to make the panasonic drive to become high dens. Instead, I followed the comparison of the original C= design. Switched on. It booted. Worked since. Wheew! :-)

[spihunter]

Back in 95 I knocked a 64oz big gulp of coke into the open/empty 5 1/4 bay on the front of my A2000 while it was on. The screen went red as I was yanking the power cable out. I opened up the case, turned it upside down on the floor. I put two fans on it for 2 days. After that it powered right back up like nothing happened!.
 :-o  :-o  :-o  :-o  :-o  :-o

[Hyperspeed]

The wackiest thing that happened to my Amiga was when I was cleaning
it with kitchen foam.

The letters of the keys wore off, it's now a partially naked Amiga!

Oh, and I remember when I couldn't get my Blizzard 1230-IV to fit in
the trapdoor expansion, Power Computing reccomended I cut the
shielding around the Zorro slot. Why I don't know but it looks like a
war zone in there.

My clockport cover also snapped off and rattled about inside.

:-D

[platon42]

Used a "modem cable" (no, not *null*modem) to transfer data between my old A500 and fresh and new A4000D, because it was "shorter" than my null modem cable (though I could run it at >51600bps). Very stupid, because the Tx/Rx wires were not crossed and the power lines were routed. Fried the soldered CIA of the A4000 immediately. Very stupid.

[elendil]

adolescent wrote:
I decided to execute a file called VIRUS that I found on one of my floppies once.  Hmm, wasn't my smartest move.  Luckily I had a backup of the RDB on floppy.

While not the most harmful, that's definately the stupidest thing so far

Myself, I decided to wire up a fan for my a4k/ppc while it was turned on. Amazingly only my harddrive (my only harddrive and no backup, sigh) got destroyed.
Non-amiga related we tried reviving the hd, though. It gave these click noises and refused to spin up, so we decided that it probably just needed a little more power to snap back on. Giving a hd just 13 volts made the chips on it become big, round, smelly and smoky.

Sincerely,

-Kenneth Straarup.

[minator]

I once tried boost an A1000 by putting in a 16MHz 68000 and soldering a 14MHz clock signal from the custom chips.

Didn't work oddly enough (the CPU and chip set are very closely coupled so it'd never work, but I didn't know that then...).

So I put back the 68010 and it worked fine :-)



Heh, I was doing overclocking back in the 80's!

[mikey2001]

Changing the resolution of my MicroVitec montior from PAL to A2024 to see what would happen, not a good idea...  :-o  :-(

[Brian]

Stupidest things I've done... I wanted to take a picture of the inside of my A1200 (with a 3.5" disk installed inside ontop of the shield), so I opened the top and let the keyboard stay plugged in and stil in the top cover so it looked like an open book so to say. Positioned myself in front of the machine with camera, repositioned myself and must have moved the rugg (computer was on the floor) cause the next thing the keyboard slided out of the holes in the topcover and landed on the harddrive witch started to make stupid sounds and never worked since.

Another stupid thing was not that long after. Satt in front of the computer (about a meter away) on a air mathress and playing a game while finnished of a beer. Being a bit woosy I jogelled with the bottle a bit and at first it was no problem... 2nd or 3rd time around i dropped the bottle... it bounced of the mathress and smached into the monitor... luckily it only took a small chip off the monitor glass but everytime I use that monitor I'm reminded of my stupidity.

[Brian]

Not realy something I did but I borrowed my 1950 monitor to a friend. His A3000 had the scandoubler module on and installed a CVPPC also with scandoubling on sending out 4*15Khz to the monitor made to cope with max 35Khz. Needless to say it didn't end well for the monitor (sounded like a popcorn maker and all the "good blue smoke" left it).

[kd7ota]

Replaced each individual key with another keyboard.
*Hey, it was a great idea then, but the touch to it sucked.

Then probably trading off the accelerator card for some PC hardware, big mistake, but who cares though, probably pick up myself a 060 accelerator and make it even better.  :-D

[Shamron]

First...I was halfway through my first year in electronics at school. At this time i was "of course" an expert... (yeah right!) I wanted an extra floppy drive on my first A500. I already had a msx-spectravideo computer wich i opened and removed the floppy from. I then soldered a cable myself from the floppytastion to the ext. drive. on the back of the A500. Then powered it up and smoke arrived. The lare two resistors between the two 8520 chips inside the amiga was burned up.

Second... I made a wooden case for my A600. Pretty nice if i may say so myself... Only thing i forgot, keyboard. An adapter to an external keboard was not awailable at the moment. After a LOT of searching i gave it up.

So there... :-)