Amiga A2000 Semi-Resurrection

[Uncle_Meat]

I'm quite chuffed about this. I was given an elderly A2000, still in a rather tatty box along with an 1081 monitor. Problem was the old battery leakage. Unfortunately, it had been stored standing on it's back so the battery had leaked down the board. The previous owner had snipped out the battery and attached some leads to try and get it working again a couple of years ago and gave up. Anyway.

First job, clean the board a bit, give the existing sockets a bit of a clean and stand some turned pin sockets in to give things a better contact whilst testing.

Still nowt. Black screen, sod all. Onto the next suspect.. The machine had a MegAChip in there too which was also quite grotty and greenified. After getting an A500 board for spare ICs, take out the MegAChip and drop in a more standard 8372A Agnus.

Result! We have action.

Now it was still a bit tempermental, particularly if you shuffled the Agnus around a bit, need to replace that socket in the future, but for now, onwards.

The A2000 came with various cards, a GVP '030 40Mhz Combo, a Hi-8 RAM card, Sunrize Audio card, Opelvision, a capture card that I can't remember the name of now, a Tandem IDE card and a Power Computing HD Floppy thingamajig that hangs off the back of one of the floppy drive.

At first, no luck with the GVP. Black screen when fitted. Random coloured screens with the rest in. Ok, the CPU and some of the Zorro slots are a bit green and manky. Out comes the IPA and a brass brush..

Result!

All I need to now is find some WB floppies and I'm sure I've got a SCSI HDD lurking in a box around here somewhere...

Huzzah for tatty Amiga setups"

 

[BlindGerMan]

Wow!!! Very good job mate!

 

[mjnurney]

All looks familiar , good work

 

[tokyoracer]

Given?! Wow you scored big time there with all them cards, well done!

 

[lostrego]

Nice. there is nothing more rewarding after messing with any troublesome big box miggy than watching that Expansion Board Diagnostic screen with the working status mark on all of them.

 

[Hell_Labs]

Very nice.

 

[Uncle_Meat]

Quick update on this..

Good news. After much scrubbing and polishing, MegAChip is alive, for a healthy 2Mb Chip.

Not so good news. The GVP combo was not showing any amount of Fast RAM (should be 4Mb) in Workbench. The Miggy does have an 8Mb Fast card in there, I was expecting to see 12 or thereabouts in total, but only the 8. Sysinfo reports as being no 32-bit RAM. Looking at the GVP, I see that J12 can be opened or closed for autoconfig or extended, so I take the 8Mb RAM card out and close J12.

*Nnnng*. Straight into a red diagnostic screen saying, essentially "Defective" which I assume is the onboard RAM. Sysinfo does now see a GVP 4Mb RAM card, but the memory is not mapped to anywhere.

That's a job for tomorrow.

@ Hell_Labs

*brohoof* /)*(\

 

[Hell_Labs]

Our influence grows!