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[tokyoracer]

All i can say now really is I wish you the best of luck. :-)

[chiark]

Thanks :-)

Looking at the schematics, I might be being a bit too optimistic... the fuse is only in the 5v_user line, not the generic 5v line. Damn.

[arkpandora]

Hi,

Broken Amigae are always a sad experience. I wish you good luck with yours.

In a few weeks I will bring my broken machines by car to Amiga Center in France, as I haven't the skills to repair them myself. If I may help, for example by collecting other Amiga hardware (around or on the way) in exchange for sharing of travel expenses, just contact me. I live in Belgium.

[MadMonkey]

I have a spare card you can test. Although I'd prefer to test your cards in my machine. Just in case

I'll be visiting my brother in Leeds w/e 2nd Feb so let me know.

[chiark]

ArkPandora, thanks for that. I think I'll end up sending my dead 3000 (it's been dead for coming on for 13 years now) to Anthony Hoffman along with the 4000 for audio repair, but it might make more sense to use AmigaCenter as they're a bit more local!

MadMonkey, it'd be great if you can test my warpengine in your machine: if that's working, then it's the riser card, or motherboard, or PSU. Narrows it down a bit .

[chiark]

Just a quick update.

I stripped, cleaned, and inspected the motherboard and cpu card yesterday. It all looks fine, no signs of scarring or distressed chips that have given up their magic smoke.

Checked all fuses. Unfortunately they're all good :-(

Tried again, and now I get random coloured screens on power up - sometimes it'll go from white to grey, or sometimes salmon pink to purple, or ... basically completely random and not telling me anything about the state of the boot process.

I've ordered an ATX PSU converter cable: if I do borrow anyone's hardware, I want to make very, very sure that the power it's getting from the PSU is clean. This also eliminates one unknown from the equation.

The screen colours confuses the hell out of me. I know the amiga boot process, and can't think why it might be doing what it's doing. Well, other than it's fundamentally very confused :-D

[Oli_hd]

Tried again, and now I get <snip> basically completely random and not telling me anything about the state of the boot process.

Sounds like memory problems.
Check you put the 2meg chipram simm back in the right slot, clean the contacts on the memory simm too.
Remove any extra memory and try again.

There are other reasons for such behavour though, those aluminium capacitors can leak and cause the same trouble and it seems to be happening to a lot of A4000's last year. (A few years ago I didnt hear of a single report) so it may be worth probing the silver capacitors with a multimeter to see if they are reading roughly correct, I hear the ones around the RTC can specifically cause error colours on switch-on.

Its a good sign you got it to attempt to load the kickstart though, that means the chips are all working ok, or at least they are alive.

[chiark]

That's great news that it means something is working - I was mortified I'd killed it stone dead by shorting 12v to 5v somehow!

Yup, the only memory on the board is the 2MB chip ram in the chip ram slot.

Next steps then are to utterly, utterly clean the simms and cpu connectors, and to cross fingers!

The battery / rtc is long dead. I am wondering if the battery leak has damaged the machine to the point of non-booting... However, that short noise makes me thing that it's something else.

[tokyoracer]

Owning an Amiga these days seems to be like owning a classic car. Parts are running out and they are getting older so we need to keep as many alive as possible, specially the 1000 series. I'm currently "shareing the experiance" as I have given 2 Amigas to friends already so they can understand how special they really are.

[chiark]

My 1000 is working fine , as is the 500. The 2000 is a little bit sick in some way as the video output is smeared.

The 3000 is long dead.

The 4000 is potentially coming back to life after being full of beans just 38 hours ago!

[chiark]

Well, stranger and stranger.

I get the random colours with *nothing* plugged in. no memory, no CPU card. Plugging in the CPU and memory makes no difference.

I've tried different kickstart ROMs.

I think the motherboard is dead. Sniff.

[JuvUK]

hi,
there is a guy in the UK called Paul Willingham, he is a top, top bloke and really helpful, he just got my A4000 up and running for me (completely dead just a black screen) he also did the dreaded battery replacement and sorted out a load of problems for me, and he was incredably cheap, so cheap in fact that i paid him extra just to ease my conscience. would you like me to put you in touch with him?
best regards, Justin

[chiark]

Yes please! That would be great.

I'm pretty much convinced after inspecting the PSU and everything that it's the motherboard that's gone. I don't have the skills to take it any lower level than that

[JuvUK]

No problem mate, i've just send to a PM, good luck ;o)
Justin

[chiark]

Well, Paul's guess from the symptoms was spot on, unfortunately

I got a 3640 for a great price... And the 4000 lives again!

The WarpEngine is dead. :-o

Anyone know a repairer?