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[Mickey]

Hi everyone,

Since nobody here at home can appreciate I decided to tell you all about what I did today. Yes the subject gave it away. I hadn't realized those roms sit so tight in the motherboard and I dared to take pliers and rip em out. Put the new pair in and to my wonderful surprise my miggy booted and now I'm a 0.1 ROM happier.

Anyone have similar "daring" experiences?

Thanks for listening. :-D :-) :-D

mickey

[WarPiper]

hehe.....living life on the edge, are we?

[Desmon]

I've seen worse things done to a precious Amiga.

I hope you at least observed static electricity precautions.

[Ilwrath]

Not too much daring on Amiga... I've always been very careful with them... About the riskiest thing I've done is maybe accidently plug a floppy drive cable in upside down or unplug a serial device while the machine was powered up...

Now, my x86 boxes... you name it... Heck just recently, I accidently pulled a graphics card out of a machine that I forgot was plugged in. (ATX-style machines don't really shut off, with the soft-power...) I remembered I hadn't bothered to unplug it as I was removing the card and seeing a green LED on the motherboard still glowing... Didn't seem to harm anything though. (shrug)

Thinking about it, I used to be fairly abusive to my C64s, too... I remember fixing fuses by removing them and replacing them with a small copper wire, and other such nonsense... ;-) I guess it's just the Amigas that get pampered.

[Effy]

Removing roms is easy. Only need a good big screwdriver and enough patience. Installing a Powerflyer (aka Winner Fast ATA controller) is a bigger problem because you need to plug that thing (A1200 version) onto the motherboard. If you don't push hard enough the thing won't boot. If you push too hard you damage the motherboard like I already did once ... :-o

[Doobrey]

I once had to make a longer floppy drive cable out out 17 bits of loudspeaker cable ( I`d just towered a 1200 and forgot about the short cable they have!)

Anyway, I "cut and shut" the original FD cable with the speaker wire, then insulated the joins with bog standard cellotape..

Powered up the miggy, up came the purple "insert disk" screen, so I shoved a WB3 disk in..no change.
Powered off, checked the cable and found 2 wires crossed over.
Powered up fine, except there were now icons on the workbench screen for DF0,1,2 and 3 !!
Checked again, found another couple of crossed wires.

I also abused a ZX Spectrum years ago. I found that when it`s powered up, if you run a flat bladed screwdriver up and down the legs of the ROM chip, the TV would start flashing funky colours and patterns ;-)

Finally, I regularly reboot my PC by giving it a hard kicking under the desk, accompanied by shouting 4 letter words at it, but then everyone else does that too, don`t you ??

[blobrana]

The last time i sweated profusely in front of a computer was when i had to Flashed a Bios...don`t laugh.

i could do it blindfold now...

infact, i sliced a finger on a cooling fan ,... :-D

[Ilwrath]

The last time i sweated profusely in front of a computer was when i had to Flashed a Bios...don`t laugh.

Hey, don't laugh, but in a past life (as a sys-admin) I destroyed a (fairly expensive) laptop by not paying attention and flashing it with the wrong file. We shipped it back to the vendor and claimed we didn't know what happened, the user just said it stopped working. :-D Anyhow, the short is, BE CAREFUL when flashing a bios to a device. (unless it's one of the new PC mobo's with the dual BIOS chips, then go ahead and blast it.)

[game_fan]

Hehe, working as a computer technician we really used to play about with machines ot just plain f*ck up.

Pulling IDE cables out of drives whilst the machine is turned on (on most Windows machines the system just hangs till you plug it back in and the machine runs like nothing has happened - who says Windows isn`t stable, lol).

Pulling out video cards whilst machines have been turned on.

Putting magnets to the bosses hard drive (held all the transaction records as the machine was used as a till) after she screwed us all for money.

Dropping a monitor down a flight of stairs and then giving it to out boss to take to a customers house to install (when turned on it started sparking and smoke came form the top).

And probably the biggest f*ck up of all leaving a laptop top on a work bench and then accidently dropping a screwdriver which went through the screen (not my fault, honest )

You name it it had been done.

A funny customer story going back to last Christmas, a customer bought a £3500 Pc for his son to act us a home recording studio, a week later the machine came back in crawling (it took over 20 mins to boot into windows), fault, the hard drive had been filled with MP3`s and porn.
Seeing as the parents were so abusive saying we sold them defective products we took great delight in demonstarting what was wrong

[KidIce]

My last "daring" electronic related activity was putting an Afterburner (internal light) in my Gameboy Advance.

Barring a smidge of dust seepage, it turned out great.