A500 oddities & upgrade suggestions

[stephen_usher]

I'm afraid that all the info I've gathered about Amiga faults have come from people fixing them in YouTube videos.
(e.g. Adrian's Digital Basement, CRG and Jan Beta to name a few.)

[JezC]

I'm afraid that all the info I've gathered about Amiga faults have come from people fixing them in YouTube videos.
(e.g. Adrian's Digital Basement, CRG and Jan Beta to name a few.)

Well, thanks for those names - gives me a bit more to research about!

[JezC]

And the second board is another B52 Rock Lobster...doing a major rebuild of the embedded s/w for one of our products gave me just enough time to make a cuppa & remove the top metalwork & reveal the work of art beneath...

Now where did I put those Gotek drives...?

[rubber_jonnie]

Good luck

Boots OK with the keyboard from the "working" A500 (well, had time at lunch to just disassemble the working A500 & move the keyboard across and try one boot with it)...

Later I'll try the suspect keyboard in the "working" system...

Oooh, good stuff.

[rubber_jonnie]

I wonder if your keyboard just has 'something' on the membrane causing multiple key presses being simulated causing the boot issue.
Just the other day on eBay there were a few Keyboard Controllers for sale. Membranes also easy to get.

Much as I was thinking

[JezC]

Boots OK with the keyboard from the "working" A500 (well, had time at lunch to just disassemble the working A500 & move the keyboard across and try one boot with it)...

Later I'll try the suspect keyboard in the "working" system...

Oooh, good stuff.

Booting issue moves with the keyboard, so that helps narrow the investigation down hugely - thanks all!

[rubber_jonnie]

Oooh, good stuff.

Booting issue moves with the keyboard, so that helps narrow the investigation down hugely - thanks all!

Well that's a good afternoon of diagnosing in my books then

Next step is to pull the KBD apart, see whats what.

[JezC]

Well that's a good afternoon of diagnosing in my books then

Indeed! All while the laptop tries to kill it's SSD by building lots of intermediate artifacts before the final binaries are ready...

Next step is to pull the KBD apart, see whats what.

That might be after I've plugged a Gotek into it & seen what s/w I have that runs...

There's an image with over 30 Gig of Amiga games on it...but I only have one USB drive bigger than 32 Gig (128 Gig) so it might be used to test it but I don't think it will be a final use for that drive...

Time to add a last-minute request to my Christmas list maybe?

[Maximilian]

As Higgy already said, these machines give very little trouble.

You can see the revision on the PCB on the right hand corner just under the floppy drive in the nearest corner.
Rev 5+ and up are the best, if you find a Rev8+ with only 0,5MB Chip memory onboard you are in luck, these do not have a battery and can easily be expanded to 2MB Chip memory by just adding a few chips(soldering) and a 1MB internal expansion.
The Rev6 has a few unpopulated chips, do not add these, with this board you are better off doing a 1MB chipram mod and a compatible 1.8MB internal expansion with a Gary adapter.
For machines without any rev marking you can use this:
https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboa ... .aspx?id=8

To repair your A500+ with the battery damage you can use this:
https://www.amigapcb.org/

These machines are rock solid, things to look for are:
Bad PSU
Battery damage.
Corrosion
Broken or to loose Agnus socket (black/green screen)

Just reseating all the chips(use a PLCC extractor for Agnus) can be enough to bring some machines back to life.

Welcome to the light