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Need help with booting Amiga 1000

S

SEgamer

Experienced Member
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Sep 18, 2011
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97
Location
GA, USA
Last week I got an A1000 and finally had a chance to test it a few days ago. All I get is a flashing red screen and the power LED flickers when the screen is red. No response from the drive or any other change in color. I reseated every socketed chip and checked the voltages on the PSU which were good, though I guess the caps could still be faulty. I also made sure the keyboard was plugged in as well as testing it with and without the external floppy drive it came with.

I think the bootstrap ROMS are corrupted, but I'm not sure. Does the Amiga boot from the boostrap then looks for kickstart, then looks for workbench or are boostrap and kickstart the same thing?

I also had some questions about RAM expansions.

This unit came with two: a Ramex 4x256 and a Microbotics 2MB Starboard 2. After doing some searching, am I right to assume the Microbotics needs drivers to function and the Ramex doesn't?

Any suggestions are appreciated.
 
The red color is important. This is like the amiga's beep code for errors. I don't know what red means off the top of my head, you google is your friend. The fact that you got a color means that the amiga is mostly working. At least the 68000 and denise chips are good.

I doubt that the boot roms are bad. They are mask roms and enough code is loaded to get the red screen.

Neither ram expansions need drivers. Although, the starboard needs kickstart 1.2+ to bee seen.
 
I found this on wikipedia:
Red - ROM failure (may be not properly inserted due thermal cycling)

and also saw a similar description at http://amihelp.0catch.com/Amiga/tech/ahardtip.html

So the code may still be there but it's putting out a bad checksum for whatever reason. Is the screen supposed to flash the color or stay on the screen?
 
The color error codes flash. I never had an A1000 (my first Amiga was A500), but I think that the A1000 loads Kickstart from a floppy. If so, you need the Kickstart disk (floppy).
 
tingo said:
The color error codes flash. I never had an A1000 (my first Amiga was A500), but I think that the A1000 loads Kickstart from a floppy. If so, you need the Kickstart disk (floppy).
Click to expand...

Well the problem is that I can't get it to the screen that asks for the kickstart disk. I got a kickstart disk today just to see if it would do anything. The drive didn't even try to read the floppy so my only guess is that either the code in the ROMs is bad or one of the other chips has gone bad.
 
Last edited:
Hmm, can't think of anything specific to look for.
Are the ROMs socketed directly in the motherboard, or in a daughterboard?
Have you checked that the ROMs are correctly placed?
 
tingo may be onto something there.

That huge-A** daughterboard is a royal pain. Might check ALL the pins going to it. If one is not making contact or is contacting something else it could cause problems.

Pulling it off and checking all the connections and maybe giving an eraser treatment (rubbing all them down with an eraser 'til they're shiny) could help.

Also the thumb routine could be useful. Press each and every socketed chip with your thumb. Don't panic if you hear creaking. That's what you're after, reseating all the chips. Just don't try to push your thumb through the board!

Good luck.
 
Well it turns out tingo was right. I finally found a replacement daughterboard and that fixed it!

Thanks for the help guys!
 
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