Replacement A600 mainboard
 

Hi all

This evening i turned my A600 on and got a blank black screen. no life from my cf card, wont boot from floppy although i can hear it spin up.

I guess the mainboard is gone. Having real trouble finding one, would need a v1.5 - anyone know where i could possibly get one from.

Dont really want to get a full replacement machine ideally.

Thanks!

Darren

Darren, I'm not familiar with the 600, but a common problem with Amiga's is the chips need to be re-seated. basically, remove the top, and press on all seated chips. You will feel them move a bit further in. If this doesn't fix it, it might be the power supply, can you measure voltage?

Dont throw it away if you give up. Sell it to someone. Like me =)

But yes, open it up and press on the socketed chips.

If it hasn't been recapped it is very likely that the leaking acid has corroded and broken some tracks or vias, which is why it has stopped working. This happened to both my A600s, but fortunately I was able to repair both of them by cleaning it and repairing the broken tracks and vias.

The A600 has only one socketed chip, the kickstart. If you open it up, try the loosen the ROM a bit and push it down again. When you do this, also check the mainboard for any corrosion. It will normally be easiest to see around the power supply section left of the IDE connector since there are many electrolytic caps close together.

The first clue is that the floppy spins up which means that the unit is booting. If it's not clicking then it could be that the machine isn't getting all the way through the boot up routine. Capacitors are the usual fault in A600 machines, for some reason they seem to suffer really awful corrosion around the video stage. Take a high resolution photo of the top left corner of the board as you have the unit with the keyboard towards you and post it. Also check that the CF card hasn't bent one of the pins and shorted it internally.

Thanks, but ended up buying a replacemenf machine

how much did you end up paying

£45 for a boxed wild weird wicked pack original packaging with a few extras, very tidy, version 2b mainboard, all warranty seals intact

At that price, I would have opted for a replacement machine as well. :)

But please don't bin the old one.

Noticed that 2 of the pins of the IDE port had broken off and a lot of the others were loose so was only a matter of time i think.

I did add an extra 1mb upgrade, a 4gb CF card and replaced the floppy and added a 2mb melcard fastram pcmcia card so a replacement system was cheap in comparison!

I collect a lot of retro machines, and up to 11 so far, such a shame to lose a great machine from the collection whuch is why i was so keen to replace it.

Nice one although i paid close to 70 for the exact same one seals intact the lot