Hi
I have this A1200 tower which is a bit of a beast made from scraps that I found around the place. Been working generally for nine years I guess. Every so often though I start to lose the computer. Starts with a flickering screen. Then failures whilst running and finally just will not boot. What I do is fold open the A1200 motherboard which is exposed as I don't have the case on the tower and then I simply press on the various connectors that sit over the chips and that does the job. For a while.
Anyway... today I stripped the machine down and tried to establish what was wrong. Couldn't really find any issues and then by luck I was having a nose around the ribbon connectors to the hard drive. And there it was... the ribbon connector had come away. I recall the issue vaguely as there is red tape holding the ribbon in place. It's broken.
I very quickly swapped the ribbon out and reconnected, together with the EZKey-board connector which had come adrift and booted up and it didn't work. Nothing... dead as a proverbial dead thing with a very good reason for being dead. And then it struck me to check the photographs I had been taking. It was then that I noted that the ribbon actually flipped over half way down its length on the original. What threw me was the connector looked the same as on the original. I struggled a bit as the ribbon had a tidy tie to keep it, er well, tidy but managed to get the connector the other way round on the buffered interface.
Whoopee and double whoopee doo doo... Magic. Worked first time. I knew she would. Anyroadup as they say [ Who are these they .. Shut up ] I decided to take some close up images of the A1200 motherboard to see if I could find evidence of the lesser spotted capacitor leaky thing. Well known in Amiga forum circles as the biggest issue affecting Amiga 1200s. I never raise issues regarding hardware any more on the forums as I always get the stock reply ' recapp ' or what ever.
The machine is now back in the little room running an animation on loop to test. Looking good.
What next ? Cuppa tea first.
At this point I'm supposed say its an Amiga 1200 EZTower system with Rev something motherboard, Blizzard whatsit turbo with 32MB RAM. Scan doubly flicker whatsit and EZkey widget running on a Japanese old stylie monitor. The OS is 3.0 as I has not changed them chips yet. Also has a buffy the hard drive slayer interface and some drives, two hard and one bendy. One of which is from an Austin A35... or should that be Amiga 500... Same thing really. And no outer case... cus that's on the other table upside down full of disks, or are they discs. Good question. That's all the tech stuff. What the **ck is in this tea... !!!!!
Pictures on the website probably later this week when I can find my developing tank and red light. Don't you just love old stuff.
I'm scuzz
http://www.scuzzscink.com/amiga/car_001.htm