Hello from Connecticut, USA

[FirstNE]

A brief introduction. My user name kind of says it all. A buddy and I were the first folks in the Northeast, USA to buy the Amiga 1000. I still have the 1000, though I can not get it to sync with a modern CRT. I also have an A3000. Unfortunately , I made a big boo boo and accidentally wired the power outlet into a 220V line and blew it's power supply. I replaced the supply, but the A3000 is showing a green screen - indicating it's got a memory chip problem. I haven't been able to solve that. <sigh>.

I was an Amiga developer from the beginning and I formed a small company and made a program called "Age of Sail". We sold a few copies but I met a girl, got married, and lost all my free time to work on it and my board members didn't want to do any of the daily things necessary for a company so we disbanded it. I would love to redo the game and put it out as freeware - but I've a lot of hurdles to go through before I do.

A year ago I booted up the A3000 and I couldn't believe how quickly it was up and running. I miss that with modern OSes. I left the Amiga well after Commodore went defunct in the hopes someone might resurrect it... but alas it was sold and resold. I became a Linux geek and here we are almost 30 years later, trying to resurrect a long defunct and well beloved machine.

Anyway, I'll be posting for hardware help to see if I can rescue data on hard drives and floppies. Cheers!

[chip]

Welcome to the forum

[lilalurl]

Welcome.

Originally Posted by FirstNE

A buddy and I were the first folks in the Northeast, USA to buy the Amiga 1000.

Out of curiosity, how do you know that?

Originally Posted by FirstNE

I was an Amiga developer from the beginning and I formed a small company and made a program called "Age of Sail".

This one?
http://hol.abime.net/3484

[FirstNE]

OMG - It lives! ROFL! Yes, I am the author of that game. WOW! I am thunderstruck! We only sold a couple of copies.... maybe 30? I am trying to resurrect it. I swear I made a hard copy of the source code but cannot find it. I have data stored on floppies and probably also on a hard drive, but I've been searching for a reasonably priced SCSI card so I can retrieve the data off the hard drives. Or off the floppies. I do have a hard copy of the main calculation routines and all of the ship data... but the GUI code is not to be found.

AFA the A1000 - we waited outside the store in Providence, RI. They had just gotten a shipment of ten A1000's and we were so hyped up that we bought the first 2 within minutes of the store opening. What a machine!

[lilalurl]

Thanks for the answser about the A1000.

Regarding your quest for a SCSI card, maybe try and post a request either in the marketplace section and/or in the support.hardware section.
The majority of EAB members are from Europe, but there are some from the USA. Maybe one of them will be able to help (either by selling a card or if they are near you help you do an image file of your drives).

[NPI]

Welcome, FirstNE.

First of all, it is quite amazing that a game that sold 30 copies is actually available on the internet.

Second, you might want to write a guide on how to actually play this game

[Anubis]

Welcome to board FirstNE!

Wanna change nick to LastNE!!!

[Shadowfire]

When the power supply on an Amiga fails and generates too much voltage, the RAM IC's are indeed the first to go. The good news is, that you get a green screen, which means that the ROM, the 68030 processor, and the Gary/Agnus/Denise chips are working.
The first thing to do is get a multimeter and confirm that the power rails on the power supply are OK. You don't want to put in new chips only to have the power supply kill them as well.

[FirstNE]

Originally Posted by NPI

Welcome, FirstNE.

First of all, it is quite amazing that a game that sold 30 copies is actually available on the internet.

Second, you might want to write a guide on how to actually play this game

Oh I still have about 70 or so manuals in my basement. I just found them yesterday - I was cleaning out my "train" room. I have 5 copies of the manual still on my desk - it's 74 pages long. Of course the files are on both the floppy and hard drives, which I am still trying to get access to. If I can find the manual file I'll put an electronic copy of it online.

[FirstNE]

Originally Posted by Shadowfire

When the power supply on an Amiga fails and generates too much voltage, the RAM IC's are indeed the first to go. The good news is, that you get a green screen, which means that the ROM, the 68030 processor, and the Gary/Agnus/Denise chips are working.
The first thing to do is get a multimeter and confirm that the power rails on the power supply are OK. You don't want to put in new chips only to have the power supply kill them as well.

The A3000 blew the fuze - which thanks to our wonderful corona virus took two weeks to be replaced. I put the new one in and nothing - completely dead. So I cut all the wires and resoldered them all onto a new (well actually a slightly used) power supply. So that's where it stands - I turn on the monitor and then the A3000 and get the green screen. So you are saying I need to replace the RAM - but am I wrong in thinking that at least some of the RAM chips are soldered to the motherboard? Or are they the ones in the (for lack of a better word) standoffs where I could just lift them out? I do have a chip "replacement" tool to insert new ones - if replacement RAM can be found.

[Shadowfire]

IIRC on the A3000, the unit shipped with 1meg of chip ram soldered in, and 1 meg of FAST ram in DIP sockets on the right side of the board.

If you wanted to upgrade the fast ram (which required ZIP chips instead of DIP chips), you would yank the DIP socketed ram out of the fast ram slots, then move them to the empty chip ram slots on the left side of the board, giving you 2 megs of CHIP ram. (Of course, this was back in the day during the first great artificial DRAM shortage... I remember paying >$100 per megabyte to upgrade mine in the early 90's).

So, if the unit had 1meg of chip ram, it's all soldered in. If it underwent expansion, half of it is soldered in.

But let me make this clear: The green screen means that the BIOS had problems accessing chip RAM, i.e. it wrote a value and read back a different value. Normally this would be an almost certainly a chip ram (or motherboard trace) problem, but you have an Amiga 3000.

The Amiga 3000 chip ram is special, Commodore slapped in a bridge circuit so that the 68030 could access it 32-bits at a time (hence the A3000 is almost twice as fast at running programs out of chip ram than say, an A2000 with an A2630), and the bridge circuit itself would also cause a green screen if there was a problem with it.

The best thing to do is get someone who specializes in fixing vintage computers to take a look at the unit. They will have the test equipment to minimize the amount of time spent f**king around and replacing chips that aren't the problem.

Also, check the battery, if you've had the unit in storage for decades, its probably making a mess of the board. Get it off of there ASAP.

(If the left side RAM sockets are populated, you can safely remove them all and bring the machine down to 1MEG of chip ram. If the machine boots up after this, then you know one or more of the removed chips are bad.)

[FirstNE]

Some good ideas there! The battery is fine - which is surprising considering the number of horror stories I've heard about the battery leaking.

I will try removing the RAM in sockets... see if that does anything. Not sure I want to unsolder the others. But we'll see. I just need enough ram to get the data off the hard drives and maybe copy the data from some floppies

Many thanks for the help!

[FirstNE]

I took the RAM chips out of the sockets. No joy - still a green screen. So it's probably the soldered ones. Well, I guess at this point I have literally nothing to lose if I desolder them.

I doubt there is anyone in my area with any Amiga experience. I know only a handful of folks who had any Amiga... and the only store that catered to us is long gone.

I found an Adaptec AHA-2940AU on Ebay for $20. I'm willing to buy - but ebay's user agreement and privacy notices are both "corrupted" pages. And I won't get an account until I read them. I put in a complaint to ebay but you know how those things go.....

Did some quick searching for RAM but found none for sale even if that is the problem. A decade too late me thinks. Even the SCSI card is hard to come by.

[Shadowfire]

You would be looking for 256K x 4 page mode (or static column) RAM chips, 120ns or faster access time, in the DIP package.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/5-PIECE-LOT...0AAOSwM3Zdt3BN

Those chips might work.

I suggest getting a bunch of sockets and socketing the "new" memory, since almost nobody actually tests these things, they tend to get pulled out of e-waste, and there's no certainty that they will all be good.

[FirstNE]

Thanks Shadowfire - I was planning on socketing the chips.