Black screen of death on my A4000!

[ImmortalA1000]

OK well it could be because the keylock is in the locked position (lost the keys since putting it away ages ago) but I also notice that sometimes the screen is like a very dark grey of even tone, which is normal for most computer stuff on this TV, but also sometimes it is darker and there is a hint of graininess to the picture.
edit:sorry I forgot to mention, the TV does detect an RGB signal and I left the machine on for a good 20 seconds with no change.

I tried shorting the two pins for the keylock and no go but this is the only computer I own with a keylock so I don't know if shorting it would work.

Removed and re-seated the CPU card as well as pressing down hard on the ROM chips (which look like homebrew 3.1 ROMs not Commodore CSG units originally supplied). I have also removed the hard drive and even tried it with the floppy disconnected but always the same thing. The battery was removed from this machine a long time ago and the motherboard is super clean.

Just out of interest, does shorting the two pins on the header where the keylock connects to work for machines with no keys in the locked position. Does being in the locked position actually prevent it from booting and keep it on a black screen?

Do people like Amigakit sell these keys, are these keys universal (like they were on old 486 PCs I used in the nineties) or would I need to replace the barrel at the same time with matching keys?

Thanks

[grelbfarlk]

No... the lock doesn't disable the machine, as I recall just makes the keyboard/mouse not work while it's locked. You can just unplug that cable.

[Jope]

IIRC the keys are the universal PC key lock keys, but as grelbfarlk said, you can just unplug the keylock connector and forget about it. :-)

[ImmortalA1000]

Hey thanks for letting me know, so if I disconnect the keylock from the motherboard I can use mouse and keyboard input? Not found the keys yet, might never find them! haha

Last night I went back and spent an hour with it. There seemed to be an issue with the floppy drive cabling. I got it to boot consistently to the KS 3.x disk animation screen if the floppy is connected up but it takes between 30-40 seconds which seems really odd. As I said, I never owned a KS 3.1 machine or an A4000 before so for a machine with HDD I just removed without setting any jumpers on the motherboard, could this be normal? Only had one disk to hand which was a coverdisk I have never tried and might not work but it didn't like the disk but the drive does 'click'.

Possibly there is a jumper on the board that controls a 5 second boot to KS screen anim if a HDD is ignored? Not sure.

I have decided to sell it now, I am not comfortable owning something worth so much......which could be worth a lot less if it starts going wrong or fails. I will have one last week with it trying out things like F1GP, Virus and Frontier with possibly some Vista Pro 3 rendering (if I can find the disks). If all goes well I will use it in a Youtube documentary, the reason I bought it last year from a seller I trust. I want to do something about the Amiga 4000/40 and how it fit into the context of rival formats in 1991. In some ways there is a similarity with the A1000 of July 1985 vintage, apart from the fact the 1000 was superior for years but the 4000/040 was probably overtaken by the constant advancement of Motorola Mac/Intel 32bit x86 hardware at light speed within months (perhaps not the ultimate static display quality, 1280 15bit displays were more a mid 90s thing IIRC).

I've never owned an A4000/040 Amiga before so will be nice to see what it was like using the fastest desktop computer in the world, when it came out. It was the Amiga 4000/040 and it also managed graphic displays hardly any PC could manage like 1280x512+overscan in HAM8 or 256/16 million colours )

[amigasith]

A 30 to 40 seconds boot delay if there is no HDD connected to the system is normal for a 3.1 Kickstart machine. If you don't like this delay, then you can for example connect an IDE device that has no partitions on it (this is what I did and it works great) or you can use something like this: https://amigakit.amiga.store/catalog...roducts_id=831

Cheers

[ImmortalA1000]

Ahh OK, it came with a hard drive that was untested and supplied separately so I never connected the cables up in case I got them wrong and caused damage to the IDE interface. I guess for gaming I have an A1200 so it's not that important. Somewhere I have some 'new' 4gb drives I bought over a decade ago.

It takes a long time to boot but at least it is working normally then, thanks for letting me know the machine is working as expected. I might look into getting some Kickstart 3.0 ROMs if none of my hard disks work.

[ajk]

There is no sense in downgrading to 3.0 if the 3.1 ROMs are working; if you have no need for an actual IDE drive, use a terminator as suggested above. It's only a couple of resistors (instructions) connected to the IDE pins so you could even put one together yourself.

[ImmortalA1000]

That was as a very last resort, the drive I got with it does spin up OK IIRC. It was assuming the Kickstart 3.0 on the A4000 is as quick to boot as an A1200 and I couldn't get any working HDDs in there.

I want to get it up and running properly so I can start coding my Buck Rogers game again, which after what happened with the backbone Amiga Smurfs game someone wrote will never be called Buck Rogers!

But all this is for when I finally have some spare time AKA when I finish renovating this huge house back to its pre-war glory Somewhere in about 100 boxes is my collection of A4000 Workbench disks and a full set of manuals but so far the four game disks I have found will not boot on the machine so the floppy drive may be a bit knackered.