A500 keyboard problems

[bsa starfire]

Hi All,

I recently bought an Amiga 500 setup form ebay, my first miggy in nearly 20 years. It works fine although many of the disks included were stuffed! Anyhow after playing a few of my old favourites like Road Rash, I loaded up F19 Stealth fighter, a game I used to love! At that point I found some of the keys were not working. So i booted workbench 1.2 and tested the keys in notepad, find 1 line of keys not working, 7,u,j,m.
I contacted the ebay seller(airey38) and he sent me a replacement keyboard that arrived yesterday.This keyboard is different to the original in that it has 2 extra keys, both are blank, one next to return, one next to left shift. Looking at some pics on the 'net this seems to be a 500+ keyboard. Anyhow I tried this one and it also doesn't work right, the number keys & symbols on top row all fail to register. Delete on that row and the tilde key however do.
So my questions are is this just 2 dead keyboards or does the 500+ board not work in a standard 500?
On another point, the ram expansion card had a battery that had corroded and leaked, I have removed this(it was so corroded a little wiggle and it came right off!). I have wiped away as much of the blue/green corrosion as possible with a clean rag but was wondering what the best method is to make this stuff inert, I assume it is still gonna rot the electrical contacts as time goes on.
Best regards,
Chris

[emufan]

i cannot give technical advice, but to make it easier for others, try to make some good close-up photos of the board and poisened areas. this would help to give good advice. also photo of the keyboad connector area and the keyboard pcb.

[TjLaZer]

Sound like a keyboard problem. Both are bad.

You can try to repair it, open it up and clean it and see if it works.

See here:
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=13934
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=36390

[jimbob]

500 and 500+ keyboards have a few variations but AKAIK they are all 100% compatible with all 500 type motherboards. The keyboard membranes have a row/column switch matrix. You likely have one keyboard with a bad column and one with a bad row. The controllers are probably good. With luck it is just a contact problem and you just need a reseat of the connector between the switch membrane and the controller PCB. You need to unscrew the PCB from the backplate and slide the outer part of the ribbon clip(s)(some boards have two narrower ribbons) away from the board to release the contacts. Blow/brush/clean both cable and clips before reassembling.

Weak acid followed by washing with water and/or alcohol is what you need for cleaning the battery crud. Lemon juice seems to be the household chemical of choice for this job. Slosh it on and agitate gently until it stops fizzing, rinse clean and dry thoroughly.

[bsa starfire]

Thanks, folks, I'll tackle this today, on further inspection the 500+ keyboard has a load of sticky crud on the ribbon, circuit board. Hopefully cleaning this will give me a working keyboard. Better put lemon juice on the shopping list too!
all the best,
Chris