So I went exploring in the loft...

[Retrofan]

Doesn't look so bad. All you have to look for are the traces around if they are ok without any leakage (if it has, lemon juice) and take that battery off.

Edit: You see? Another post saying the same while I was writing.

[roy bates]

just like everyone is saying, its not to bad your amiga will survive this.

just snip off the battery at the terminals and soak the board with vinager or lemon juice to neutralise the alkaline(doesent look like much going by the photo) the clean it up with maybe isopropyl alcohol,if you have any.


looks like this will be your first job on this machine before the floppy good luck.

I'm in the same boat, i've just got a 500+ and want to transfer ADF files but not having any luck so far.

I only want to do about 20 or so of my old faves, if anyone can help please PM me

[NovaCoder]

Cool find, A500+ were a nice 'little' Amiga.

As others have said, you can turn this into a nice little machine.

To make it all look pretty I'd go for an IndivisionECS.

I personally don't like playing around with old floppy discs so either go for a HXC or go for a processor upgrade that allows you to stick a CF card (crammed with WHDLOAD titles).

And don't forget to hook it up to some massive speakers

[chris-red]

Right the battery is off and has been cleaned up with vinegar, I had a go at cleaning the floppy heads with the cleaning fluid from my camera sensor cleaner but still it does the same. I have a floppy cleaner than has just arrived that I will use tonight if that doesn't work how can I tell whether it is the floppy drive or the controller.

The Symptoms are... turn Amiga on get the purple disc load screen, but a disc in the screen goes completely purple, the drive light comes on and you can hear it working, a few seconds later the light goes out and it returns to the disc load screen.

[alexh]

It is unlikely to be the controller. 50:50 either the disk or the drive.

Are you using a known good disk?

[chris-red]

No but I have tried about 30 different discs, I'm assuming they aren't all buggered!

[chris-red]

Anyway to check their integrity using a PC and USB Floppy drive?

Failing that anyone local (South Essex/East London) I can pop round and try a few discs with.

[demolition]

It sounds unlikely that all 30 disks are completely dead. You didn't format them all before you put them away and then forgot about it?

When you put in the disk, do you hear multiple clicks from the drive before the kickstart screen returns, or does it show again immediately?

Since you had a leaking battery, I would suspect that it could have caused some broken connections between the drive and the 8520 chips. I would do a detailed visual inspection of the area around the two 8520 chips and towards the floppy connector and check for miscolored tracks or black vias (should all be shiny silver colored).

If you can't find anything visually, the next step should probably be to try another disk drive. PC drives won't work directly, but any Amiga drive could be used for the test, if you can find one to borrow.

You cannot use a USB PC floppy drive for reading or testing Amiga disks.

[Drucifer]

Let me know if you still having trouble as am in north london and happen to have 8 A500 indoors a few of which are for spares only so could help you out.

[chris-red]

Looks OK I was slightly worried slightly about that track that looks damaged it goes from a resistor to one of the expansion pins under it so shouldn't be affecting the running of it.

I tried the disc cleaner but still no joy.

I put the disc in the drive it spins up and I here clicking for approximately 3 seconds then it stops and goes back to the disc loading screen. Looks like a need a new drive.

Who has one I can buy?



A side question what are the expansions slots things for?

there is one on the left that something slots onto and one underneath with pins.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by chris-red

I put the disc in the drive it spins up and I here clicking for approximately 3 seconds then it stops and goes back to the disc loading screen. Looks like a need a new drive.

A side question what are the expansions slots things for?

there is one on the left that something slots onto and one underneath with pins.

Def. sounds like you need to try another drive.

The expansion slots can be used for almost anything you need to connect to the Amiga, for example RAM, harddrives, accelerators, Action Replay etc. The bottom one (trapdoor) is for smaller, internal expansions like RAM, and the external for bigger ones like HDDs which would not fit inside.

[s2325]

Try thin, soft and not shiny sticker on the back of floppy disk where is metal circle. You will hear some noises and if you eject disk you should see black dirt on sticker. I saved 2 drives that way.

[chris-red]

Originally Posted by s2325

Try thin, soft and not shiny sticker on the back of floppy disk where is metal circle. You will hear some noises and if you eject disk you should see black dirt on sticker. I saved 2 drives that way.

Tried that with some masking tape, no black marks on the tape.

[roy bates]

try re-seating all the socketed ic's,i dont think its this but there you go.

[chris-red]

Originally Posted by roy bates

try re-seating all the socketed ic's,i dont think its this but there you go.

IC's?

[roy bates]

Originally Posted by chris-red

IC's?

computer chips (Intergrated Circuits)


use a flat blade screwdriver to gently pry them up a bit from the sockets and push them back in again,cia's paula etc.


EDIT:i still have that floppy drive if you want it,i havent got round to testing it yet though.

and i dont know witch amiga it came out of either.

does anyone know wiether a teac fd-235f's ejector button can be replaced by one from an a 500?


EDIT2: the side slot is for harddrives,cd-roms(a590 and a570),memory and processor addons(gvp sidecars etc)

the one that goes underneath with the pins is a memory slot,theres also a few addons for the 68k cpu as well, these are really nice.


EDIT3:can you pop the lid off the floppy drive and take a pic,just the top cover.

[ahhyes]

I repaired an external amiga drive once by replacing 2 electrolytic caps that had leaked, the caps were inside the drive itself, very small caps. It's not always immediately obvious in the way of physical appearance if caps have leaked, one way to test (a crude way) is to touch the leg of the cap with a soldering iron. If you smell cat pee/rotten fish (you're smelling the leaked electrolyte burning), change it.

[ahhyes]

I'd be recapping any unit that's as old as an A500, mainly the electrolytic caps.

[ahhyes]

I still remember playing Superfrog and Alien breed on my A500 in the early 90's. Good times. Amazing what they could do with such little computing power compared to today's hardware, though back then, most things were written entirely in ASM and heavily optimized to squeeze every bit of juice from the processor. I still take my hat off to the coders from those days. They were really skilled programmers, whilst I never learnt m68k asm, I did learn x86 asm and asm in general is not for the faint hearted! It's a good way to learn and adopt good programming practices, that you can even apply to higher level languages.

Seeing that A500 pic in this thread bought back memories for me too. I couldnt resist this thread

Ps: Sorry for the offtopicness/dribble