I think my beloved A1200 is dead, is there any hope?

[mrbob2]

Today after reading a thread about someone wanting football glory disks dumping i thought i would dig out my originals and convert the disks to adf.

i plugged in my a1200 and nothing...

no lights, no noise, no disk activity.

i have 3 power bricks.

black one that came with a1200, cream that came with a500 and another than came with a600

the power bricks work fine with my a600 so i know the power is there and its not a power supply fault.

iv taken the 060 card out the a1200 and hard drive. the hard drive works in the a600 which is good

but the a1200 refuses to turn on.

i have very little hardware knowledge and apart from memory chips i dont really know what im doing.

so in case its something simple, maybe you guys could help me out?

if its a dead component then im guessing buying another a1200 would be easiest option.

thanks for any advice

[dlfrsilver]

have you changed the capacitors in your 1200 ?

[mrbob2]

sorry to mess you about

its working now lol

i just "tried one last time" before it goes back in the loft and all i did was remove and re insert the 32mb memory expansion in the 060 card

dont know why this made any difference as i tried it without the card in.

all is working fine now apart from the space bar isnt working!

so now i have to find a way to use transdisk without a space bar. on screen keyboard maybe?

[Daedalus]

Sounds like classic contacts tarnishing over time. Good stuff that it's working, though I would suggest changing the capacitors anyway because if they haven't failed yet, they will soon. It could also be capacitors causing it to not turn on at first, and only a coincidence that they started working when you turned it back on the last time.

ADFBlitzer works without the space bar for reading and writing ADFs.

[Retrofan]

For the key not working, try to move the keyboard ribbon cable (or whatever its called) in and out of it's connector in the mobo, just a bit.

[Jope]

And just a reminder, always open the latch in the keyboard connector before moving the ribbon cable.

[whiteb]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Sounds like classic contacts tarnishing over time. Good stuff that it's working, though I would suggest changing the capacitors anyway because if they haven't failed yet, they will soon. It could also be capacitors causing it to not turn on at first, and only a coincidence that they started working when you turned it back on the last time.

ADFBlitzer works without the space bar for reading and writing ADFs.

What caps are more likely to fail, specific ones, or just, ALL OF THEM ?

I have an A1200 that has been in the cupboard for like YEARS. (I know, that is SERIOUS cruelty).

[ajk]

All the surface mounted electrolytic ones (little aluminium cans), of which there are about a dozen on the board. The larger, through-hole ones don't usually leak but are commonly swapped out at the same time anyway, since it is not much extra effort.

[mrbob2]

its funny but i started to backup my 150mb hard drive using lha and file joiner splitter. I found a version of shell that you could move the cursor around using the arrow keys, so a press to the right basically created a space.

it took a few nights to back up fully and on the 3rd night after typing a command for the 100th time i noticed i was just using the keyboard as normal.

the space bar just started working again

i feel guilty now for calling my amiga a bit rubbish lol 21 years on and everything still works perfectly.

whats equally amazing is my older a500 and a600 both are fine too.

they dont make em like they used to!

[Daedalus]

Very true, especially the older A500s tend to just work and work and work. The A600, like the A1200 however, will suffer damage from leaking capacitors sooner or later so best to get them changed out to make sure they stay working for the next 25 years at least.