Can Amos Kill my Amiga?

[WAKD]

Hi. This is probably a stupid question because it sounds stupid to me but, I have been using Amos Pro on my A500+ and everything has been great until I wrote some software which was working. When I tried again for the second time I instantly got the following:
Green screen - Burgundy - Green screen
Power led flashes once

Like I said sound stupid but, all was well up until now. I have checked all the chips and Fat Angus for looseness and everything is as it should be. Also, none of them are hot to touch.

So, for some reason or other I'm looking at chipram and possibly kickstart rom??

[Samurai_Crow]

By itself, Amos cannot kill your Amiga. I'd more suspect aging components. Especially if the clock battery has not been removed on the 500+. It takes out motherboard traces when it goes.

[WAKD]

The battery was removed and motherboard cleaned. What I did notice was a game warned me it needed 1mb of ram and was crashing. I know it has 1mb ram so I'm thinking it could have partially failed and dropped to 512k.

[redblade]

So if you remove the ram expansion card you can no longer see the boot screen?

You might be able to damage your screen by the incorrect values to a copper list ($DFFXXX) which could play with the screen frequency, but maybe that just affects CRT screens. I don't think you would be doing that with AmosPro, unless you were trying to do a rainbow copper list.

I don't know what type of damage you could do by writing to the $bfexxx addresses.

[paul1981]

Originally Posted by redblade

So if you remove the ram expansion card you can no longer see the boot screen?

You might be able to damage your screen by the incorrect values to a copper list ($DFFXXX) which could play with the screen frequency, but maybe that just affects CRT screens. I don't think you would be doing that with AmosPro, unless you were trying to do a rainbow copper list.

I don't know what type of damage you could do by writing to the $bfexxx addresses.

That takes me back to some really bad crashes I used to get in the 90's on my 1200 when running shitty copied A500 games. Some of the crashes played hell with my TV. Ah... the memories!

[Photon]

Any programming language that can bang the hardware 100% up close can probably do things to your hardware - solid state component are VERY unlikely, but you can probably drive the floppy drive crazy until its analog motor fails or something.

It's incredibly unlikely that an OS-compatible programming language, or high-level stuff you do in it, can harm the hardware in any way at all.

Hardware can fail on its own though, given enough time. From experience, the order of suspicion is:
1. If a battery leak was observed, cleaning is not enough. It may have crept into or along the board.
2. The PSU is analog and affects every component. If you're still running on the original PSU and it's not been serviced by an expert in the last 10 years, replace it. This is good even to protect it from future errors.
3. Agnus. It controls the entire chipset. If it has gone bad, a characteristic trait is a green screen. If you're comfortable with working with hardware, get this, clean socket and pins, gently bend the socket pins with a toothpick, and reinsert. It's also the only surface-mounted socket which requires an SMD station to resolder if that's the culprit.

But this is just all possible causes without knowing enough. You must tell us the hardware configuration, Workbench setup, and especially exactly when it happens. The presumption is that your program resets the Amiga and then you get the green screen in Early Boot, before the startup-sequence has been run.