Test hardware A500

[Vaninna]

Hi,

can someone please help me with the following:

I need/want to test the hardware on my Amiga 500, some expansions and extra gear.

What software can I use? What procedure?

What I want to test:

The ports on the back of the Amiga: Serial, Parallell, Diskdrive etc.

Expanded memory 512k and a on/off switch.
Rom 1.3 and rom 2.0 and a toggle switch.

An external floppy drive.

The internal floppy drive.
An external gotek drive.

Thanks a lot!

(Also, I need to do this pretty soon and does not have much spare time so any advice on how to proceed quickly is greatly appreciated)

[Zetr0]

@Vaninna

Hello there, most of this testing requires a simple approach, the only things that will take a bit of time would be the Parallel and Serial tests - we shall come back to these. To continue you will need a working Workbench Floppy Disk.

512K Epanded Memory
Simply plug this into the trapdoor port of the Amiga and power up - you will see 512k "other memory" with it turned on and just 512k Chip (less workbench use) memory.

ROM 1.3/2.0 Toggle
After installing the unit(s) on the A500, simply power on the machine (without a floppy disk installed). When Kickrom 1.3 is selected this is a white screen with a hand holding a floppy disk. With kickrom 2.0 selected this is a purple screen with an animation of a floppy disk being inserted into a floppy drive.

Floppy Drives
For floppy drives, simply put a known-working disk into it and see if it loads, from here you can test floppy disks and the external drive (and external drive interface)

Gotek drives will need to be programmed to work with the Amiga, if that has been done then this can either be configured as internal or external, using a preformated USB stick with the correct selector software on it should allow it to load a floppy image to the machine without any real fuss. There are a couple of threads on here that can help you further with the Gotek if you experience problems with it.

Serial & Parallel Ports
To test these properly you would either need another Amiga with a null modem cable for the serial or parallel cable - or modified cables (Parallel and Serial) that would echo-back information sent with a small delay. While it would be easier (and quicker) to get general cables (remember the Amiga has a different Parallel output) and hook up to a PC or another Amiga.

Personally I would look at ParNet and SerNet from www.aminet.net - this will give you more information, testing and and connectivity to other Amiga's (I used to use the CDROM drive from the CDTV for my Amiga A1200 via ParNet)

Anyway have a look at that lot, I hope it helps.

[Vaninna]

Thanks for the info.

I guess I am looking for deeper testing, since all things seems to work... Except:

The External floppy drive, which gives read/write errors or show "DF1 Bad" in Workbench.

To rule out errors I have cleaned all my floppies from virus, checked for loose cables inside the Amiga and now I want to make sure it is not any other hardware that mess with the floppy drive.

Maybe the only thing I might need to do is to check the serial/parallell ports but especially the drive port. I got a serial cable that connects with a PC, I have used it to transfer adfs to the Amiga. I also have another Amiga500.