a quick question

[extralife]

I was reading in the upper amiga problem post, that when the amiga gets startet it will flash 4 colours indicating some system checks, my quick question is, what if there is like say a rom error, will it just stop the test there or continue testing rest of the system and throw up the kick disk anyways ? i'm a little confused, coz i get a red screen on my own 500 right when i turn on power and then it flashes 3 more colours and gets ready to boot, this a500 is assembled from various different miggy parts, so maybe my rom is bad ?

[Jope]

Sounds like there is a ROM problem indeed. If the machine is 100% stock, then the red screen means there is something wrong it it at the moment.

Do you have any expansions connected?

[thomas]

If one of the errors indicated by screen color occurs, the Amiga will stop, flash the power LED for about 10 seconds and reset, starting all tests from the beginning again. This usually leads to a flashing screen because the same error occurs over and over again every 10 seconds.

If the ROM was bad, it would always stop with the red screen. Also, in most cases when the ROM is bad, the Amiga would not do anything because the code to check the ROM is inside the ROM. If the ROM was bad, there would be no code to execute.

A red screen usually means something different. It's only a symptom that the ROM checksum does not calculate correctly. I'd suspect that the power supply is not strong enough to power all components at start time. So the processor makes mistakes because it does not get enough power. On the second try, when all other components are already running, especially when the HDD is spinning at its nominal speed (if you have a HDD), enough power for correct calculations is available.

[extralife]

aha thank u very much both of you, that was very helpfull and cleared things up for me