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I just recently walked past a dump, where in the corner of my eye I spotted something that looked like a huge keyboard. I went to take a closer look, and found out that it was an Amiga 1200 with a 030 accellerator board and scala dongle. Jackpot!

So anyway; I dried it, cleaned it, it works, but the floppy was not powering on and same with the harddrive. I am using an old Amiga 1200 PSU that was making some strange high pitch noise when I tried to boot the amiga with the harddrive installed in it. I removed the harddrive and it booted fine with the PSU not emitting any detectable noise. However, when I have the 030 installed it sometimes reboots and shows a red "Software Error" screen. I tried removing the memory on the board, same effect. Sometimes it does not boot at all, just gives a black screen. Someone suggested the card had problems with 3.1 roms, but this amiga has only 3.0 roms installed.

Does anyone have any apparent theories as to why it seems unstable? I don't have any other Amiga parts to cross-swap with to test a lot of things, so I'd really appreciate some sound input here so I'd know what to look for in order to try fix it.

And merry Christmas everyone :]

Josh K
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cc0
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3 Answers3

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I remember buying a 68030 accelerator card for my A1200, back in the day, and I definitely needed a more powerful PSU than the stock unit. Random glitches as you describe sound like marginal power.

Phil P
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Ok, so I tried replacing the PSU with a custom atx one, to make sure I had enough juice. That didn't change anything. I tried almost every possible thing you could think of, and then I realized it worked 100% perfectly if you just pull the accelerator board a little out of the socket, so it's not 'all in'. Just a case of bad contact it seems. I also tried bending the pins carefully, but I could not get that to make any difference.

Works like a charm now though.

cc0
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The black screen at boot means that the Amiga doesn't have a CPU or couldn't initialise one (really!). Check whether the board is properly seated and connected - a short or loose connection to the board could also explain the spontaneous resets/gurus. Check whether the system works properly from the 68020 on the mobo. I also had similar problems on an A1200 that were caused by the (overclocked) CPU overheating.