Hi, Folks,
I have a kind of Frankenstein's monster A1200, which I hadn't fired up in probably 5 or six years. Then, I needed access to a document from 1996 that I suspected was on that machine. So after some fiddling around with the hooked together Amiga, lo and behold, the thing booted and I was able to find the (Wordworth!!!) document I'd sought. This brought back some of that Miggy magic, and now I'd like to play around with the old girl on a more regular basis.
Here's the catch:
This is a very modified machine.
It's got an A1200 motherboard, fitted into an Ateo Concepts (anybody remember them??) tower case. There's a Blizzard A1260 accelerator board with the SCSI interface/fast RAM add-on board. The Ateo bus (essentially an ISA bus board) is fitted with an Ethernet board and Ateo's Pixel 64 RTG card (running Picasso 96, IIRC). There's a bunch of other stuff in the tower case, including a flicker fixer / scan doubler, a SCSI CD burner, a SCSI Zip Drive (!!!), Ateo's PC keyboard interface, an Eyetech doodad that mixes the CD drive's audio output into the Amiga's audio out, and probably a few other things I've forgotten to mention.
So, the machine has a funky boot-up process. From a cold start, it auto-reboots once... IIRC, this is something in the startup sequence that loads the 68060 libraries, or something like that. If left alone, the Miggy will then boot into the AGA chipset. But then, if I manually reboot with Ctrl-Amiga-Amiga, it'll boot into the RTG card (which sports a breathtaking 2 MB of video memory)!
My problem is that the ability of this machine to boot successfully is rather hit-miss, and I cannot determine why. Sometimes, it has frozen on one of the AGA diagnostic colors, indicating a hardware problem. When that happens, sometimes reseating the accelerator card, or even the fast RAM, will fix this, at least temporarily. Lately, the machine boots all that way to the gfx card like a charm, but then, after a period of time, it locks up and may not even respond to a keyboard reset, so that I have to power down and reboot.
I don't think that this is a thermal issue (as hot as the 68060 runs) because right now I'm running the machine with the tower case removed, so the innards are getting plenty of air circulation.
So...
How would you troubleshoot this kind of issue? Clean the contacts on the various PCB connectors? Something else?
I'm all ears, folks.
Cheers,
rebbi