Sunday, July 7, 2019

Repair : Amiga 600 for parts, not working ( corroded trace )

Due to my geographic location, local population and transient demographics it is really difficult to get reasonably priced Amiga kit.  Working Amigas are like gold.  So the cheapest solution I have is unfortunately Ebay and "For parts, Not working".

So far I have bought two "For parts, not working" Amiga 600's.

Amiga 600 number 1

The first Amiga I got came all the way from the UK,  It was grubby but overall it was in good condition.  Opening the case it was clean, the caps have not leaked ( yet! ) and it looked in really good shape overall on first inspection.

Powering it up told a completely different story.  The screen flashed from grey to green.  I hit up Google and found this wonderful resource.

http://wiki.classicamiga.com/Amiga_boot_error_code_colours

Seems like I had an error in the Chip Ram.  Initially I thought I'd have to recap it first, but then I noticed a little fuzzy blue coloured dot near the RAM.

One of the traces to the RAM had corroded into a blue copper oxide puff ball.  I cleaned it with some Isocol and a cotton bud and found the trace has completely disappeared.  Using a multi-meter I tested all of the surrounding traces and found only one was broken.

A little soldering and some wire and hey presto, a fully functional Amiga 600.


Update : the other corroded trace also finally gave up so I've bypassed that one as well.  It was pretty bad before I cleaned it up.  This time I scraped all of the bad traces off of the PCB.


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