For many years ago I aquired this machine from somewhere (I believe it was found in a trash/trift shop locally), anyway it showed heavy serious issues with red, green and yellow screens including a broken/bad floppy drive - all at the same time!
Can it be fixed?
Join me as I reveal what was the easy fixes to get it back to life - and back to reality!
I also show evidence of that a "RED SCREEN" as normally found, when googled, tells us its the Kickstart rom which is bad, well, in my case that was not true, so this may save your own Amiga if you had given it up already.
As I have many Amiga 500's around, but all where Kickstart 1.3 and one 2.04 Kickstart and I had been busy for the past years with a number of other projects, I finally got the time this summer to go through my Amiga 500 collection and fresh them up!
After the video boot above, showing a red screen, sometimes either the Workbench Boot Disk picture would be garbled, or after a while a GURU appeared and the graphics look like a horror show!
What caused this?
Well, that was simple. I just started taking out the Fat Agnus 8371 chip and while I was trying to pull it out, I stopped halfway and thought, "maybe that was enough", lets try!
I put back the fastener clip back onto the chip, and booted the Amiga again.
Voila, no more garbled graphics, the yellow screen was gone too and no gurus. But the RED screen came from time to time, so next problem up!
So, I started with the first chip I saw, the DENISE 8362R8 "0590 28" chip.
Pull it out!
Replaced it with a separate DENISE (8362R8 "087 28") chip I had extra, and voila!
The RED SCREEN problem was gone. That was the fix.
To make sure, I inserted the bad DENISE chip into other Amiga 500's, even the same machine to make sure it caused the RED SCREEN, and indeed it did!
On to the next issue with this A500 1.2 machine...
I found a PC floppy drive, dug out some tutorial how to make it compatible with Amiga 500.
In my case it was the PANASONIC JU-256A048PC
Before the hack!
After the hack!
Plugged it right in, booted up with a floppy disk to dump the Kickstart 1.2 rom, I had to make sure that "RED SCREEN" and the claim it was the "BAD ROM", told to be a bad Kickstart rom.
Yeah right, that was not the case. I checked it with Kickstart checksum tools, and even verified it against my Winuae Roms.
All 100% match. A definitive proof that RED SCREEN = Is not bad rom or bad kickstart as I would come to believe from Google's and Commodore's own hint and tips!
It should be noted that the power light was RED on this Amiga, which indicates it to be of the older types of Amiga 500's.
Then, simply check disk with "CHK" with D-COPY 2.0 to verify a random old disk from my collection was without severe errors. All fine.
Naturally there are some red re-tries, but that was only because my old tools disk from the 90's was starting to wear out naturally :-)
Google search for "RED SCREEN" typically gives back "BAD ROM/KICKSTART", well, not always!