SangJaOppa Hardware

Table of Contents

Repair

A common problem with A4000D is the leakage of their barrel batteries (see here for an example), which damages the motherboard and leads to non-functional clocks or, worst, non-functional A4000! These batteries must be replaced and the motherboards fixed... Difficult jobs! Fortunately, the modern Web helps greatly with Web sites to explore, search, zoom on any Amiga motherboards, the Amiga PCB Explorer, and to access all the schematics of the different Amigas, the AmigaWiki... Cheers to them .

However, after a while, my A4000D started to show instabilities until, one day, only a yellow screen! TUMO helped a lot with finding out what the problems were. It seems that some vias continue to deteriorate even after AmigaKit repairs.

There are also efforts to produce new (improved) motherboards for the A4000D, two in fact:

  1. The Alice project with blue, ATX-size motherboard.
  2. The Replica project with red, exact replicas of the motherboard.

 

Upgrade

Besides recapping the motherboard with new capacitors (thanks AmigaKit!), I also changed the PSU fan with a new and quiet 80mm 1500 RPM 3-pin fan, because the original fan sounded like a plane taking off! It was money well spent: I can now work next to my A4000 .

 

Components

I have the chance to have few expansion card to make my A4000D more interesting:

  • A Arxon ScanDoubler, plugged into the extended video port (lower slot on the expansion daughter board) to connect the display to a moder VGA-compatible LCD monitor;
  • A DKB RapidFire, plugged into one of the Zorro port, to control external SCSI devices;
  • A Village Tronic Ariadne Ethernet card, plugged into another Zorro port, to connect my LAN and the Internet.

 

The last three changes:

Tygre - 2020-01-29 08:19:40 pm  |  Tygre - 2020-01-21 02:09:58 pm  |  Tygre - 2020-01-21 02:06:15 pm