Amiga Apollo 1230 expansion card repair log

 Computer Repair Logs, Repair Logs  Comments Off on Amiga Apollo 1230 expansion card repair log
May 272011
 

My good mate Andy over at RCM gave me his 1230 MK2 expansion card to have a look at last time I was there. The problem was the PLCC socket on the FPU was cracked at one corner.


I did manage to confirm this was the problem by holding the socket together so I ordered some socket from China and removed the old socket
The old one came off easy enough with a hot air gun.

The sockets came and I set about fitting it. I decided to use solder paste as it makes the job quite a bit easier when soldering surface mount things with many pins.
5 or so minutes later the new socket was on and after a quick check under the magnifying glass it was time for a test run.

Workbench reported the extra RAM and my 1200 was now a flying machine so im happy its working. Tried Scorched Tanks to make sure, its the only game that was on the compact flash drive!

16bit ROMs byte swapped

 General  Comments Off on 16bit ROMs byte swapped
Apr 132011
 

Just a note to anyone attempting to burn ROMs that are available online.
This mainly concerns the ROMs for 16bit systems such as the Amiga, Atari ST, Megadrive etc.
The ROMs available for use with emulators, like the Kickstart ROMs for use in WinUAE, have all been byteswapped. If you are going to burn these into an EPROM then they needs to be byteswapped. This can be done using many different tools. I use my own drag and drop program to do this quickly but I know Hex Workshop (and probably most other hex editors) can do this too.