Expert: Gregory Donner - 12/2/2007

Question
Hi, my old amiga 600 died on me today. First it gave me a pinkish screen with the disk but worked fine I then though it was some problem with the colors that had occurred when I started it so I rebooted.
But after that it never came back online. The screen is blue and nothing happens. I've tried disconnecting the HD and removing the expansion memory to see if the problem was in any of those but it's completely dead.
Do you have an idea about what has happened? I've read about the color codes and I've found this:
Red    ROM Error - Reseat or replace
Blue    Custom Chip(s) Error
I'm not sure what custom chip error means.
Is this repairable? What are my options?
Hope you can provide me with some insight.

/Richard

Answer
Hi Richard,

As you guessed, it appears to be a problem with one of the custom chips (there's no easy way to know which one is bad). As far as I know, the custom chips are all wave-soldered onto the motherboard, so there's no practical way to replace them (it's extremely difficult to unsolder and resolder that kind of chip that Commodore switched to to save money during production). The Amiga 1000, 500, 2000, and 3000 series are the only Amiga models with socket-type custom chips, which can be replaced rather easily.

Keeping your 600, the only option I know of would be to buy a replacement motherboard, but it may well be cheaper just to look for another used Amiga 600 on eBay.com or perhaps Software Hut (softhut.com) or AmigaKit (www.amigakit.com).

The problem is that a lot of Amiga hardware is so old--more than twenty years in some cases (some dating back to early '86)--and is failing even though it may never have been used before (especially floppy diskettes). Considering that even ten years is ancient for computer hardware, the Amiga really has done quite well to last this long!

I hope this helps,

Greg