Amiga 500, and Pi1541 does not work

Amiga 500

Yesterday I dug out my old Amiga 500 from the attic. Unfortunately the power supply cable left some ugly marks on the case. But inside it looks quite good. Didn’t find any leaked capacitors or the likes.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work the first time I turned it on. Only the red power LED was blinking. There was no picture either. After a few power cycles, the LED stopped blinking and you could hear the typical cracking sound of the floppy. There was still no picture. But after inserting a floppy I could hear that infamous Amiga floppy sound. Hooray. Howevery, sporadically it didn’t start up after power on. I pushed on all chips a little bit. I also checked the power supply. Even under load, the voltages 5V, 12V and -12V were ok. Strangely, the longer I had it on, the fewer it stopped working on boot up.

But I could not get a picture on the TV. After many attempts I was able to connect the composite signal. That finally gave me at least a black/white picture. After some research I realized that the composite signal from the Amiga has no color. But I was still unable to get a picture with a scart cable via RGB.

After some research I found a manual and a service manual for the TV (Philipps 24pw6518). According to the wiring diagram SCART1 should be able to handle an RGB signal. The manual says the same. Maybe I have to supply scart pin 16 with the right voltage?

The cable should be connected according to those diagrams:

But today it’s already late and tomorrow I’m off to Berlin. So the Amiga will have to wait for a while.

Pi1541

Yesterday the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ arrived. The Pi1541 image seems to work. The buttons on the side of the board do something. But when I try to load a disc on the C64, nothing happens. There is no error on the C64. It just hangs. The status display in the Pi1541 shows that one line is changing. But then nothing happens. I checked the cable again. I think it is ok. I have no idea what’s wrong. I hope there is no problem with the port of the C64…

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