Its called Amiga life when you power up your Amiga computer and you are greeted with an unexplainable error.

You can have the most stable system ever, but that day will eventually come when something will break – either you did it yourself or something happened by itself.

That happened to me recently, my trusty A4000TX stopped working, showing a frozen screen on boot.

What had happened? I suspected it was because I removed a Zorro card with the PSU ATX stand by power not shut off, it should not, but could have. Nobody knows for sure.

After tearing down the system to bare minimum I consulted the creator of the A4000TX.

Suggestion was to remove Lisa, Alice and the VideoDAC and test them on an other Amiga (paid off to have a second A4000TX with sockets this time!).

Another suggestion was to run Diagrom with serial port output. Surprisingly the Amiga was fully working (except graphics output) in serial output!

All chips worked fine on my secondary A4000TX (that had sockets for the chips)! What else to do? Put all three chips back again and send it off for a grand inspection at someone more knowledgeable.

While desoldering the Alice chip one solder pad lifted off the PCB. Now one problem grew into a larger problem…

Always good to have spare parts at home, I scraped off the slot pad from a cheap PCIe card and super glued it to the broken pad space on the A4000TX – Then I made sure it made contact to the traces by soldering wires to it from traces.

And guess what!? After soldering all the three chips back to the A4000TX it works fine again!

C’est la vie