Repairing a Terrible Fire 534

Surprisingly a Terrible Fire is actually a good thing! It is a range of accelerators for the Amiga and Atart ST. I recently picked up a damaged one on eBay relatively cheaply in the hopes that I could either repair it or use the parts to build a new one. It has a 68030 CPU with 4MB of RAM onboard. This is my journey through the repair…

The seller was quite open about the damage, they had tried to remove the 50MHz clock to fit a 40MHz one for stability. They didn’t have the correct tools so managed to damage both the board and the crystal.

So, we have a damaged clock on damaged pads and one of the traces to the IDE connector is broken. What you may also be able to see if you zoom in is the square IC in the top left has a tiny bit of solder shorting the two pins.

Using some very fine tweezers I managed to break away and remove the tiny blob of solder from the IC. I then ordered a new hot air rework station so I could replace the crystal and ordered a new 40MHz crystal from Digi-Key amongst some parts I needed for other projects.

The crystal was easy enough to remove with some gentle heat, I then used a soldering iron and a very small amount of solder to repair the broken trace. I coated this repair in clear nail polish to protect it for the rest of the repair.

The pads for the crystal were pretty clean, so I put some solder paste on each pad, used tweezers to place the crystal. Went over it with the hot air station and it fitted nicely.

Next up is the Amiga itself. I wanted to test this in my Amiga 500 Plus, but the revision 8 board has a capacitor standing up in the way (C816 below).

The legs were too short to move it out of the way, so I desoldered it and fitted a new one at a 90° so that it was out of the way. I could then get the board in the socket. There was a CPU relocator that came with the TF board, which rotates the location of the board by 90° so that you can get the case on properly. Unfortunately the socket on that is damaged too, something to repair another day. So, I plugged the TF board straight into the CPU socket of the Amiga.

I turned on the Amiga, and it booted! Ran a memory check and got the all clear! Here is some Sysinfo screenshots.

My Amiga now runs at over 14 times it stock speed. Now I need to upgrade the Kickstart and get compact flash card socket for it.