I've had a busy few weeks with this Amiga 4000 I've been working on, especially now that it's officially mine and not just being borrowed for recap/repair work.
-Half the reason I didn't use it so much before was that two of Paula's audio channels - the second and third columns in Protracker - just weren't coming through. Capacitor goo probably killed it up there.
Turns out those are Paula's right speaker channels (don't tell me why it's 1 and 4 for left speaker, 2 and 3 for right speaker), and a trace connecting the right edge of R434 and the bottom of FB411 was broken (resistance should be zero). The rest of the audio circuit was fine, as verified by tapping into FLTLEFT and FLTRIGHT on the expansion daughterboard connector. Now I get full audio out of the rear RCA jacks!
-I set up some CompactFlash drives in an adapter, which was fine, right up until I tried to install IDEfix and kept running into problems with the setup hanging after IDEfix was started. This drove me nuts enough that I moved over to a 6 GB laptop IDE HDD I had lying around.
That introduced an additional problem: the Amiga has a 4 GB hard drive addressing limit normally. Using PFS partitions in SCSI Direct mode can get around this, up to 8 GB, though going past that and up to 128 GB requires an updated scsi.device to be loaded with LoadModule, or new physical Kickstart ROMs like Cloanto 3.X or Hyperion 3.1.4.
Here's what drove me up the wall for a while, making my HDD disappear: I accidentally used an A1200 scsi.device, which is not compatible with the A4000 and renders your IDE devices invisible, and ClassicWB is set up to load DEVS:scsi.device if present in the S:startup-sequence script (think AUTOEXEC.BAT on MS-DOS). I had to go into the Early Boot Menu from the very first cold boot before it soft-resets from LoadModule, boot without the startup-sequence, and "ed s:startup-sequence" my way into commenting that out long enough to swap in a correct scsi.device file.
With that resolved, I could finally go in, install IDEfix and CacheCDFS, and finally use CD drives on both IDE and SCSI (I have both an Emplant board for Mac emulation and an A3640 board from an A2000 I'm in the middle of repairing). There's some yellow alert errors that come up the first time a disc mounts for some weird reason, but I can still go in and browse the files like normal.
Next up on the list: gotta remove my CR2032 battery holder and take a look at some traces near the RTC circuit that probably got Vartakilled, because my time keeps resetting and SysInfo says "CLOCK NOT FOUND", which absolutely should not be the case on any A4000. It's a relatively minor issue, but it still just bugs me a bit.
After that, maybe I can find out why BlizKick just never works for softkicking newer Kickstart ROMs (this A4000 still has 3.0, a lot of stuff benefits from having 3.1 or newer), neither on the original hardware nor WinUAE, and this is with the MAPROM setting on and CPUCARD parameter specified in both cases.
Also not quite related to my Amiga adventures: my SCSI Zip 100 drive is driving me nuts by not working. It comes up on my Power Mac 9600 and my Amiga 4000 as a SCSI drive and all, but it never actually bothers to mount and read any inserted disks, instead opting to constantly light amber while repeatedly clicking an actuator on the release lever.
This isn't quite the typical Click of Death, as the heads aren't actually being inserted into the disk to begin with. They don't appear to be ripped off or misaligned, either, which is what usually shreds disks and causes the archetypical Click of Death everyone knows. I hope it's not a matter of the AC adapter failing to provide enough amperage, as the voltage checks out and one post on the 'net suggested that changing the AC adapter was enough to fix it.
I know the disks themselves are good too, because I have a bus-powered USB Zip 100 drive that works and reads them just fine. It's just this SCSI drive that's acting up. Maybe I should've picked up a few more spares at VCF Southeast 2018, because they sure didn't have any on consignment for 2019.