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Amiga A2088 IBM PC XT Bridgeboard stopped working

roadrash

Experienced Member
Joined
Aug 17, 2011
Messages
128
Location
Huntingdon, U.K
I've had this bridgeboard working in my Amiga B2000 ever since I bought it many decades ago and its never failed to boot up.
But recently my Amiga has stopped booting and I removed all the add in cards and found it was the bridgeboard card that's causing it to stop booting.
If I remove it the Amiga boots fine so the issue seems to be in the A2088 bridgeboard. Its basically a complete IBM XT clone on a card.
So far I've backed up the bios just for safety and replaced all the electrolytic caps (just 6 in total 47uf 25v).
The first time I tried it after replacing the caps I was shocked when a brand new cap exploded. I checked and it was put in the correct way round so have no idea why it should have done that. Anyway just to try I replaced it with a 50v one and tried again and still it doesn't let the Amiga start up.
There is not a lot I can think of to check so would be grateful for any help I can get to resurrect by now dead PC XT.
Here is a link to some hi-res photo's of the A2088 bridgeboard https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16h0baB6Lxl2cEzkjjCwQK1BNG-tnnoln?usp=sharing
 
Luckily I have another B2000 Amiga and I just plugged the Bridgeboard into that and it worked so the problem seems to be with the computer itself and not the bridgeboard.
Strangely, other cards like hard drive controllers all work fine in it but I can see they dont use the exact same slots (there are 3 different ones) and the hard drive controller uses 2 of them but the bridgeboard uses all 3.
All I can think of is try recapping the motherboard starting with the caps between and around the slots.
 
What did you replace the electrolytic caps with? The - mark on electrolytics is negative, on Tantulums its the opposite and Tants blow up if you either over voltage them or put them in backwards.

The Bridgeboard bridges the Amiga Zorro slot with the passive ISA slots on the A2000 motherboard (as well as having a XT machine in your Amiga). Could just need the edge connector cleaned and reinstalled. The 286 version of the Bridgeboard allows the use of 16 bit ISA slots.
 
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