Right, so I decided to pick up an A1200 off eBay, as a birthday present to myself, and I've run into a few problems.
Given the item was described as being in good condition, full working order, never been opened etc, I was surprised, as you might imagine, to find that not a single one of the supplied floppies could be read without AmigaDOS whinging about disk block errors, or the software failure screen. Odd, I could have sworn the seller said it was recently tested...
So, I do the obvious thing and make sure nothing's taken a knock in transit. Time to check the cables and make sure there's no fluff or foreign objects in the drive. I opened the case up and was frankly horrified by the amount of rust and corrosion on the RF sheild, drive housing, and the phantom hard drive bracket I was not expecting to find. There's also huge amounts of dust everywhere (not a problem, it blows out) but my god! This is going to take me AGES to clean and that's after I've bought the right shit to do it with! Also need to wire-brush the TV modulator housing as that's rusty too. Has anyone else found unexpected electrical tape on their A1200 innards? I suspect strongly I've been lied to just a little bit by the seller.
Then we need a new floppy drive, because I wouldn't trust the old one as far as I can throw it (which incidentally I am about to find out exactly how far), a new cable because the current one seems to be rusting as well (wtf!?) in parts, and finally (I hope!) a whole new keyboard because I can't afford to take the 6 weeks off work it'll take to get all the filth out of this one. I'm sure I saw a pube in there earlier... I mean what the hell.
That's BEFORE I can even think about getting hold of a copy of ****ing WorkBench and have it running, nevermind any of the stuff I actually wanted to mess around doing.
I am rather cross and not having a very nice day. I honestly don't know whether I'd prefer to spend the money fixing it up or just throw it in the bin and try to forget about the money I wasted.