CompuServe Messages

Peter, the CIA chips bear the number 8520, there's a pair of them in your Amiga which is (as far as I remember) located to the rear center of your A500. On the motherboard there should 'even' and 'odd' and/or 'CIA-A' and 'CIA-B' be written beside or in front of the chips so you know which is which. The CIA chips are used for a whole lot of things in the Amiga so in quite a lot of cases when it acts weird, a 'fried' CIA is to blame. As there are two of them you can easily swap them and see if your problems disappear (and others appear in their place, due to the other CIA chip now being the defective one…). I don't know what they really do – there are some timers integrated in the CIAs, and they have some function or other with the ports (Serial, Parallel and floppy). Other than that I have no idea. But you can see they're pretty vital to your Amiga's operation. Unfortunately though they seem to be in no way protected from harm – you can fry a CIA by just plugging/unplugging a cable (serial, parallel) with your Amiga powered on (which is why you should never do that according to the books…) Cheers, // Christian "ELP" Busse \X/ near Frankfurt, Germany