Category: Amiga

Some weeks ago I received my compact cards and ide adapter.
I installed Workbench 3.0 on one of the Compact disks.
To speed up installation, I used WINUAE on my PC.
The disks connected by USB card reader.

After installing the Workbench I mounted the compact flash with the adapter in the Amiga 1200.
She booted up on first try (And a lot quicker than the original disk).
After this I inserted a PCMCIA to compact flash adapter, but She couldn’t see it.
(cfd and fat95 installed),
So I ordered 2 Sandisk 4GB Compact disks.
I’m still waiting for those to arrive.

My colleague got hands on some old PCMCIA cards.
One of these card was a D-link 670, a cnet.device compatible card.

After some work, getting files to the Amiga using crossdos and PC2AM and several tries on configuring MiamiDX (TCP/IP Stack) I manage to get online.

As my Amiga only has 6Mb, lot of sites are not able to load, but aminet was no problem.

next:
-getting compact flash working with the PCMCIA for easy file transfer
-Getting 2 16Mb GVP SIMMS (if price is not to high), Or wait for vampire 1200

18 August I bought an Amiga 1200, my fist 1200 I ever owned.
I had the choice to get a nice white Amiga Technology A1200 or a yellowish Commodore A1200.
I choose the yellowish A1200 as the internal HD was still running and the board doesn’t have the Escom drive fix (making the drive incompatible with some demo/games)
The Amiga also contained a GVP 1230 (Jaws) 68030 board with 4mb memory and another 4mb 68020 (Blizzard 1220) card.

The Amiga was used until 2006 by a local broadcast company in Tilburg.

Yesterday I finished the cleaning of my Amiga 500+.

Last week I removed the battery and neutralize the acid from the battery with lemon juice.
This time I Removed the 7400 series chips that are in the affected area so I can also clean the circuit board below the chips.
After removing the chips I still see some corrosion, so I cleaned it with a toothbrush.
When I finished cleaning, I placed some sockets and placed some new chips back.
When done with the chips, I pull the Gary from her socket and start removing the old corroded socket.
When removed, I again clean the circuit board with a toothbrush and place a new socket.
I Didn’t had a 44pin socket so I used a 40 pin socket and cut a part of another socket for the remaining pins.
After reseating the Gary I reassembled the Amiga and powered her up.
The 2.o Kickstart welcome screen is shown on my TV ( in color 🙂 )

While doing some more testing, I found out that I couldn’t type “dir”.
the R key did not respond. after a quick test I found that the keyboard was not responding on two columns, the column with the R and the column with the T key.
So next mission for this Amiga is to check the keyboard and repair/replace it.

To be continued

Yesterday I created a scart cable for my Amiga.

I took the schematics from ilesj’s blog and for the first time I had a color picture on my TV.
Not counting the GBS8200 experiment I did.

Next I need to try to get the 80 column output of my Commodore 128 on the same TV.
But that will be another adventure.

A big problem that old computer systems have is leaking batteries.
The acid that gets free causes the copper conductors to corrode and when nothing is done the computer will stop working.

So yesterday I started to clean the damage caused by the leaking battery on my Amiga 500+.

First I opened my Amiga and completely disassembled it.
While doing this, I noted how the floppy drive power is connected.
Connecting it the wrong way will damage the drive beyond repair.

When the mainboard was out, I cut out the battery and then I cleaned all green corroded parts with concentraded lemon juice to neutralize the acid from the battery.
I then used a tooth brush to clean the affected parts and afterwards I dried the board and use pure alcohol to clean the part that I cleaned.

I still havened tested if she still works as I wanted to be sure that the mainboard is dried up.

Next step will be replacing the 7400 series chips that are corroded as I want to be sure that all corrosion is gone.

Today I fixed the Amiga that was smoking.
Last week al parts arrived so I could fix her.
The capacitors are for a higher voltage and therefore a little bigger that the ones I removed.

After fixing I turned on the Amiga and she gave the kickstart boot image again.
In the top of the picture you can see the connector of my Amiga to scart cable.
But my TV is not accepting this input so I’m still stuck with a gray scale image on my TV.

I also received a GBS8200 board last week, so I can start building another Amiga -> GBS8200 -> VGA adapter.
I will create a post about this, when done

While she is older than 18 years old, she is not allowed to smoke 🙂 .
So I started to look for the reason why she did.

First I measured the resistance between the resistor that smoked (R406) and ground.
It was only 0.2 Ohm, A little to low.
So I checked the schematics and noticed that the capacitor C401 and C402 are also in the circuit.
As Capacitors die after some time, I removed them from the circuit board.
When I checked the capacitor C401 it only measured 0.2 Ohm, while C402 was somewhere in the mega Ohm.

So I found the reason why R406 was smoking.
I’m now waiting the ordered capacitor and resistor.

Yesterday I was building a Amiga to scart cable.
But when I was testing the cable, I had no picture on screen (only as shadow on a black screen).
So I looked on the internet and found that my TV (LG) must be manually changed to RGB mode.
So I turned on my Amiga and TV (cable disconnected) and while I was busy searching for the option, I hear the floppy drive running and noticed a funny smell…

I immediately look at my Amiga and noticed gray/white smoke rising from her.
So I turned her off.

It looks like R406 that started to smoke.
I have to find out what could cause this, and what I need to replace.