Midlife crisis is strong. This blog is about restoring and expanding two Commodore Amiga computers from my childhood over the next few months. There will be hardware repairs and component modifications. I will also share .mod music tracks, demos and rediscover Amiga games. Nostalgia deluxe. Follow me on Twitter or YouTube for updates or subscribe via RSS.
Today two pre-orders from Individual Computer arrived.
Hello World (2)
It's a little dead, Jim.
How hard can it be to fix a pulled solder pad?
Tonight's the Night! Tonight I'll re-cap my Amiga 600! Spoiler: It won't end well. :-(
Bought a dirty and broken Amiga tank mouse on Ebay in order to gut it, clean it and mod it with a laser sensor by @jesusdelatorrec.
8 hour train ride! Ideal moment to play an Amiga classic: Darkmere: The Nightmare's Begun (by Core Design, 1993)
A super flat package arrived today!
After watching the 4th episode of @thejanbeta's recent Amiga 500 repair video series, I learned about the existence of a custom kickstart ROM that can diagnose Amiga hardware.
Final (proper) Amiga keyboard update. Besides the broken plastic clip of the space bar, the keyboard membrane needed some love because some keys were flaky sometimes. A good way to improve the reliability is to add graphite to refresh conductivity.
To fix the semi-broken Amiga 1200 space-bar for good, I need to replace the plastic back plate with a new one. And for that switch a full Amiga 1200 keyboard dis- and reassembly is required. Perfect activity for the last day of the year.
My 1200 keyboard back plastic plate replacement arrived today. Had to soak, clean and dry it: A simple man's requiem.
Exactly 28 years ago I got my first original game for xmas: F-19 Stealth Fighter by I lost it a few years later during a chaotic move, however this week I managed to obtain a near-perfect copy on Ebay!
Got stuck in a platformer game, hit space, spawned a little dude. (Apprentice, Rainbow Arts, 1990, OCS)
Amiga 1200 space-bar fix update 3!
Final screen test.
Quick follow up on the Amiga 1200 system instabilities I've been experiencing. I bought an IR thermometer to measure the heat generated by the Indivision AGA MK2cr.
The keyboard fix I did earlier this month didn't work. Too much force was needed to get the key to trigger. UsingAmigaShellwashell. Tonight I decided to revisit the space bar repair.
I finally figured it out.
Bad evening, lots of debugging. I suspect the accelerator card isn't working properly. This error or variants of it pops up a lot.
Follow up on that broken AmigaOS disk.
This is the "Gayle" chip inside the Amiga 1200. It contains a hardware bug that prevents the proper reinitialization of the PCMCIA slot after a reset via keyboard or a software crash. To make it detect cards again, a full powercycle is needed.
Last night the Power LED started to fail. After some quick research, it seems this is a common issue with aging Amigas. Recommended fix: Re-solder the LEDs.
AmigaOS 3.1.4 arrived today! It's on 6 floppy disks and two Kickstart roms.
Even for @lazygamereviews, this is an inadequate amount of packing peanuts.
Today I received my new SD card interface (SD2IDE) as well as a single port IDE adapter by RastPort for my Amiga 1200.
New essential hardware in the mail today.
Okay.
"Congrats! Your new hardware has just come home!"
I bought a used Amiga 1200 (Escom REV 1D4) on Ebay in very good condition. This machine will get upgraded in the next few weeks.
My new Amiga replacement PSU (Universal +12V, -12V, 5V) by Lotharek arrived today!
A big box with Amiga parts was delivered to my Briefkasten today.
Quick update: The left fire button on the joystick wasn’t working correctly, turns out the micro switch got dislocated. Easy fix.
Bonus material: Clicky and squeaky like all good peripherals.
Let’s start off with something trivial. Mouse and Joystick cleaning.