Copy of Amiga 600

Hello World (2)

A few months ago I managed to find a replacement on Ebay for my half-dead Amiga 600. And it's in excellent condition: Zero yellowing and just a tiny bit dirty.

I didn't think I'd win the auction, but because the deadline was in the middle of the night, I got it for a bargain.

It came with an IDE2CF adapter, a 4 GB WD compact flash card and an unbranded 1MB chip memory expansion.

The seller recapped the machine already, and it's looking very good. Bit of rust on the RF modulator. I noticed a that one of the new capacitors was misaligned, but my multimeter told me it's fine.

Of course I'm going to use AmigaOS 3.1.4 on this machine, so my plan is to burn a new Kickstart ROM. I got plenty of unused chips. But before you can write on them, you need to clear them. Like formatting, but with a light hammer.

It's quite the machinery. You remove the protective sticker from the chip to be erased and put it into the little drawer. Close it, set the timer to 4-8 minutes and turn it on. Inside a strong UV light shines down on the chip, erasing it in the process.

I guess a single UV light source, like a tube or so, would probably work fine as well. However I wanted something cheap, safe and easy to store away.

To actually burn data on a 27C400-type chip with a TL866II-Plus programmer an adapter is needed.

I used Keir Fraser's excellent EPROM Adapter v4. It's very affordable, great build quality and it's opensource. github.com/keirf/PCB-Proj…

This just feels right for a full stack developer like me. On this picture you can see the light sensitive surface that responds to the UV light.

I used Xgpro to burn the ROM, picked AM27C4096 (at DIT 40) as base chip and de-selected "Check ID" because it's no exact match, but close enough to work. Some chips need voltage adjustments, but all other defaults worked fine for me.

Done!

How to best end a day? Installing AmigaOS and a lot of disk swapping.

Hard drive setup was not straight forward. After partitioning the drive in the machine I had to attach it to my Windows PC and format the Disk in WinUAE: I wasn't able to format 4GB directly, even in 3.1.4. The OS complained that there wasn't enough memory to verify the disk.

Maybe there is a command line method or 3rd party tool to do this, I'm not sure.

My new Amiga 600 is ready for use. The AmigaOS 3.1.4.1 update is still pending, but don't have the physical disk ready yet.