Some time ago I’ve decided to start using my old Amiga again.
It was bought as a new machine in 199X, and it’s pretty much the most important computer in my life. I remember how it changed my mind on what was possible on a home computer, and it was the first machine that I’ve used to connect to the Internet. I’ve got computers before and after that, even some other Amigas (A2000 which drowned in a flooding of my basement and A1200 which I unfortunately sold), but A600 was my first true love.
Since it became obsolete I’ve stored it in very good conditions and now at first glance it looks almost as good as 20 years ago. It seemed that not only external looks are in order as after hooking it up I was greeted with the Kickstart screen and the sound of the floppy drive searching for a disk. To my own surprise I found a Workbench disk and it booted up.
It works, I thought.
Looks can be deceiving.
I forgot about that old adage and started shopping online for upgrades. I’ve bought a Compact Flash to IDE adapter, a new Kickstart ROM 3.1 since the adapter doesn’t work with 2.1 ROMs and a 1MB PCMCIA SRAM memory expansion (which becomes FAST RAM on Amigas). The other memory expansion shown below was bought in 90s and is a 1MB SLOW RAM expansion sadly without real time clock.
I’ve prepared the CF card under Windows using WinUAE and installed a Workbench 3.1 onto it. It’s quite nice btw that WinUAE allows using real physical drives on a PC as Amiga disks.
With all of those upgrades in place it was time to test my new old Amiga, once again everything worked and I’ve booted into Workbench. Unfortunately, after some time I’ve noticed some of the keys don’t work. I’ve checked the keyboard’s connector and noticed that almost all the connections at it’s end are worn out. First I’ve tried cutting it a little so the worn connections won’t be there anymore and the remaining bit will do the trick … it didn’t. The rest of the tape was covered with some kind of protective varnish so I thought if i can get it off somehow it’ll connect. It took me about 2 hours of cutting the tape by 5mm at a time and trying to scrub off the covering substance without destroying the circuits below.
The tape is now almost half it’s normal length, but the keyboard works again!
Booting back to Workbench I was sure nothing else will go wrong.
When preparing the CF card I’ve put some WHDLoad games on it. It’s a great way to avoid using diskettes, specially when you have more memory installed in your system. After some problems I’ve managed to run most of them.
Thing was the sound was completely messed up. It sounded like it was coming from a bottom of a well. I’ve tried connecting it differently to the TV but nothing worked. To top it off after some time the video got messed up to and colors started to randomly change.
I’m not happy.
I know that’s the fault’s probably in the motherboard’s capacitors and I’m planning to have them swapped with new ones as soon as possible, but it’s just kind of sad.
To be continued …
HIGHER RESOLUTION IMAGES: http://zdzieblowski.com/_/AMIGAREVIVAL/A600.zip
(includes normal pngs and "retro" gifs ;))
