💻 Accidental Amiga

Toward the tail-end of the first lockdown I speculatively bid on a boxed, Amiga 600. I wasn't expecting to win it, I'd only put on a tiny bid, but low-and-behold, I snagged it for a bargain. The idea being, to have a little side-project during the lockdown, and maaaaybe get back into some Amiga Dev. I keep promising myself…

It arrived a few weeks back, and I’ve been tinkering ever since.

The first job was to give it a clean, as it was starting to yellow. One damn good wash, and an hour on the windowsill later, and this was back under control. It's actually a very tidy machine, so I’ve lucked in.

I’ve owned enough Amigas in my time that I’m past the point of trusting an O.G. Commodore PSU, so that’s going to be recycled somewhere. Fortunately, there are lots of options for replacements. I settled on a one from Amigastore.eu.

The motherboard looked in good condition, but I decided to re-cap it just to be safe. Now, I’ve not done anything with a soldering iron in the last 20 years, so I’m, er, rusty (not that I was ever that handy), so this was a bit of a leap. But, I’m not gonna learn anything by watching You Tube videos, so what the hell. It looked doable, for the most part, but there was a tight little collection around the RF output that worried me.

I had a crack, anyway.

And duly failed.

Colour output was broken, I’d lost green, so I had to call in the help of an adult. My mistake? Too much paste on one of the caps, so an easy enough fix (apparently). And there was a wire missing off one of the chips that was meant to short it. Not clear if that was me, or it was bought like that, but again, an easy fix.

They also tested and aligned the floppy drive while they were in there. Woo!

For it to be useful, it needs more RAM, and I seem to have won the only A600 on the planet that didn’t have a 512k RAM expansion rusted into its expansion port. I bought an A604n from Individual Computers, as I’d like to have a few more expansion options down the road and slotted it in. At 35e, it’s a steal:

https://icomp.de/shop-icomp/en/shop/product/a604n.html

I now have a pretty tidy A600, that’s nearly ready for me to do something useful on. Next steps: upgrade the ROM to 3.1.4, install the SD-HD, and get Workbench going…