Mike's Old Tat

[stephen_usher]

Yeah, rust often doesn't mean dead machine. Indeed, dried out, mouldy leaf litter inside the machine doesn't mean that it's dead either, as I found with the Apricot F1 barn find.

[alexh]

Well done for rescuing it. When I saw it on eBay I thought there was too much rust for it to be savable.

[HomeLate]

Great work on the Amiga (and the other ones too). I bought a battered Amiga 1000 a few months ago. It's now cleaned (but still yellowed) and working like a charm. I added a Rejuvenator and a Parceiro II and this added 2Mb chipram and 8Mb fastram and a SD-card based 'hard-drive'. It now also boots into WB 1.3 with KS 1.3.

And I bought a TT030 too early this year. Mine was in great condition though. I added a Thunderstorm IDE/Fastram interface and a VME USB interface. It now has 32Mb TT-RAM installed.

Don't get me started about my PS/2 collection ;)

[alexh]

Where are everyone finding TT030s? I've been looking for a sensible priced one for years

[lilwashu]

A1000 Continued

I put the RGB port back on then fired the machine up to test and thankfully it still worked (now in colour).

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I connected up the floppy drive after servicing it and inserted a kickstart disk, which was detected but not read and the machine returned to the Insert Disk screen. I tried my Gotek with similar results so something was wrong - CIA failure is a common cause for this sort of thing so I swapped them over, tried some spares etc with no success. The Paula chip handles disk I/O so I pulled it out to inspect and was greeted with this:

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One of the missing pins is the RXD line. Swapping with a good spare Paula chip brought the disk to life and it booted Kickstart, only to hang on a white screen after rebooting at the point it should ask for a Workbench disk. I have noticed a few people have had similar issues with RGB-HD15 adapters recently and sure enough swapping my Commodore one for an RGB SCART cable allowed Kickstart to reboot successfully then load Workbench.

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The original floppy drive was not working correctly and immediately failed any write operations so I swapped it for a Chinon FB-534 from an A500 - these can be modded to accept the floppy drive LED in the A1000 which is wired directly to the drive rather than the motherboard.

At this point I have a basically functional A1000 with 256K expansion, so 512K RAM. Audio, memory and CIA test all complete using Amiga Test Kit. Still to do is sort out a keyboard as this came without one, tidy up the rust, and see if the Spirit RAM expansion that came installed works.

Next: Keyboard, Cosmetics, Expansion

[HomeLate]

Where are everyone finding TT030s? I've been looking for a sensible priced one for years

I got mine on eBay (and paid a premium price). One has been sold on Amibay just recently. It wasn't in great condition and it was still sold for 900 euro.

[viking272]

Great work on the machines, in particular the TT. Looks amazing!

[lilwashu]

I found an A1000 keyboard which turned up and was very yellow but functioned properly apart from three keys.

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Contact cleaner down the stem (these are switches rather than a membrane) sorted two of them but one remained failed, so I had to desolder it, dismantle it, and adjust the internal lever using instructions found on various sites. This gave me a fully working keyboard which in the meantime I had stripped and cleaned because it was a bit grubby.

The A1000 came with an internal period "Inboard 1000" RAM expansion which plugs into the 68K socket via extension pins and needs a couple of wires soldering to the A1000 daughterboard. This one had 512K extra RAM installed.

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I removed it before doing initial testing so I reinstalled it to see if it worked. The machine booted but no extra RAM was seen - thankfully the manual and software for it is available so I put it in "test mode" and ran the quite impressive RAM tester software to reveal 4 bad chips:

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I ordered some replacements and installed them, all reported good and putting the board back in normal mode added the 512K giving me a total of 1MB:

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I had while waiting for parts rubbed down, primed and painted with silver alloy wheel paint all the rusted metal shielding, so it was time to put it back in the case - here it is with a matching A1010 floppy drive:

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Plain sailing so far, so naturally at this point the machine started to play up and mostly hang on a black screen on power up rather than go through the power on flashing LED/tune/kickstart sequence. I am still troubleshooting this so will update when progress has been made.

[stephen_usher]

Are you tempted to fully populate that RAM board to give you 2MB?

[lilwashu]

If I can ever get the machine stable again I am, yes - it will allow clever things like soft kicking more recent kickstarts and reclaiming the WCS RAM, etc. Prime suspects for current iffy behaviour are aged single wipe sockets and caps in the power supply, hopefully the latter as I don't fancy my chances of getting the hens teeth Agnus chip out in one piece.