Hello from Spain
Posted: 21 Apr 2020 10:48
Well I'm not exactly a collector or a retro hardware modder like many of you here probably are, but due to the lockdown I need to find something productive to do and so these days I decided to spend some time with my beloved A500+ which unfortunately failed to boot up when I hook it up after many years of no use.
Opened the case to see if I could figure out what was wrong, only to find the leakage and damage caused by the internal Ni-Cd battery. Had to clean the mess and repair a few broken tracks on the motherboard (with the help of Amiga PCB Explorer), and it came back from the dead! That was a great moment to see my Amiga asking me to insert a disk again.
The floppy drive and most of my old disks still working, but I went ahead and did some improvements. Installed a Gotek and a STM32 with Flashfloppy + OSD + rottary encoder. Now it feels great to swap disks and be able to play hundreds of games from a USB stick, but I still want to be able to play my original games, so also added a simple switch to swap between the native floppy drive and the Gotek. But still too slow! Maybe it's time to think about an accelerator card with some IDE support that I can use to speed things up. Always dreamed to have a HD on my Amiga back at the time! That's how I found out about the TF cards and this forum.
My next step is to attempt to build a TF card. It looks a nice choice to take my A500+ to the next level, and the only opensource accelerator I could find so far. Good to save money and learn new things at the same time!
Opened the case to see if I could figure out what was wrong, only to find the leakage and damage caused by the internal Ni-Cd battery. Had to clean the mess and repair a few broken tracks on the motherboard (with the help of Amiga PCB Explorer), and it came back from the dead! That was a great moment to see my Amiga asking me to insert a disk again.
The floppy drive and most of my old disks still working, but I went ahead and did some improvements. Installed a Gotek and a STM32 with Flashfloppy + OSD + rottary encoder. Now it feels great to swap disks and be able to play hundreds of games from a USB stick, but I still want to be able to play my original games, so also added a simple switch to swap between the native floppy drive and the Gotek. But still too slow! Maybe it's time to think about an accelerator card with some IDE support that I can use to speed things up. Always dreamed to have a HD on my Amiga back at the time! That's how I found out about the TF cards and this forum.
My next step is to attempt to build a TF card. It looks a nice choice to take my A500+ to the next level, and the only opensource accelerator I could find so far. Good to save money and learn new things at the same time!