So I got an Amiga

So recently me any my parents went out to pick up a shop smith. Its this giant ungodly contraption that is a bandsaw a lathe and a table saw all at once. Its great! So we saw the people’s property and they showed us around (it was fucking beautiful like holy shit its smack dab in the center of 3 lakes in the middle of the woods and the bats are always out because the forest is so dark so theres no bugs UGH IT WAS SO GREAT) and we walk into their barn to see this holy shit machine and I turn and see this.

And I’m like “Oh cool an amiga” and turn back to the machine. WAIT WHAT? AN AMIGA?

For those who don’t know I fucking love amiga’s but the NTSC models for America are pretty rare in all honesty. They were here, its just that MSDOS machines, IBM DOS machines, and CP\M machines were way more popular here (for the most part). So to see that thing… It was amazing. Turns out the guy is like 87 or 88 and fighting cancer for the second time. He can’t feel anything in his hands or feet anymore and he’s trying to get rid of stuff but in the appropriate way. He really didn’t want to have it all get scattered all over the place and he has had this computer for over 25 years. When he saw that I knew what it was and that I knew about them he was trying to sell it to me. 30 bucks total, and you wouldn’t believe what he had with it.

Every piece of documentation. When he had it serviced and refreshed in 2002 (has a new battery in it, no worries there :3 ), all the docs for the printer he had, all the original disks, all the amiga basic stuff, all the from-factory documentation about the upgrades that had to be made because the 3000 was a pain in the ass to get in the mid-west so it was easier to just throw a 68020 inside instead of keep the stock 68000 in there, everything. Literally every paper that could be packaged with this thing is. Its great. But I feel kinda bad. This was basically his center thing for years. He used to be a minister, and until 2005 he was using this amiga as his main machine. He had an HP printer plugged up to it that was rather modern in all honesty, but worked, and all his sermons on floppies. I kinda wanted the floppies because I don’t have many DD disks, so we made a deal that I could keep them IF I could get the sermens to him in a text format on a USB or something (its like 30 some years of his lifes work so I can see that). I use AROS so that should be easy enough.

I honestly wanted him to donate it to a computer museum somewhere with the amount of stuff he had with it. There aren’t any add-in cards or anything, but thu original KB and Mouse, Commodore 1010 monitor, and the (1015?) external 3 1/2 floppy drive. It has another 3.5 floppy drive internally, maxed out 9mb of ram, and a Fat Agnus chip paired with that 68020. Been working on cleaning it since last night getting it home and I think I got it all done pretty well. KB was the hardest part actually but I’ll do that in a post below.

Its beautiful. Its not the most collectible amiga available, but fuck it its mine and I love it.

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So about that KB cleaning.

Never done it before so I googled and followed what it said for some things and then pretty much made up the rest as I went along. I have no clue if any of this is the correct way to do such things, but there are keys on the board working now that didn’t before so I did something right.

So here is the disgusting thing.



That doesn’t look too bad, right? Well its a spring KB and some of the keys were… gummy, lets say. T and space were so fucked that they didn’t even work.

At some point this thing was in like a kitchen or something. It smelled like it had been.

All the keys had this weird grime around them and it had started to make the backboard rust. Ew.



I had read online that using a bowl and chucking in the keys on your board and soaking them a bit in soapy water would help really get the shit off them. I don’t have the patience to scrub each one individually so I just chucked them in and used soap with some lemon oil in it to cut into the surface of the plastic some, and then mixed the whole thing in my hands.

Avoiding the messy living room, I threw the now clean keys in a towel, made a sack, and shook it up some and let it sit, kneading it every few minutes. Seemed to work fine.

Now the thing that took for fucking ever.

Of course.

Before you bitch, thats not recent oil. Thats an ancient oil stain and that rag has been used for years and washed 5 billion times. Its fine.

So I tried to just half ass and wipe in between the keys because I didn’t think I had a spare toothbrush. The only one I use with alchohol I use to scrub processor lids clean. Not using that shit. But, I found a new one in a drawer.


After about an hour of tedious bullshit, and halfway through another episode of the triforce podcast, I had done it! For the most part, the backboard was clean.

Now I have never seen a buckling spring keyboard before, nor do I know if this is how they all are, but these contacts needed to be cleaned so the keys could function. So I attacked each of them with the brush and the carriages with the rag. Tada!

Getting the keys back on was a pain in the dick. Had to get an image but thinking back now I coulda used my own pictures. Oh well. Heres the one I used.

So after another half hour , and the start of another podcast episode, the keys were on and the screws back in! Lets test!

Hooray! It works! T works! SPACE WORKS! I’m happy.

Looks hella sharp now too, so thats good.

Next I need to learn how to write amiga floppies! (or buy a gotek but thats no fun…)

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Reminds me of when I bought an IBM 5150 for 50 bucks, I was happy as a clam but he comes out with boxes of manuals and software, manuals where HUGE.
There is a tremendous Amiga fan base out there and a ton of sites. I never got into Amiga’s but I know the Amiga community were very active back when I was into old computers.
The great thing about old computers is if it is a “barn find” you can afford it, old rare cars not so much.
At least there was no cig ashes,beer stains and stray armpit hairs in the keyboard :slight_smile:
image

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Haha well not exactly a barn find. The guys wife doesn’t really like tech too much. He was just a lover of amiga’s and refused to get rid of it so it lived in the barn. Used it every day till his hands were meh a few years ago. Kinda sad tbh.

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That is a great computer… I know someone cough way back in the day, that had a vic20, and hacked a bank with it, as soon as the very first modem was released to the public.
Anyways that computer there was way ahead of its time. I knew someone who had that machine too… good score.

Well I really want to use it to its full potential. Any help with it is much appreciated!

I’m hardly one to just collect and keep. Its on my actual desk for a reason. I want to get a hard drive in there, I want the newest kickstart it can take, I want an amigaOS installation in there, everything. Make games and demos, hell maybe get it online eventually.

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My favorite AMIGA game

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@wendell
Maybe smarter minds can figure this one out.
Every now and then for the past 6 years a YouTube comment asks me to reply to trolling about something. Except that by now I have forgotten what the original comment was and why I keep getting these pop-up requests.

What are the odds on the layers of chances that a response 6 years too late when, obscured by having to click on it 5 times before I can forward it too an obscure forum where no one knows what it is or where to forward it and I have forgotten why I think this is interesting?

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:stuck_out_tongue: I know the amiga story front to back. Even some of the stories about the first sales and how people couldn’t just use the keyboard for everything and some sent theirs back. I find it pretty funny.

More or less I need to learn how to either burn disks or get a gotek or a hard drive. Making floppies of stuff would be a lot easier bit I don’t have cables to slash up.

AMIGA’s of that period used SCSI drives. Surprisingly SCSI drive aren’t too expensive, or very big.
I saw a lot of 18GB SCSI drives for under $20. Should be enough for an AMIGA, especially if you can network it. There must be a PCI add in cards for Ethernet and that converts SCSI to SATA.
.

I had a ribbon cable running to a PC box with a big PSU, 2nd floppy and a 20MB HDD. Cost like $500 for a HDD at the time, plus I rolled my own case mod. The phone guy didn’t want to sell me the parts cuz he thought I could never get it working.

I had a RAM + 68020 CPU upgrade in my A500. That’s why it needed more power.
In my A1200 I did the same with a 68030 and a conventional metal HDD box plugged into the side.


image

I was looking for this earlier.
.


peroxide
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It has made my day seeing that :smiley:

epic

if you can find the parts and software you can have a Video Editing rig. A place i worked for used this well into 2008 clearly not going to do HD hey who needs HD right.

PS: I found the software http://www.discreetfx.com/openvideotoaster.html

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The plastic isn’t yellowed anywhere actually its just the light. The front of the case is a dark gray.

A more recent vid from the same guy

Good find, @FaunCB

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You actually have an Amiga not found at the granddaddy of computer museums, they have a 500 and 1000
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org
amigazone is down I see
81k files here
http://aminet.net
2 very active sites
http://www.commodorecomputerclub.com/tag/amiga/
http://amigaworld.net
Yea your gonna have fun with this :slight_smile:

If i remember about this whole commodore arcitecture… they had what they called the CIA complex interface adapter… basic I/O if i remember… but what they had that nobody else did… was 3 processors… one for video, one for sound… one for computations…Agnus,Denise,Paula …I did a study on computers when I was in college back in the day… I focused on comodore/amiga cause it was just cool in the day.

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Oh fuck yeah dude. Commodore, and really the amiga team in total, really had the most advanced stuff of the time. But because IBM was the big shit here in the states no one really saw the ads. You should read up on the AAA chipset. We could have still had 35 or 45 mhz processors even in the 2000’s because of how stupidly efficient they are.

m68k was probably the best architecture out there. What do we have now? Layered bumbling broken shit that is tied into other shit that gets more and more power pumped into in in the hopes that windows will run better but it gets slower every year. I’m almost tempted to just run Icaros on everything and say fuck you to everything so I never have to worry about processor overhead again. X86 really is broken and horrible and needs to die.

Nope. I’m wrong because market share.

Mmmhmm.

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Didn’t Gateway buy commodore/amiga in about 2000?

No, they tried to, but they went out of actual business and got bought by dell before anything really happened so Commodore was back up for sale.

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made that way.

Even when they were new I thought . . .
“Bold move Commodore. By making your cases an aggressively boring shade of beige, they will never go out of style or fade over time. They will just get beiger.”

i kid because i am jealous :wink:

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