Finished flashing my new Gotek and it's now in service as an external df1: for my A500. I flashed it to FlashFloppy for now, however. I have one HxC and one F-F, I am planning to do a comparison test between the two firmwares. As cool as HxC is, I'm not sure I need the extra platform and image format support it has..

Anonymous Coward wrote:

You must have gotten my old Wii. Is there a Saddam Mii in there too?

Haha, nope, but I don't doubt you could make him given the selection of moustaches available. I bet somebody out there has done a collect-'em-all of horrible dictators just to spite Nintendo's clean & wholesome facade. 😜

As I have swapped a working Amiga Tankmouse with a dismanteled Amiga500 in bad shape, then I have used the evening to get some life in the old lady. (nope.. Not talking about dancehall party and martini) 🤣

The first thing I did, was to power her board on. And wait to see what chips became warm. Everyone, except Gayle became warm, so I unplugged the board and took out all the chip from their sockets. Cleaned each pins with cue tips and IPA. Then gave the sockets a little alcohol and reseated each chips two times. Except for Fat Agnus, as I did not want to take it out if I did not need to. Then came some life. More accurate 9 short blinks and one long blink on the power diode on the keyboard. Some googling revealed that it was indeed the Fat Agnus that had issues. I took it out and one pin was badly corroded. It was all black, so I scraped the pin, cleaned it with IPA and reseated it.

Now there is life in the little lady.... So I connected a floppy drive and inserted Budbrain Megademo. And it ran with sound, stable image until second half, then it would crash. I suspect it is because the Amiga has Kick 1.2 and not 1.3 like the newer 500's. The bad thing is that my Rev.5 board will not start with a Kick 2.1 (37.175) kickstart. Oh well... Need to get a 1.3 then or just run some kind of burnin test.

Anyways...
As I said. It is in really poor state. Board seems to work. It is missing one joystick port. It has green corrotion on serial and parallel ports, and the Audio connectors have some white corrosion kind of stuff on them, preventing good contact with the audio cables. The case is cracked yet can be fixed with some plastic-welding (Acetone + abs plastic = glue paste). The RF shield will have to go. It can not be salvaged.

The good part, is that I have 9 extra loose serial plugs, that can be used for joystick ports. And things look positive as of now.
Tomorrow, I will have a look at the bottom part of the case, in order to clean it up. And then I will start to take a look at the keyboard.

All the pictures are taken by the previous owner of the machine...

Finished cleaning up the board, only thing todo, is a couple of new joystick ports. One is missing, the other is really bad.
I tested with a couple of games, and it loads perfectly. Runs budbrain demo all the way through.
I ran systest. Ram, sound and video test OK. I really think that I can pull this off, and now the old lady smells like a pub. 😁

I did some more restoring of the 500.... This time, the bottom case and the plastic inlay, that goes between the bottom RF shield and the mainboard. This cleanup really took some time. It was not battery acid, though it was all rust from the RF shield. I used warm water, dishwash soap and a splash of alcohol. Used a nylon spunge and to get the last rust out that had buried it self down into the plastic, I used a small stiff knife, to scrape it off. Before it was a trainwreck, now it looks kind of decent. Still tiny traces of rust left, so I need to fix that on a second run. I think it took me 3 hours or something like that. My hands are itching and are extremely dry now.

Hi brostenen, I am currently also caring about my 3 new Amiga. Completely disassembled and cleaned them. I never owned one and I am surprised how repair-friendly they are. The 1st one looks like new now 😎

Mainboards seem to be OK except the one in the A500+. The battery started leaking and all caps seem to be bend and partially broken. Will need to replace them.

Today I will care about the A501 memory expansion. There seems to be a battery inside and you can already see the green residue everywhere. Have to desolder to open the metal case.

^...already disassembled:

Does indeed not look good.

After the 1st cleaning run its better:

There is liquid below the 1st PCB layer but I think I will leave it as is at the moment. When removing it will not look good anymore. I also expect the 74F27PC needs to be replaced...

Slowly progressed yesterday evening with desoldering an old barrel battery off a VLB 486 motherboard and cleaning all residue.
Not really a nice work to do while having a heatwave but otherwise my whole desk remains full with the pc parts and I cannot continue with other tests/projects.
Hopefully it will be dry this evening, then I only need to solder an external battery package to the correct 4 pin connector from an old pc speaker and the bios settings should again be stored in the Bios.

Also cleaned the case alot from dead spiders/dust/stupid stickers someone sticked in and on the case. It is looking much better now.
Now I only have to find a good VLB graphics card that matches the dx2 I am planning to drop into the motherboard and the system should be good to install.

Made a backup of the Toshiba hard drive running 95 and transferred it to a CF card. Just gotta wait for the CF to IDE adapter in the mail.

Yesterday I set my 3 retro PCs back up again (a 486, a Pentium MMX and a Pentium 3 system) after having used the space to refurbish an Amiga 2000 that I picked up for cheap a few months ago. Everything is set up to share a common keyboard (AT-style), mouse (Microsoft mouse with both serial and PS/2 support), speakers and monitor - I couldn't get a standard KVM to work right due to all the different ports and connectors, so I'm using old-fashioned switch boxes to make it all work. Everything is networked too - even the 486 can pull files via ftp using mTCP and an Intel PRO/100 network card.

Once I got it all running again, I took the opportunity to test out a DOS game that I've been working on (a Sokoban clone that uses the CGA 160x100 16-color graphics mode) on the 486. I do most of the development on my modern PC and test in DOSBox, but it's good to get it on real hardware every so often.

Predator99 wrote:

Hi brostenen, I am currently also caring about my 3 new Amiga. Completely disassembled and cleaned them. I never owned one and I […]
Show full quote

Hi brostenen, I am currently also caring about my 3 new Amiga. Completely disassembled and cleaned them. I never owned one and I am surprised how repair-friendly they are. The 1st one looks like new now 😎

Mainboards seem to be OK except the one in the A500+. The battery started leaking and all caps seem to be bend and partially broken. Will need to replace them.

DSC_7240.JPG

Today I will care about the A501 memory expansion. There seems to be a battery inside and you can already see the green residue everywhere. Have to desolder to open the metal case.

DSC_7238.JPG

DSC_7239.JPG

Yup. The old 500's are really easy to work with. Everything is extremely simple, and many things can actually be done fairly quickly. I really hope you can save the parts that have had leaked battery. I kind of like, working with these simple Commodore machines, from the 80's. That includes Commodore64 as well.

The journey continues. The old lady had her buttons cleaned and had them put back on. When replacing the keycap's, I took notice that the Caps-Lock diode is a red one. I was under the impression that they used to have a green diode on the Caps-Lock. I know that the old keyboards used green and red diode. And that Commodore at somepoint changed it to green and yellow. Shure I know that the old chicken lips keyboard had a red diode, yet those are rare keyboards, and they are the only ones that had mechanical keys. So I am really surprised to find a rubber dome (with springs), that has a red diode in the Caps-Lock key.

Anyway... From nasty to acceptable. I really do not want to take the entire keyboard apart if it is working. For now, a good surface clean will do. Here in Denmark, they add something to the rubbing alcohol, that makes one sick if one drinks the 97/98 percent proof rubbing alcohol. It leaves a kind of sticky resedue, and is perfect to clean keyboard springs in. I think it will prevent more rust from forming. So I have used it to clean the springs.

what is that A button next to space?

I believe that's like a special key that was used vastly on Macs and older Apple machines, such as the Apple 2 for launching the menu bar (question mark).

Damaniel wrote:

I took the opportunity to test out a DOS game that I've been working on (a Sokoban clone that uses the CGA 160x100 16-color graphics mode) on the 486.

Any release info on this? Always game for a new game especially in that graphics mode.

PTherapist wrote:

Judging by that picture, a possibility is that the TV may not support the NTSC color burst signal. The only real way to rule that out is try the card on a different TV.

Another possibility is that perhaps having it set to 80 column color is disabling the color burst signal (as 80 column mode doesn't support it), so try setting it to 40 column color mode.

Sadly this is the only TV I have which accepts compsoite. I also tried with 40 column mode, didn't make a difference. Well Planet X3 won't release tomorrow, so I have some more time to figure this out.

liqmat wrote:

Damaniel wrote:

I took the opportunity to test out a DOS game that I've been working on (a Sokoban clone that uses the CGA 160x100 16-color graphics mode) on the 486.

Any release info on this? Always game for a new game especially in that graphics mode.

The project is actually open source and you can grab the source from my Github:

https://github.com/Damaniel/dos_games

I don't have binaries but I can throw some together. Otherwise, if you have DOSBox and Turbo Pascal installed, then running make.bat from the MOVEIT directory should work. Updates are sporadic but I try to spend some time every week adding features.

I also have a couple other items of interest there:
- LOCGAED, which is a sprite sheet editor for the low-res CGA mode. It generates sprite sheets that are in the same format that Paku Paku uses (as well as my two games). There's also a Python script that can take an image with the appropriate palette and chunk it into unique tiles, generating an image sheet and list of indices that can be dumped into a Turbo Pascal array. It doesn't import directly into a LOCGAED spritesheet yet though.
- DAMANOID, which is a prototype of a Arkanoid clone using the same mode. I'm really planning to get back to that one, but I'm not very happy with the ball/paddle physics at the moment.
- TETRIS - something I did in high school 20 years ago. Sadly, it won't compile due to a missing sound card library, but I'll have to publish the binaries I kept from back then at some point. It's mainly of historical interest and pretty cringey.

oeuvre wrote:

what is that A button next to space?

It is one of the two "Amiga" key's. Look at it, as a kind of function key. Pressing bot Amiga-keys and control at the same time, does the same as ctrl+alt+delete.

@Damaniel Love your setup, man. Will build the game in DOSBox from your Github and test it out on my DOS machines. BTW, welcome to the forums.

The keyboard is dead. 🙁 Tested it with systest. So now I have to get another one.
I might find another Amiga in bad shape, and see if I can put together one complete system.