sketchus wrote:

I'm glad there's a bit of Amiga action going on 😀

I've been playing Prince of Persia which actually holds up really nicely.

You may laugh, but I never knew you could save the game until recently, so I may finally finish it!

Nice game... Though I am more pleased with the C64 version for some odd reason.
It is somehow a greater achievement on behalf of the programmer's.

andrewreader wrote:

I was secretly jealous, but fast forward 20+ years later, my Amiga 1200 is running with an ACA 1221 upgrade, CF Drive as a HDD, 64 MB RAM, Gotek Floppy drive and real-time clock.

I allways regretted geting rid of my 1200. It had a GVP TurboJaws-II (030-50) accelerator card, and a Surfsquirrel PCMCIA SCSI adaptor. I had an external SCSI drive connected to it and a 20gb Laptop HDD with Ide-FIX97 software installed.

Now a days, I am trying to save up money for upgrading my Amiga600. I have upgraded it with a CF-IDE adaptor and upgraded the Kickstart from 37.300 to 37.350 so all I need is an a604n memory upgrade from Indevidual computers, and a IndevisionECS internal scandoubler. I had a minor setback, were I needed to get a new system board, so I found one that were recapped with tantelum caps and what looks like a PCMCIA port fix. Set me back some 110 euro for a recapped and tested board. Anyway... I have saved up 25% of what I need, as of now. Perhaps I will get an accelerator card in the future for the 600. Will not be much, only a 020-20 as I need just a bit more beef yet still retain backwards compatibility.

Finally, I need an a500 (not the plus, for that I have the 600) with IndevisionECS, a 512kb mem upgrade and a couple of external drives. Shure a 1200 will be nice, though I fear it will not be used as much as my other retro platforms. And that would just be a waste of space.

If you will get an A500 definitely get an ACA500Plus for ir 😉

appiah4 wrote:

If you will get an A500 definitely get an ACA500Plus for ir 😉

Not planning. Need stock speed. 😀 What I would look for instead, are more memory than 1mb in total.
The plan is to have something that can play the games, just as it was meant back then.
More mem and a scandoubler will do nice enough for an 500. Some 12mb in all will be max.

If I need a faster Amiga, then I might see if I can manage to save enough for a Vampire V2 instead.
Or some other vampire if the V2 is nowere to be sourced when I have the money.
This however will only be considered, if I can get an a500. Then I can game on the 500 and use the
a600 as a kind of work horse for text editing and adf file container.

You can use the aca500plus at 7mhz but enjoy the ks3.1 8mb ram cf-ide and action replay 3

Corrosion ate my A500 🙁 The memory add-on's battery leaked and the damn goo got literally everywhere. Thankfully the rev5 motherboard isn't dead. Will get rid of the nasty stuff and recap since I took the time to tear it all apart. As for the memory's PCB... Although I removed most of the residue with isopropyl alcohol, I don't exactly feel like testing it now. I suspect trace damage near where the battery was. It needs time, patience and metering, and who knows, maybe some green nail polish if it works.

appiah4 wrote:

You can use the aca500plus at 7mhz but enjoy the ks3.1 8mb ram cf-ide and action replay 3

The reason for me getting an a500, will be to have an OCS with Kickstart 1.3 for them games made specifically for the a500.

Cleaned up and partially reorganized the "Secondary Desk/Workbench/RetroDesk/Stereo" corner.

Currently a spare Core2 box plugged in, but this is where I do machine builds and where I set up retro machines.

It's also where my good retro(ish) stereo equipment is:
Sony STR-AV470 (free from a friend)
Technics RS-BR465 tape deck ($8 at Goodwill)
Sony CDP-70 CD Player (can't remember if this was a Goodwill find or a dumpster find)
Technics SL-B202 turntable (free, technically my younger sister's)
MISSIL MA302 bookshelf speakers ($30 from XSCargo when they were still a thing, they sound surprisingly good for no-name specials. 6" woofer and a 1" silk dome tweeter in each speaker)

LHN91 wrote:

Cleaned up and partially reorganized the "Secondary Desk/Workbench/RetroDesk/Stereo" corner. […]
Show full quote

Cleaned up and partially reorganized the "Secondary Desk/Workbench/RetroDesk/Stereo" corner.

Currently a spare Core2 box plugged in, but this is where I do machine builds and where I set up retro machines.

It's also where my good retro(ish) stereo equipment is:
Sony STR-AV470 (free from a friend)
Technics RS-BR465 tape deck ($8 at Goodwill)
Sony CDP-70 CD Player (can't remember if this was a Goodwill find or a dumpster find)
Technics SL-B202 turntable (free, technically my younger sister's)
MISSIL MA302 bookshelf speakers ($30 from XSCargo when they were still a thing, they sound surprisingly good for no-name specials. 6" woofer and a 1" silk dome tweeter in each speaker)

Nice setup. I love a proper component stereo system. Those MISSIL speakers even have a similar (but different) font to MISSION.

All this talk about Amigas makes me envious, if only because they're next to nonexistent here in the US despite Commodore being an American company.

The price premium for Amiga hardware is pretty nuts to the point that I just stick to emulation, though maybe the new Vampire accelerator boards will make the older A500s just as valuable as the A1200s and A4000s due to adding AGA support alongside the other usual amenities. Too bad you have to get on a waiting list with no listed price just to have a chance of buying one.

And then Japan has the Sharp X68000 line all to themselves, too. Importing one of those makes getting an Amiga A4000T setup look like budget retrocomputing by comparison, but damn if they're not the coolest 680x0-based computers ever, with plenty of arcade-perfect ports to themselves.

Ironically, they seem to have suffered from the same problem the Amiga did: having a cutting-edge custom chipset in the '80s doesn't mean it'll stay cutting-edge six years later when all the IBM clone manufacturers start boasting VGA and "wavetable"/sample-based synths by default, or with affordable upgrades to existing systems since they're all on add-on cards anyway.

As for old stereo systems, I wish I had the space in the computer room for that Marantz TA-70 and matching massive floorstander speakers I got from those neighbors with all the Mac stuff I've been posting about, but the speakers in particular are just too huge. I don't have any decent bookshelf or near-field monitor speakers for computer use, and while big, beefy floorstanders are normally preferable, it's imperative that the computer room remains as empty as possible to permit as much room-scale VR space as I can get away with.

UPDATE: That damn Mac IIcx suddenly decided it didn't want to respond to soft power anymore, so I decided to hard-jump it again. Startup chime comes through. Broken trace passthroughs still show continuity. This thing continues to baffle me in all the ways.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

The price premium for Amiga hardware is pretty nuts

True that. Locally here in Denmark, 1200's go for some 400 US Dollars average price. 600's go for some 250 US Dollars average. Yet I have seen 1200's at sale up to around 800 US Dollars, wich is so crazy that I can't imagine what the seller was thinking. And it is not like that machine was anything great to look at. Dirty, missing a couple of keys, no drives only the stock machine and a PSU. Not even a mouse came with that one. Personally I think eBay are way better for Amiga's, as you will have the money back guarantee. No way I am going to pay 500 for a 1200, and not have the money back guarantee, if I recieve junk instead.

The release of Vampire FPGA accelerators really messed up the market for A600 prices. A1200 prices have been crazy ever since ACA12xx line have been around. ACA500plus has also driven A500 prices up. What's really crazy is that there are people developing all kinds of Open Source accelerators for Amiga hardware still.

I feel lucky to have an A500 and a 1084S..

brostenen wrote:

NamelessPlayer wrote:

The price premium for Amiga hardware is pretty nuts

True that. Locally here in Denmark, 1200's go for some 400 US Dollars average price. 600's go for some 250 US Dollars average. Yet I have seen 1200's at sale up to around 800 US Dollars, wich is so crazy that I can't imagine what the seller was thinking. And it is not like that machine was anything great to look at. Dirty, missing a couple of keys, no drives only the stock machine and a PSU. Not even a mouse came with that one. Personally I think eBay are way better for Amiga's, as you will have the money back guarantee. No way I am going to pay 500 for a 1200, and not have the money back guarantee, if I recieve junk instead.

I don't care for Amiga, thank god. I would go broke in minutes... I checked the local markplaats.nl and prices are indeed high, I never really realised that.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

I don't care for Amiga, thank god. I would go broke in minutes... I checked the local markplaats.nl and prices are indeed high, I never really realised that.

I've been using Amiga since launch in 1985 and IMO emulation has eclipsed the real thing so I don't need to own any hardware anymore. Sigh. Good for my back and my wallet.

Made a couple of vintage computing videos for my YouTube channel. Deleted them all. Flawed and imperfect. I'm seriously considering leaving the vintage PC YouTube scene. It's not yielding the following I had been hoping for. Going on 6 years now and making the same content quality I still can't compete with YouTubers like VWestLife and BBISHOPPCMS. I'm really wondering if it's worth the effort at this point. Only 20 subscribers and some 20k views. My goal was 20k subs by the end of year 5 and that's come and gone. My long term goal was 100k by year 10. So much for becoming the greatest.

Spent the night lamenting the quick death of the GX150 I picked up yesterday. Wanted to get a bit of Win98 gaming in, but I don't yet have a case my for P3-550 machine. Remebered that I have a Latitude CPx H500gt with 98 and some games already installed, so I pulled that out and started messing around.

I read somewhere here that the sound card it has (ESS Maestro-2E) is capable of doing A3D 1.0 stuff so I loaded up Blood II, chose A3D as the 3D sound renderer and...holy shit.

Even when I owned a Vortex 2 a few years ago I never truly heard how amazing it could be through a good pair of headphones. It seriously blew my mind how awesome it was hearing background characters talking and it actually came from the correct place in my hearing. Just...wow.

Remembered I had Shogo installed on here too, and that's another early LithTech game so I tried that and it was the same. The Mobility M1 (Rage Pro based) chip in this thing isn't the greatest, had to run at lowest settings for the most part, but it was still so damn fun.

Am currently installing a bunch of other games to see what kind of performance I get out of this thing. It's been awhile since I just blew a friday night on old games, so this was a very welcome way to kill several hours.

BTW, posting this from the laptop using Opera version 9-something while I wait for Jedi Knight to finish installing in the background 😀

Back to adventuring in vintage Mac land...

-Okay, so soft power suddenly works again on the IIcx, no physical changes. I don't get this thing at all.
-I still have the 80 MB SCSI HDD on the 6500 like last time, and... oh crap. It's exhibiting the same behavior on that system now with the solid LED and doing absolutely nothing, except instead of seeing the "where's my System Folder?" question mark floppy, it actually holds up the system's boot process considerably... wait, now it's booting through, and it mounted this time. What the hell?

I took a closer look at the HDD's controller board. There's three tiny little electrolytic caps, through-hole mount, not showing any signs of leakage, but I'm not expecting them to fare any better than the IIcx's axial caps that needed replacement too regardless of being non-leaky Nichicons. I could try recapping it in hopes that it'll hold up better, because if the system does mount the drive properly, it works just fine from what I can tell, no disk errors. The problem is getting a computer to mount the damn thing reliably.

Regardless, this means I may have misblamed the IIcx's SCSI woes the whole time if the drive itself can't even work 100% of the time in the 6500. Time to get a SCSI2CF or SCSI2SD adapter now, I guess. (Considering CF here because I have a 4 GB CF microdrive left over from an iPod mini, the slowness of which won't be an issue on a 680x0 machine.)

Even if that does solve the HDD startup issue, there's still one more thing I need to look into regarding the IIcx's logic board: figuring out why it won't see the other two banks of RAM at all. Only having 4 MB of physical RAM is pretty limiting in the grand scheme of things.

UPDATE: So I moved it over from the 6500 to the IIcx, the IIcx booted just fine from it, I turned it off, let it sit for a while, started it up again... oh, dammit, solid access light and it's not booting up at all.

I suspect that it's a warm-up thing at play here; once it's warmed up, it gets its act together. I can't say for certain yet, but without physically touching a system that worked the last time I tried it, that's the only conclusion I can think of at this point. I might just have to take a hair dryer to the drive to make extra sure it's begging for a recap.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Made a couple of vintage computing videos for my YouTube channel. Deleted them all. Flawed and imperfect. I'm seriously considering leaving the vintage PC YouTube scene. It's not yielding the following I had been hoping for. Going on 6 years now and making the same content quality I still can't compete with YouTubers like VWestLife and BBISHOPPCMS. I'm really wondering if it's worth the effort at this point. Only 20 subscribers and some 20k views. My goal was 20k subs by the end of year 5 and that's come and gone. My long term goal was 100k by year 10. So much for becoming the greatest.

One does things for oneself's happiness - or do you see your "retro activity" as a business?
I have one channel where I've only uploaded a few clips of bodybuilding workouts(zero effort) and I got 70+ subscribers... seems pretty strange to me that you only have 20+ even if you put in work.
I do not know about the channels you've mentioned but what I have witnessed is that channels which are successful have the owner being a kind of TV host for his show - like the LGR. Not my thing but one has to give him credit that he represents his fetish in a likeable way. 8 Bit guy is another strange fella that really does well because he puts himself out there and his stuff is often worth a watch.

Upgraded the hard drive in my 286. From 104MB to a whopping 213MB. That took a bit of effort, as I had to place the new drive into another pc to set up Ontrack so that the full drive could be recognised by the 286. Couldn't do that on the 286 itself, as Ontrack needed more RAM.

Reinstalled DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 and so far so good. It's using a later version of Ontrack so hopefully I'll no longer encounter the issue I had with the previous drive where it stopped working randomly and Ontrack failed to recognise it.

As I am waiting for the "new" VLB Controller for my dx2-80. I have begun to service the machine. The case need to be bended out a bit more, and I need to clean it a bit more. Until further, I have only taken it apart. Cleaning will take a long time and I did not have that much time on my hand today. The reason being that I did another retro activity that are not computer related. We went on a family trip today. We went to the top northern tip of Denmark, in order to see were the two sea's meet. We stopped in a town called "Skagen", to see some really famous paintings on a museum. They are known as the Skagens-painters, and they are really awesomme. And we got a bit more than we bargined for, when we eventually found our way to the top of Denmark. There in the middle of the thin landstrip, we saw a seal and her cup. They still had blod on them, from when she gave birth to her cup.... People could get within 30 centimeter of them, and the mother would do nothing at all. There were like 15 to 20 people surrounding both seals at all time. They only kept sleeping.

Love the seals!

Got a Hot-433(433AIP15?) Rev. 1.x board today which I exchanged for a HP Elitebook that just sat around in a drawer.
Since I had heard many good things about UMC chipsets I was eager to get it to work.

The build quality is nice as it feels and looks sturdy... better than the Lucky Star. Great voltage selection(3.3, 3.45, 3.6, 4.0, 5.0V) and two cache banks complete the positive picture. I quickly inserted a 12ns tag ram and proceeded.

A "disappointment"...
revealed itself in the BIOS - no FSB to PCI clock "divider" option. That was a real bummer as I was pretty much looking forward to a dandy 66mhz system which "blasted" away on 50ns EDO ram. On a more positive note - the board is fast even at "just" 50mhz fsb. Faster then the GA-486VS at the same speed.
Doom shareware ~66.68 fps and 3DBench2 ~96fps.
All speed settings are at max. besides the L2 cache which runs one notch below optimum(2-1-2). Maybe filling the second cache bank with annother four 64k-srams will help alleviate this and it may finally go full speed. There's still a lot of testing to do - and installing Win98 is a "must".
The system did not work at 50mhz with FPM ram, be it 60 or 50ns. EDO at 60ns is running fine though.

Bios Issue Resolved - downloaded the bios images from a link provided by Feiopa.

p.s.: Windows98 was installed and WinBench96 has finished the cpu tests.