andrewreader wrote:

From one Amiga fan to another, well done on your dedication. […]
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brostenen wrote:

I have finally gone through all my Amiga disks.

From one Amiga fan to another, well done on your dedication.

Don't forget, you can always store the ADF files on a Compact Flash drive and write them back to the Amiga Floppy Disks.

At the recent UK, South West Amiga meet, I had my Parallel Iomega Zip drive attached and working with my Amiga 1200.

It was also connected to the internet via my mobile phone and a travel router.

I'm also a fan of the latest 'Amiga Forever' on the PC. I've installed Amiga Final Edition 4.1 too.

I have a lot of ADF's my self. Ordered a 4gb CF card to upgrade the 512mb that I have, and will be using the new one for storing ADF files. That way, I can use eighter ADF-Blitzer or ADF2DISK in order to write files. 😀

I truly like using real disks, and I have so many empty ones. I will continue to use disks until drives are nowere to be found.

1200 you say... Hmmm... Sadly they are too expensive these days. 🙁

EDIT:
Amiga600 memory module arived today.... Installed it, and everything runs better.
Came in this fancy box. Love the presentation.

aop wrote:

Does anyone have a good advice on how to remove capacitors on these old boards without damaging the board? Any way to protect the bottom layer which gets most of the heat and is most likely to get rekt during the process?

You can preheat the board prior to doing your work. The tools you use also make a huge difference. You use two irons? A desoldering bulb can help, but a desoldering pump is ideal. Something like the Hakko FR-300 (which is what I use).

Adding fresh solder is a good idea - and you mentioned that. There are a lot of capacitors that filter to ground. Obviously the ground plane gives you trouble because of its size. When removing a cap that is connected to a ground plane, I like to desolder the positive lead first (easy) and get it loose. That way there is only one leg pinning you to the board (ground plane). From there, you'll need that extra heat time to get the other cap loose. If the board isn't preheated, I'll put the desoldering pump on there for a bit, pull away, put it back for a bit, pull away, and try not to just leave it there for a long time. Grab the cap with some needle nose and give it a little, gentle wiggle-pull as you are heating the other side. You may not be able to vacuum all the solder out of the hole, but eventually the solder closest to the leg will liquefy enough that you can extract the cap.

I leave my pump on 350C/660F - the lowest setting.

Naturally, if you have minimal solder extraction from the hole, putting in a fresh cap can give you trouble because the remaining solder won't allow enough space to push the lead through. So - favor the negative lead by heating the hole as you push the fresh cap through. The positive side should slide through easily because the solder was easier to remove & the hole is clean. The negative lead will push through and probably have some bumps of old solder on it as it comes through the other side. No big deal - that lead will be trimmed off anyway.

When soldering back to the ground plane - don't forget to make sure the ground plane hole gets enough heat to create a proper joint. The solder will easily melt and grip the cap's leg right at the hole, but the hole is going to need a few extra seconds so as to not have a cold solder joint.

And of course don't forget the secret weapon: flux.

brostenen wrote:

I have a lot of ADF's my self. Ordered a 4gb CF card to upgrade the 512mb that I have, and will be using the new one for storing […]
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I have a lot of ADF's my self. Ordered a 4gb CF card to upgrade the 512mb that I have, and will be using the new one for storing ADF files. That way, I can use eighter ADF-Blitzer or ADF2DISK in order to write files. 😀

I truly like using real disks, and I have so many empty ones. I will continue to use disks until drives are nowere to be found.

1200 you say... Hmmm... Sadly they are too expensive these days. 🙁

EDIT:
Amiga600 memory module arived today.... Installed it, and everything runs better.
Came in this fancy box. Love the presentation.

IMG_20171026_243211851.jpg

Ooohh an individual computers box in the mailbox is always a welcome sight. I remembee my joy when my ACA500plus arrived. They are a great company.

yawetaG wrote:

Besides General MIDI, this special Yamaha version has preset banks for the Yamaha DB50XG daughterboard (default settings), MU80(XG), and two FM synths: TX7 and TX81Z (!).

Late last evening I had a look at the included sysex support, and it includes quite a few high-end Yamaha synths (some of which are on my list of "interesting gear"). Unfortunately no TG-300, but sister module TG100 is also included.

All your dreams coming true

Nice, got a slightly later one, MMX though, very similar apart from no LCD status display. Forgot the model. Will look when I'm upstairs.

Edit: Well I guess not super similar, has touchpad (in addition to nubby) 380XD... technically it's my wife's retrogaming machine, though we got her favorites set up in dosbox last year.

My Gateway M685E arrived. Posting from it now. With 1.5GB of RAM and the mid end 1.66GHz Core2 Duo processor option this PC is still quite usable for a basic Windows XP web browsing experience. Sadly, the unit I received has some pretty bad light bleed near the edges of the screen when looking at a black background. The Go 7600 GPU seems to be in good working order. Played about an hour of games and it didn't show any issues so I guess I have a good GeForce 7 series based laptop. Now if I can just get my hands on a Gateway MXM Go 7900 I'll have the ultimate DX9 gaming laptop. Sounds great too. I think this model has a sub-woofer or a pseudo-subwoofer system of some sort.

brostenen wrote:

Amiga600 memory module arived today.... Installed it, and everything runs better.
Came in this fancy box. Love the presentation.

IMG_20171026_243211851.jpg

Last time I got a box like that it had one of these bad boys in it:

http://amigakit.amiga.store/catalog/product_i … 18&currency=USD

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

My Gateway M685E arrived. Posting from it now. With 1.5GB of RAM and the mid end 1.66GHz Core2 Duo processor option this PC is still quite usable for a basic Windows XP web browsing experience. Sadly, the unit I received has some pretty bad light bleed near the edges of the screen when looking at a black background. The Go 7600 GPU seems to be in good working order. Played about an hour of games and it didn't show any issues so I guess I have a good GeForce 7 series based laptop. Now if I can just get my hands on a Gateway MXM Go 7900 I'll have the ultimate DX9 gaming laptop. Sounds great too. I think this model has a sub-woofer or a pseudo-subwoofer system of some sort.

Could be the screen that's having issues. Check the display cable, or hook up an external monitor to see what the issue is.

liqmat wrote:

Last time I got a box like that it had one of these bad boys in it:

http://amigakit.amiga.store/catalog/product_i … 18&currency=USD

Ohhh... That is the one I am trying to save up for. Not cheap, though can be installed internally.
Two of them stacked on top of each other, gives dual monitor output.

brostenen wrote:

Amiga600 memory module arived today.... Installed it, and everything runs better.
Came in this fancy box. Love the presentation.

IMG_20171026_243211851.jpg

I love getting stuff from Individual Computers. 😀 The boxes they package their stuff in are great (plus the stuff they sell is all great too of course!).

Hopefully I can sell that Compaq Deskpro Socket 370 Pentium3 machine on monday. (P3-1000, TNT2-Pci and Voodoo2)
Someone is going to come and look at it in order to decide if he will buy it.
So if I can get it sold, then I will have money enough for that IndivisionECS module, and the a600 will be almost finished.
Beginning to get a quite expensive old lady... New system board, new mouse, memory upgrade, CF-to-IDE and so on.
On the other hand... She had her caps replaced with tantilum ones on that replacement board that I bought.
This way, I will have an working Amiga for the next +10 years from now on. No leaking caps, that is for shure.

BitWrangler wrote:

Nice, got a slightly later one, MMX though, very similar apart from no LCD status display. Forgot the model. Will look when I'm upstairs.

Edit: Well I guess not super similar, has touchpad (in addition to nubby) 380XD... technically it's my wife's retrogaming machine, though we got her favorites set up in dosbox last year.

380XD with a touchpad? o_o

oeuvre wrote:

380XD with a touchpad? o_o

Heh, apparently not on recheck, derp, getting confused with my T400 I guess.

GeForce2 Ultra arrived. Seems to work. I've got it installed in the P3 machine but my energy ran out before I got around to the 3D tests.

My QX9650 also arrived. Good god this processor is insanely fast for its age. DOOM (2016) was smooth as silk backed by a 780 Ti XLR8.

you going to need to oc the qx9650 stat.

I decided to install an nVidia GeForce 6200 AGP with 512MB RAM inside my Socket 370 system (hit a snag since the aperture size was set to 256MB, it gave conflict errors, and changing it to 64MB made the card work), and Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius doesn't like the card at all for some reason. It liked my VooDoo3 3000 PCI Card, but not any GeForce cards.

Got my first or maybe second ever STACK OVERFLOW error trying to play Sam & Max Hit the Road in Windows for Workgroups. Only took about TWO HOURS to transfer over the network. Ah well, it works perfectly in DOS, so I can't complain too much, it's just that the icon I made for it is useless. Unless I turn one of my Pentium systems into a Win95 box.

Edit: looks like I talked too early. Even with the DVI adapter, the picture shaking at the slightest vibration problem still happens. And it does that only during POST/Pure DOS mode. Looks like I'll have to bring the monitor to a CRT repairman and see what's wrong with it. On the other hand, I discovered that the focus knob can be accessed from outside and so I tweaked it out to increase sharpness. Picture looks way better now.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

My QX9650 also arrived. Good god this processor is insanely fast for its age. DOOM (2016) was smooth as silk backed by a 780 Ti XLR8.

Yes, I regard c2d at 3Ghz+ and c2Q at 2.5ghz plus as "modern" levels of performance still.... considering there's a lot of shatty low speed i3s and pentium dual cores being sold, and the atom based Nxxx are slugs. That's the mainstream, so if they wanna sell games, no sense making them need a top end i7