Exposed Technology

So, the majority of the Amiga Scene seem to be using a Compact Flash IDE adapter and a CF card as a good replacement for a regular 2.5″ hard disk which would normally be found in the amiga, which seems like a good idea so I have adopted this. I wanted a solution that was slightly more flexible though, which was the ability to quickly swap out different CF cards with different AmigaOS revisions. The best way to do this was cut a hole in the amiga 1200 case. After scouting around the case for the best location I decided on the upper left side which will also mean using a much shorter ide cable to keep down on case clutter.

I actually did this work with the dremel a couple of weeks ago but only just got around to writing about it. I cut the hole well short of it’s final size in case I made a total hash of it. I used a file to get the hole nice and cleanly to it’s final size, which is just wide enough for a CF card to slot in and deep enough to have 2 CF cards sticking out as I have a second CF adapter on the second ide channel. It’s the first time i’ve really attempted any such crafting like this and I am reasonably pleased with the job. The scuff marks I am not concerned with as the spray job I will give the final revision of the case will cover these.

I have also crafted a few more little things case wise this weekend but will post images of those later when i’ve tidied the pieces up a little.

Freshly cut CF adapter slotCF Adapter Slot

So, this approach then leads to another requirement which is a custom built mounting block for the 2 CF adapters. I have some ideas for this, one being to build it from packing foam, or these is a more complex option of building it from metal which will require me to do some thinking and practising.

CF Adapter Slot

If anyone has any further ideas for how to construct this though I am all ears. I am not rushing through any of this at the minute until I have thought out every angle which, to be honest, is not the way I normally do things.

So, I received my second lot of kickstart 3.1 roms in the mail the other day ready for insertion into amiga no 2. The first lot I got were installed in my first amiga and they were also a little tricky to install. For anyone that’s interested and doesn’t know how the Amiga’s operating system works then here’s a basic rundown;

The various system libraries and kernel which are used be nearly every workbench friendly program are all contained in the kickstart rom chips which, obviously, makes calling them from applications into memory a fair bit faster than if they were called and loaded from disk. The obvious drawback to this is that you have to remove and add new rom chips to have an updated version of the kernel and libraries, although this isn’t strictly true as you can manipulate patches for device drivers etc that will be loaded in place of the ones stored in rom but I am unsure how far you are allowed to go with this. If anyone has any corrections then comment and i’ll clean up my shoddy description of how it works.

Kickstart 3.1 ROM chips

So, onto the installation; I have an IC remover to get the old ones out but this was about as much use as a chocolate teapot so I opted for some good old table knives; one at each end of the rom and gently lever it out which is the easy part.

Empty Kickstart ROM Socket

The hard part is getting all the little, easily bendable legs lined up with the 30 something holes along both sides which is a bit tricky. Numerous attempts to seat and reseat the second pair resulted in a black screen when I powered on which isn’t a good sign that everything went well. Eventually, after 3 seperate reseat attempts, the last attempt being identical to the one before which didn’t work for some reason and powered on and was greeted by the flashing light of the hard disk booting and the annoying “click, click” from the floppy drive until the anticlick utility kicks in.

Surprisingly, I seem to be going backwards in skill when doing these, the first set installed in far quicker time than my second effort. I have one more set to order and install, so following that logic it may be even more of a nightmare than the last ones. Despite the hassle it’s worth doing as I can now play around with AmigaOS 3.5 & 3.9 as they require the updated rom. One of the next things on my shopping list is an EEPROM reader\writer so I can read and write different rom images, legally obtained ones obviously, and do funky things like have a kickstart 1.3 rom in an Amiga 1200, which will probably go over most readers head but it seems like a fun thing to do for me.

Back in the olden days, home computers used to connect to the tv pretty much the same way as modern consoles do now. Scart was still available, but wasn’t on every TV as it was a higher end feature of a tv. You also had a choice of RF output (aerial lead) and composite output. Out of the 3, scart gave the best picture as it used a lead coming from the amiga monitor port, composite gave second best and RF with the worse but it did work on every tv known to man at the time.

So, times have changed now and I have lots of vga monitors so I wanted to convert the output to vga. It’s not quite as simple as you think it might be in today’s age. You need 2 things to be able to do this, a scandoubler which will change the frequency of the output to 50-60hz which is vga friendly, unlike the 15hz normally output by the amiga. The other component that isn’t required before things will work as such, but will make things a lot nicer is a flickerfixer, will will handle and stabilize the interlaced resolutions, which tend to give you more screen real estate, a la resolution.

I opted for an internal solution for one of my amigas which as a circuit board with a chip socket on it and a vga trailer cable with socket so a monitor can be plugged into it. It is installed by turning the board upside down and lining up the chip socket with the lisa chip legs exposed on the top of the amiga motherboard and then pressing with all your might, which is a little scary, but sure enough it snaps into place and after testing, it worked nicely. I don’t envy the task of ever having to remove this from the lisa chip though.

Mounted Indivision AGA

I also invested in a second solution which was a custom made (not by me) external scandoubler \ flickerfixer which takes output from the amiga monitor port and also does a pretty spot on job of making the signal vga friendly. The latter solution makes thing nice and easy for swapping amigas back and forth as I do different things to each.

External Scandoubler\Flickerfix

So, primarily I now have the basics of what I need to actually start this project as it’s kind of essential being able to see some kind of output screen when working with a computer and, since I didn’t have a tv spare this has worked out nicely.

Many years ago I used to own Commodore Amigas. They were truly awesome machines at the time, both for games and as a usable operating platform for applications, software and development tools. Recently though, the emulator i’ve been using isn’t enough to satisfy my retro appetite so I have decided to buy some machines to mod and change beyond their design.

This wasn’t actually the initial plan. My plan was to buy a machine, an Amiga 1200 and port over the BBS software from the emulator it currently runs on, to the physical hardware, but as I searched for a solution to an issue I was having I came across an online forum which had a section dedicated to modding Amigas. After looking at some of the great things other people had done I was hooked from that point so my goals for the machine have now changed and so far it is becoming lots of fun.

Me, being quite geeky, gets bored of playing games pretty quickly. I have always been far more of a tinkerer with the O/S and applications since I got my first PC and then Amiga. I had been a PC user since I was 10 years old and it wasn’t until I was 16 that I decided to change format and move to the Amiga. I had some friends around the corner that were well into the scene and when I saw how their computers worked I was jealous so saved up my monies and bought a second hand 1200 from the newspaper and it was great. 75MB Hard disk, 2 Meg fast ram on top of the 2 Meg chip ram that came as standard in the machines. I spent a lot of time setting up the O/S and getting it to my liking.

Around about this time I had also started to tinker with modems and BBSes as the internet hadn’t really become mainstream for everyone as yet. People were using it but it wasn’t really a household word like it is now. So, after dialing up to certain BBSes I decided i’d like to run my own board on the Amiga. Some parts of my memory are a little fuzzy here as I got a second phone line installed but can’t for the life in me remember how I paid the bill for this each month as I wasn’t working at the time and still at school in the 6th form. I set up my board and waited for calls to come in, and they did. Through the BBS scene me and my local friends met quite a few people from the west yorkshire area and remained friends with them to this day.

Eventually, due to work and requirements to buy a PC again the Amiga was sidelined to my dad as it wasn’t practical for my job role which was a progress programmer. Although I didn’t have a machine any more my love for the platform and technology never died and I have been using WinUAE to emulate the hardware since around 1999 but nothing beats the actual hardware to satisfy my need for retroness and nostalgia.

So, that’s the brief story of the driver behind the amigas resurrection for me. Check back or all the work which is now going to take place on the machines I have purchased (yes, I said machines). I have already started and taken lots of pictures and will continue to do so as I do each piece of work on them. The first lot of pictures will be available very shortly.