Latest update: January 1, 2011

Happy New Year! The Amiga Lounge is 3 years old! iPhone Pains and the Fascinating A2000 Saga

Happy New year Everyone, I just wanted to mention the Lounge is now 3 Years old! Wow, how time files when you are having fun..
It's early in the morning on New years day. I did not do anything for new years eve, other than work my regular job, came home early and got a good night's sleep.
The last 3 weeks have been insane here at the Lounge. We had a big "Christmas sale" in the online store and that cleared out some stock, to make room for more stock supposedly coming in. The shipping has all be done. Also, the general computer service I run has been very busy with virus removal, but I got burned by a few "customers" this month, so now I insist on payment in cash and up front. 3 people have pulled the old "well, its christmas, and money is tight, so I will get you back soon" Bla Bla Bla. You would be surprised at how many times in the past I have heard that line, so now, It's Cash up front! Sure I may loose some business, but hey, I am not going to get paid for it anyway.
I got my T4 in early this year, and I only made 16 grand at my regular job, so needless to say, Money was extremely tight this past year. That is why a lot and I mean a lot of Amiga projects have been put on hold. Currently, I am looking for 2 Accelerator cards for my A2000's. I am planning on making one of them a Unix box. If I can find 2 A2030's, I will run Amix on one and Net BSD on the other. This will make for a Very interesting project.

My long time business partner and all around good friend Corey gave me his old I phone G3s for Christmas, as he upgraded to the I phone 4. He has been trying forever to get me to come over to the Dark Side of any Apple product, which, up until now, I have tried to resist with all my strength.
My Palm Treo 650 is getting long in the tooth and freezes a lot when a call comes through, so I bit my tongue and gave the I-Phone a try. I have only had it a week, and I have mixed feelings about it so far!

Gripes:

When I first got it, I was under the impression that it would be an easy device to master. I also received mine full of app's and games for for the kids that Corey has including about 10 of "Sponge Bob" cartoons. I could find no easy way of deleting app's and stuff, so I ended up resetting the phone to factory settings in the Borgware know as iTunes.
Second, the typing is horrible. I have big fingers, so it takes me a long time to type on it. Who knows, maybe in time, I will master it, but I have sent garbage massages, because it is so retarded. It obviously was made for people who love touchpads on their laptops, which I despise.
Third: surfing the net is a total nightmare! when I try to scroll, links keep opening up and it just goes all wonky. Apple should have put a small" scroll bar" or zone on the side so this would not happen.

I do like the convenience of taking podcasts and video with me though. The Treo could do some of this in a very limited fashion, but now I can watch Twit and Diggnation easily anytime on the go. So do I like my iPhone? It's ok, and fun to play "Angry Birds" or "plants vs zombies", but I still can't see all the fuss. II would much rather have a keyboard I can type with, but that is just me.

Amiga Front:

On the Amiga front. Because of the Store sales this month, I managed to actually order parts in for the Amiga's! I went to E-bay to purchase 2 ugly "battery hacks" and 3.1 Roms for the 2 A2000's. I also went to AmigaKit and ordered some various "little" Items, like a "SuperBuster 11" chip for the Tower, another CF hard drive for Mike's A600 (which is still not finished yet) and some case screws for the A600's. With all the Chaos at AmigaKit right now with the new Accelerators (I wanted 2 of the A600's, but had no where near enough money for them), Matt and the boys still managed to ship my order out within a week of placing it and Christmas was there also. Good work Guys!
And now back the the A2000 saga:...

So, I turned it on and ... Nothing. the floppy drive light stayed on constant. I powered everything down, and went to correct the floppy drive issue (i though the cable was reversed) when I unplugged it, I noticed that one of the pins was broken. Great, another issue.

So I got out an external floppy drive and found my good 2.1 Disks. Turned everything back on and held the mouse button down to boot from DF1:.

It took a while to get the hard drive to be recognized by the system, but once that issue had been sorted out, I formatted the drive and installed OS 2.1. It booted fine, but there was still one issue left. The Amiga saw 0 of the 8 megs of Ram. I then powered everything down and reseated all the ram, powered it back up and still nothing. Now I was getting a bit frustrated and powered everything down again, pulled the card and set to work looking at jumper settings. I guess when I used this card to diagnose my A4000 way back 2 years ago, I pulled all the ram off, and set the jumper to "0" ram. Now, I did my slap the head "DOH" routine, set the jumper to "8", re-assembled everything and low and behold, everything works fine. Now when I pull the motherboard out (this should be in the next week or so) I am gonna get Craig to help re solder the pin for the floppy and this A 2000 should be good to go for OS 3.1
I put an add on Kijji for a couple of SCSI CD rom drives for these units, as Ebay was just way out to lunch on the prices. One dreamer was asking over a thousand dollars for an external SCSI CD rom drive , and he wanted an extra $100 in shipping. WOW, to live in his world.