Glen's archived blog 2009/05

	RS232 port closed.....
January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 August 2009 September 2009 October 2009 November 2009 December 2009 January 2010 February 2010 March 2010 The "New" Lounge PET VIC TED LAB STORE My Collection ABOUT ME coming soon Disclaimer: All the information presented here, was taken from the following sources: Brain Bagnal's Book On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore. Available at Amazon.ca The new edition had been delayed at Amazon until Feb.2010 Also, a lot of information has come from Video interviews with Bil Herd and Dave Haynie. Dave has a lot of videos on You-Tube. Search them out.. I wish I could post them here, but I don't have permission. Lastly, more sites on the net have information. There are even a few dedicated sites to the C16. Do a Goggle search, because Bing is just a flash in the pan.:) Please help keep the lounge alive and donate Today.Your donation helps keep an Computer from ending up in a Landfill, and keeping the history Alive for future generations!	Sunday, May 31, 2009 AmiDOS The last few days I have been playing with the A600, and the A1200. I tried to install the OS to the hard drive, But the 370 Meg drive refused to Format and as a result, I tossed it. I got up and took the bus out to the used Computer store this morning, to pick up another drive. Normally I have a stack of 1 to 5 gig Laptop drives, but they must have gotten left behind in my move last year. I found an IBM Deathstar 10 gig drive. They only hosed me $20 for it. I got home about noon and installed it. I then ran Install. The OS 3.1 will only recognize 4 gigs until I install the patch, so now its "formatting". 4 Hours later and its only about 80% done. I am considering myself lucky so far, it did not give me the problems the other drive did. While the days have been playing with hardware, I have a lot of free time at work. We have no 'Net access, nor can we watch TV, so I read. I have been studying the book, shown above. It's a slow and dry read, But I have read through it twice so far, and at least I have learned one small thing. In order to see the files in a window, you have to turn on "show all files" in each window, every time. While this is not a perfect solution, low and behold, I am not running blind all the time. Now to find a program that turns that feature on all the time, on every window. The A1200 has been running great. But I am still fighting with the different file compression formats. I was installing the "Magic" software, that came with the 1200. I thought the "WizZ" disks were corrupted, but then I read the manual and see that I can't install WizZ, but have to boot right to the floppies, Its kind of a frustrating game unit you get use to the "3D" view they have on it. I had a install issue with Pinball, I will try that again later. I am not sure when I will get back to the 4000, but soon. Today, I will be loading up the 600, so I can take it to work. I hope the WHDload is not too advanced to load up. LOL. Thursday, May 28, 2009 12 and 4 Sorry everyone, there is not much pictures to post today. Yesterday was a mixed day of sweat and frustration for my Amiga's. I had planed a simple day of getting the drivers that I downloaded burned on to a CD, transferred then in my A4000 to floppies for the A1200. I also wanted to re-install the "boing Bag" updates for the A4000. Seems simple enough, but since my OS crash on the A4000, it has been very wonky to say the least. Since the A4000 crash, my CD -rom drive has not worked. Yes, it was all installed from CD, but since the last re-boot, the OS refused to access the CD drive. It could see it in mounter, but that was it. So, after trying everything I could think of to get it running, I finally resorted to a clean install. Since OS 3.5 and OS 3.9 are ON CD, I had to install OS 3.1 first. The conundrum is I HAVE 2 copies of OS 3.1 and on both copies, the "workbench" disk has read errors. But e-mailed me another copy, but I had no way of converting it into a usable disk. So, after swapping disks back and forth for what seemed like forever, I had formatted the hard drive and installed OS 3.1. Still no CD. I then swapped out the CD rom again, nothing. Then I added a new CD file system, Nothing. At this time, I was getting frustrated and installed the GVP A4008 Scsi card back in. I was going to use the SCSI cd rom. This time, the machine would not boot (just a "indivision" screen, then Black). So I put the scsi drive back in and pulled the boot jumper. Nothing. Switched slots on the A4000. Nothing. Pulled all of the ram and set the jumpers on the SCSI board. Nothing. Not even my floppy drive was working at this point, so I could not even boot to floppy. At this point I threw in the towel on the A4000. I will get back to it later. Then it was on to the 1200, It booted flawlessly , but only recognized 16 megs of ram. I set the screen up and luckily I had the HighGFX drive on floppy and set it up also. AmigaKit even put their logo into the boot rom, but there was no wall paper to be seen on my system. I though that AmigaKit would have thrown a few of their logos in a cool background, but no. I then took a break to have a bite to eat, and think on the next step. It hit me, use the "Amiga Explorer" transfer program, through the null modem I had set up on my 2000, along time ago. I had also made a back-up floppy of the settings. But that was made in OS 1.2, could it work in 3.9? After digging through stacks of floppies, I found it, and it did work. Now, one of the "pet Peeves" I have about the Amiga (I had ranted about this before) is how BLIND the OS is at seeing files in Workbench (the gui). I am spoiled in Windows, I put files in a folder and open the folder on the desktop, and low and behold! there they are. NOT on the Amiga. I first saw this in Workbench 1.2, and I thought they would have fixed this horrendous bug in OS 3.9, but NOOOOOOO! I transferred all my .lha, .dms and other files to my empty HD02 thinking they would be easy to find. I opened up HD02 and absolutely nothing showed up. Nata. Zip. Then its over to the "finder" program, and there they are. WHAT THE HELL IS HAVING A GUI GOOD FOR IF YOU HAVE TO USE A CLI or other software TO SEE FILES ON YOUR HARD DRIVE??? Then you have to open "Unpacker" once they are unpacked, MAYBE you can see them in the Workbench. Now this was frustrating, but guess what? "unpacker" has no clue what .DMS files are. Why post driver files up on the internet, that "Out of the box" an Amiga can't deal with? What kind of brain dead person thought that one up? So, it was up to Aminet to find a DMS program. After downloading over a dozen, and none of them actually worked (some needed other programs installed, and if you haven't had the PLEASURE of finding stuff on Aminet, do yourself a favor and skip it, I would rather have my teeth pulled than trying to sort through that heap for a good working program). I finally at 11 o'clock found on Amiga.org a thread showing a step by step guild for a command line DMS program. I had started this at 9 in the morning, and worked until midnight. You would think after all these years, SOMEONE would step up to the plate and make these "little" programs that would be simple to use for the newbe. But hey, that's just me. Tuesday, May 26, 2009 6 and 12 Yesterday, Before work, I wanted to install the hard drive and load this Junior up. I knew I was going to have to start out with OS 2.1. When you first open an A600, you have to be careful of the LED cable. it simply unplugs, but you can't access anything until it's out of the way. Once unplugged, you can simply flip up the keyboard and top shell out of the way. Not much to look at with the RF shield in the way, but for now, we don't have to touch it. Note the copper "tape". Below this is the Kick ROM, So in the future, when we upgrade it to a 3.1 ROM, we will know where it is at. Now, my hard drive was already mounted on a hard drive cradle. Also there were no jumpers that I could see on the old 370 Meg Drive, so I just plugged it in and put the hard drive sled in the slots. That's it. (so it would seem...) Now for the life of me, the unit would not close with the drive sled in. I had first though that one of the top support brackets was bent a bit and I tried adjusting it. No go. in the end, I removed the sled and just taped (with black electrical tape) the drive to the RF shielding) closed up the unit and hooked it all up. I found out the floppy drive was toast, but luckily, I could boot from my external floppy drive. The Hard drive tool kit could not recognize the drive, so I shut it down and will futz with it later when my new parts come in for it. I will have to order a new floppy from AmigaKit. Today's Task was to find some EDO ram and install the M1230 board in my 1200. I grabbed the HP tower from the other day , hoping to swipe from there. But, to my surprise, this tower had PC100 ram in it. so it was off to the store room to find my EDO stash. I found it, but, I discovered the largest stick was only 32 megs, so I will have to live with that for now. I also downloaded the manual for it I took this time to replace the battery. The old battery seemed to have a bit of corrosion on it, and it probably had died long ago . Now, according to the instructions, all you had to do was open the access panel and put in the card. Yeah, Right. As you can see the card is way bigger that the opening. I tried every which way to put this card in, but it seemed that MENSA puzzles were easier to do this early in the morning. So I broke out the screw driver and (GASP) broke the warranty seal from AmigaKit, and opened up the case. Once all the crews were out (I didn't need to remove all of them, more on that later), I noticed that I am not the only one who like to use the hot glue gun. Every cable (which is a very good idea- my A3000 is going to get it) is glued down. Even on the floppy drive. Now, from the top, you could slide in the board very easily. The only "hard" thing was trying to figure out where to push on the board, to plug it into the A1200, because it did need a bit of force to slide on the connection Now it was just a matter of putting it all back together, but something didn't feel right. There was nothing to mount the hard drive to, that I could see anyway. I doubt if Amigakit shipped it just loose. I put the shell back together and the it hit me. There four screws under the top "Lip" . There is nothing in these left hand side ones, and the other side is the floppy drive, so that must be where they mounted it Sure enough, I was right. Those four screws did not have to be removed, and you can see that AmigaKit glued a small plastic shield down on the indivision, where the hard drive touches it (or might) Now, everything fit back together perfectly. and nothing is loose or rattling. Tomorrow is my day off, so I have to make an emergency back up disk on the 4000 and hopefully fix the OS on the 1200 and get everything running fine. Monday, May 25, 2009 Another BIG BOX O' Stuff I was woken up by the Postal carrier today, another Big Box of Amiga Stuff. Last week I had won some incredible auctions on Ebay. Turns out the seller was an Ex-Amiga Dealer and had some other stuff, and I jumped on it. First, He had an NTSC A600, I offered him $100 "sight Unseen" as I have been looking FOREVER for an A600. Now we all know how possibly this could have come in, but I was pleasantly surprised when I unwrapped it. It looks almost mint! Nice and white, A PRIME example of a A600. Even the little plastic coating/cover over the Commodore logo is still there. This is a HD unit. The seller informed me there was no HD inside and was going to provide me with a HD kit. I put the bic Pen there to show the small size. The unit is just over 2 bic pens in length. Perfect to slide into my BackPack for work I then flipped the unit over and checked for an expansion. I didn't ask about one, as I can pick up a new one from Red's or AmigaKit right away. Just my luck, nothing in this June Bug! I then put it aside for now, and pulled out the other "goodies". The first thing was the boxed A520 kit. I have tons of pictures of those, so I skipped it. It didn't have a switch box in it, but I have a few kicking around. Next was the hard drive Kit and a game called Tank Attack. He threw in the game for nothing. It looks like a "risk" game as it has a whole bunch of tiny plastic tank pieces in it. Next was the whole reason I found him and this. The Auction on e-bay stateted this : A "New in box" Blizzard 1230 IV card, these had everything on them including SCSI. I won the auction for an unbelievable $41 USD. These cards go for anywhere around $350 and up. This is where it became "too good to be true". Now before I go on, to be fair the seller did TRY to warn me. I was discussing with them how these had SCSI on them, and he sent me a link to the picture of the card on the BboaH. The like he sent me was NOT the Blizzard, but the Microbotics M1230 XA card. At the time, I though it was just a typo on the URL, but when I opened up the box, it was indeed the M1230 XA card. I was a bit disappointed, but then I remembered seen a disk for this in my Pile. I think my GURU Daryl (R.I.P- he pasted away last summer) had this same card in his A1200 that he had willed to me, but the estate couldn't find. Also, these card take regular 72 pin simms for Ram, and the hold up to 128 megs, so I have to hunt down some from my pile. I will have that A1200 smoking long before the Typhoon card gets here if it ever does Next, out of the box, was the KCS Power PC Board for the A500. This board was complete and gives the A500 a IBM PC capability (only a 286 if we are lucky) ) Last he seen me this big external drive bays. Thes can be used for the 1200 for external devices like CD-ROMS and such. It is huge! I am off to disect the A600 now. More on that tomorrow. Sunday, May 24, 2009 Sunday Projects Part 2 My next Project for the day involved a bit of imagination. I DO NOT take any responsibility for broken hardware at this point. Do this at your own RISK. I needed another CD- ROM for the A4000. I broke out the old HP Pavilion 6640C tower I had collecting dust. I WAS (more on that later) going to used the CD burner in this unit. The design of this tiny machine will make it perfect for future projects (towered A600 Hummm) I got the HP burner out now and proceeded to get the A4000. The retro look of this CD-Burner will look good in the A4000. Now before we jump in and pull the DVD drive, I wanted to swap out the power supply fan. On the A3000, the Fan was just plugged in so a swap was easy. You will notice that this is a Skynet Power Supply Also. Sorry about the flash, but you will notice that the fan is soldered to the board. Instead of pulling the supply apart and putting in an new fan, I will Replace this whole unit with a new ATX supply in the future. So I put it all back together. Next on the list was cooling the Indivision card. I pulled the Video Toaster card for now, knowing I would not be using it here anytime soon. I found a CPU fan that would be fine for now, as I didn't have anything smaller. There are vent holes in the top of the card to cool the Lisa, but as all of us are finding out (on the fourms) that it may be not enough. There are soldering hacks to fix this, but I will not be attempting them, for it takes a very practiced hand to preform the hacks. Hopefully in a future revision of the card, there will be mounting holes for a small fan. I put the fan down on the card and tried to figure out a safe way of mounting it without doing any damage. I didn't have zip ties long enough, so I opted to put a few drops of hot glue down. I am not sure if this will do any good, because as the board heats, the glue might melt. its a long shot, but I had to try. At this time I also installed a GVP 4008 card with no hard drive, just for the 8 extra megs of ram. I used the power plug to power the fan. I also too the auto boot jumper off. In the near future, I will be ordering an IDE terminator and using a SCSI solution, but for now I just wanted the RAM. I then went to throw in the CD-Burner and found it way too long for the A4000. Matching it up to a regular CD -Rom, I found it was almost 2 inches longer. I then grabbed another HP drive (the black one) and it was only 1 inch two Long! A quick trip to the store room and I pulled 2 more CD -roms from the stock pile. These are just 32X CD-drives and the fit fine. Now I just taped the wires down on the 4008 board and neatened every thing up and then sealed it up. I left the back slots above the fan open for some ventilation. Tomorrow I will test it all. Sunday Projects Part 1 Today, I have two projects to do. The first one is the battery change in the A3000. I had been procrastinating on this for a while now because of the cramped way Commodore built this machine. I am debating putting in another SCSI controller for the simple fact, that every time you bump it, the SCSI cable comes out and it is in the most awkward location, you can't get at it without tearing everything apart . You begin by tearing everything out. I already did a blog on the teardown, so I won't go too much into detail. Here is the battery location. This battery was removed when I got the machine. A Very small amout of damage has occured, but not enough to wory about. When removing the Power supply sled, don't forget about the one scew thats hidden under the cables. Now remove the motherboard from the Chassis. Don't worry, there is no RF shielding to futzz over. Now just do the soldering. I removed as much solder out of the holes befor hand to make things easier. Yes its a bit crooked, but I had burned my finger badly and didn't care too much at this point to straighten it up. Now just put it all back together. I really have to do something about that mile long SCSI cable. And now we are done. Next the A4000. Saturday, May 23, 2009 Sometimes you win, and then there are days like friday..... First, I want to say, I DID NOT win the 49 Million in the 6/49 Draw on Wednesday. Yes, it was won in Edmonton, But my life would be TOTALLY different right now if I had won. Yesterday really kicked me back a notch. You will remember, I never claimed to be an expert on the Amiga, just a nube! Well I was feeling cocky and decided it was time to install the Video Toaster software and get my video editing groove on. Now, I am really spoiled by Microsoft Windows, for normally, when you install things, you sit back, sip your coffee and let the installer do the work. 99% of the time (unless you are installing ANY Norton or Symantic product) you just expect it to work fine. Such is NOT the case with any Amiga software that I have come across, You really have to follow the "read ME!" and follow every instruction to the letter. This usually involves manually copping files to Various places on the "C" drive. I put in the Video Toaster CD and proceeded to read through the "Read ME". One very important line was missing from it - The information that said Video Toaster software WILL NOT WORK EVER ON OS 3.5 or .9!! I found this out the hard way and Burt later Confirmed it. After the re-boot, Error messages were popping up: "Cannot open "resource.library" V44 is the main one. My dock would not open, nore my back drop (wall paper) This is what I was left with. I could not even create new "drawers" on any drive. when I went to WBPattern, I got the same error. Incidentally, I was getting the same error on my A1200 right from AmigaKit. I had chalked it up to not enough RAM at the time, but now I see differently. At This time, I was also noticing that the machine was getting very hot -especially in the CD rom drive. I know that the CD-Rom drive doesn't open all the time to, but I was warned about that. It was at that time, I deiced to put the OS 3.9 CD and do a re-install, but it kept asking for me to install 3.1 ROMS and then quit back to workbench. I know I have 3.1 ROMS installed. It was at that time I had to go to work and ponder this over. When I got home, I got an e-mail from Burt, He explained t0 NEVER install VT on 3.9, He also explained that the LISA chip heats up and because the indivision covers it, it might be overheating. To make maters worse, I have the VT card RIGHT in top over the Indivision, so cooling is not happening. So on Sunday, I will take the VT card out for now, replace the CD-ROM Drive and devise a sensible cooling solution, I have plenty of case fans left over form the computer store days. This morning, I got the OS re-install working, and downloaded the Boing Bags (updates). Now, the CD -ROM is not working at all, so I can't update it yet. The version still says 45.1, so I am Assuming that it always was 3.9 and they just left the 3.5 wall paper in (lazy gits). I am now seeing some artifacts on the screen, I am not sure what this is, but I think it is because I switched from Video ram to other ram in the preferences, I pry its not the indivision card going this soon. Well, I will just shut it down for the day, and tear it down tomorrow. Thursday, May 21, 2009 A4000 Victory Day Not really much to report today. I took the day off, from uploading to the online store, to working on my A4000 As you can see, I finally got the screen resolution looking great (with a flicker fixer). The problem is I wasn't "saving" the settings, as I could not see the "save" button on the screen. I then took a chance and use "Amiga"key and "S" and you can see the resolution is much better than they were. I also found out that this is O.S 3.5, so soon I will attempt an OS 3.9 install on it. After a bit more tweaking, I got the screen looking like this. Now, the A4000 runs a bit slower, similar to the A3000, but that's another blog for another day. Wednesday, May 20, 2009 CD32 Arrived today. Well, I have spent the last few nights playing with my A4000. One thing I want to mention is how much faster is seems than the A3000. Booting, Everything works fast (it seems), In fact, If you put it side by side with a modern Windows PC, and booted them both at the same time, You would find that the Amiga runs way faster than the fastest Vista machine. One thing I wanted to mention. So far the Indivision card has let me down. Maybe I was expecting a better graphics card, so far I can't even put a nice wall paper on , the resolution just isn't there, even in highGFX mode, the supplied wallpaper still looks like crap. I guess I will have to find a Picasso IV card for it or a Cybergraphics card. But as always, it is a work in progress. I had an early start today. I was called into court as a witness, but as always, the guy pleaded guilty and we were not needed. When I got home, there was a tag in the mail box stating that there was a parcel for me. This, I knew either had to be my "Typhoon" card for my A1200 or my "NOS" CD32 from China. It was the CD32. At first I was excited, thinking that they carefully wrapped the outer box like Amiga kit for the collectors. My Excitement, soon faded to bitter disappointment. The outer box was a bit crushed shelf warn and actually DAMP! Boy did it stink! literally, it smelled like a Chinese vegetable warehouse. I am not trying to offend with that statement, but I literally had to open all the windows and spay air freshener around, Once I opened it, it probably was never opened before, but the box had almost had it. I just prayed it worked and turned on. I don't have any games yet to test it. I have heard that it is possible to download games and burn them to CD, but I will look at that later, for now its E-bay for good games. I hooked it up to the 32 inch LCD and it works! Now to pack it all in the stereo cabinet above the CDTV. Monday, May 18, 2009 Long Weekend Projects Part 4. The last project for this weekend is my spare A2000HD. Truth be told, I like this one better than My supped up A2000HD, for everything fits together tightly and none of the holes are stripped. But its also the Achilles Heel of my collection. If you go back threw my blogs, you will see that this is the unit that the motherboard screws were stripped. Without the proper tools, its impossible to get this unit a new battery. The first thing I had to do was remove the IDE CD-ROM drive. I had installed it with my "Budda" card, but because I didn't like the Budda, I sold it. So before anything, I removed the outer shell and put the 5 1/4 drive bay cover back on. Next, I removed the Hard Drive Sled. I like this sled, because the cables are actually a few inches longer and I can move a bit more with it. Once the Sled was gone, I pulled the CD off and put it back on the pile. I then pulled the GVP 4008 card and put it aside in an Anti static bag. I then tried to get to work again on the motherboard. I got the dremal out, and actually got one screw out. I tried another one, but the tight space, I was cutting into the RF shield, I then noticed I put a very small Nick in the Mobo . Even though the photos are crap, you can see a small White line between the screw and the red sticker . This head was shaved off more. At this point, I deiced to put A stop to it. I was not going to further risk damaging the board, for the sake of a battery holder on a spare A2000HD I was planning on selling anyway. At this point, I switch gears and put the jumper on J301. I had missed this step before. The jumper lets the machine know about 2 Floppy drives. Next was installing the A2620 Accelerator card. It was now time to put the Power Supply Sled back in. and put it all back together.. Long Weekend Projects Part 3. A2000HD Video Toster Unit For the next Phase of projects, I broke out my Video Toaster A2000HD. The project is simple. I have to change the ROMS for the GVP '030 and upgrade the Commodore 2.4 Rom to 3.1. As you know I both love and hate the A2000 design. I love the vertical Zorro slots, But I HATE the power Supply Sled design.. I would put an external power Solutiom or made the chassis a bit bigger and mounted it on the side, like the A4000 design. I say this, because in order to get anything done on the Motherboard, you have to fight with the power supply sled, and the cables are so short, it is a real work out. Once you get the Video Toaster card out, then the power supply, you now have access to the GVP '030 Card and the motherboard. I removed the GVP card and proceeded to swap out the ROM and put the latest 4.1 Rom in. Once that was done, it's on to the motherboard. I like to put the ROM in an extra Socket to protect the pins, because no mater how hard I try to be careful, the pins always seem to end up being bent Thats it now I put it al back together and grabbed the spare A2000 HD unit. It has a lot of work on it. More on that later Sunday, May 17, 2009 Long Weekend Projects Part 2. Ok, This is one of those projects I hate to do, Its very simple, but a long and tedious project. A4000 Keyboard Cleanup Part 1 Teardown and Clean up. Now this keyboard was filthy. The smart people out there would simply tear it down and throw everything in the dishwasher, but I don't have one.So everything is done by hand. I would suggest a pair of rubber gloves for sanitary reasons. I picked up a package of 10 at the dollar store a few weeks ago in anticipation of the project. First, let me start off that the A4000 keyboard is ,for all intensive purposes , almost exactly the same as the A2000 keyboard. The only differences are the shape of the outer shell and the plug. the plug on the A4000 is a PS/2 plug. The outer shell is held together by 6 screws on the bottom. There is only 6, so its a no brainer. You can see here that at one time, spiders made their nest in here. It was probably in storrage for a few years, Once the bottom shell is off, the teardown is the same as the A2000. Don't forget the grounding screw and un-plug the cable. Now remove the 2 dozen or so micro screws. The above plastic says "frame A2000" further proving that either the same parts were used or someone has already replaced this keyboard with A2000 internals. Now comes the second long and tedious part, Slowly prying up the keys and removing them one by one. The "special" keys all have wires under them, so carefully pop the wires out. The "return" key is the real DOG. While this was happening, I put the outer shell in the tub (yeh, its an old blue tub), and soaked it first in CLR solution, then wrinced it off and soaked it with "all purpose" cleaner. You can see the All purpose cleaner caused the ink to run. I scubbed it down and dried it all off. Now nest to each other you can see the A4000 shell (bottom) is a bit more yellow than the "new" Amiga technologys keyboard I got from my A3000. Since the Commodore shell more closely matches the A3000, I think I will use it there. After that break, I got back to removing the keys, needless to say, the base board was filthy. I got the scrub brush out and went back to the tub, and tore at it, the results are quite good. Now it's all clean and the next tedious part is cleaning each of the keys and putting them back on. This is going to take a while . It's Now 1:45 am and I am almost done. I am cleaning, scrubbing, drying, the replacing each key one at a time. I broke out another A2000 keyboard as a template of where the keys go. The return key was almost impossible to replace with both Wires, so I left one out. It will not effect the key in anyway. I also was careful about scrubbing the stickers. Before you ask, Yes, I did contact Donny at Newtek about ordering a new set, but no luck! As you can see, the keys cleaned up rather nicely and not much yellowing (if any) can be noticed on the keys themselves. I will Finnish up putting the keys back on and put them all together in the morning, as I am getting very tired. This is how my kitchen table looks at 2 am. I slept in and got up around noon, Made coffee and got back to work. This is what it looked like when I got up. Flip the board over and put in the "Caps" led. Then place the circuit board on top., then the metal frame. Now its just a matter of putting back the 2 dozen Micro screws, Hooking up the cable and grounding screw. Now, just put the shell back on and you are done!. I found out the the Amiga Tech shell has slightly different stand offs, and needs a bit of internal modification to make the board fit. I then opted to use the original shell for now, and everything when back smoothly. As you can see this is an easy project that anyone can do, but it takes a long time. A dishwasher should significantly cut off a few hours . Now, on to the A2000's. Long Weekend Projects Part 1 The last 2 days have been quite exciting on the Amiga Front. I have been Updating and tweaking the on-line store, with a lot of help from my Web-Host Mike, we have a simple, but functional store Up and Running, but it will be improved As we go along. Some people just cant wrap their heads around the fact that shipping is INCLUDED with the prices, so the whine that the prices are too high. I just can't see a problem with this, but we are soon going to remove the shipping and add it later in the checkout. I know I can't win with this, because then they will bitch that shipping is too high, but we will be using the Canada Post shipping Calculator. I am just charging a flat rate now, if I have charged too low, I now eat the difference. Their loss, not mine. Friday, I (shockingly) won a fantastic auction on Ebay. I was watching the Auction for a Phase 5 Blizzard Turbo board for the A1200. These boards continually fetch between $3 to $4 hundred dollars each. This was a 6 day auction and it was NOS. Nobody bid on it. In the last 6 hours, I threw in a "joke" bid of $50, thinking that sniper's would drive the price up in the last few minutes. I was stunned to find when I got home from work that I won it for only $41 US!. I am not sure of the problem, the seller has a fantastic feedback rating. I wonder is the economy dropped that much? Did he only post on Ebay.ca? I can't tell, but, I did get into contact with him and it turns out he is an ex-Amiga Dealer with lots of stuff in storage. In our communication, I found out he also had an A600 that he wanted to sell. Well, I got it too. An NTSC A600 will be shipped out Tuesday. I now have (with the exception of the "tower" systems and an ultra rare A500+) at least one of All the Amiga's. That enough is cause for Dance and Drink! A year ago, I had 2 systems that I could not even use, and now, I am swimming in them! Which leads me up to this weekend. It is a long weekend here in Canada (Victoria Day- as in Her Majesty Queen Victoria) and I have a Ton of projects to do and list here. My first simple and easy task was to swap an A500 Floppy drive. My friend Burt, fixes floppys and wanted my "Non-working" ones to fix, so I had a bunch of other stuff for trade with him, so I had to get the Non-working floppy out of one of my A500's. The computer does work though, and will be featured again, when I get around to other A500 projects. A500 Floppy Swap Here we start with one of my grubby A500 that I have stacked in my closet. I know this unit works, but the floppy was dead. I also have another A500 in Pieces, that the case was suppose to be painted my a professional painter a year ago, but If that ever happens is any ones guess. He has my A500 case and my A1000 case, so the parts are piled up here. The first thing you have to do is remove the 6 -#10 Torx screws on the bottom. You may have regular cross head screws, as the torx were often replaced. Once the top shell is off, slide up the keyboard from the bottom clips and flip it over towards the back. Ther is a very small grounding cable connecting the keyboard to the floppy drive, simply unscrew it and put the screw aside for later. Once the grounding screw is gone, simply unplug the keyboard, and put it aside. Now all you see is RF shielding. To remove it, first remove four Torx screws located 2 at the front, and 2 on the left hand side on either side of the expansion slot. (you really can't miss them). Next, flip up the tabs, and then you can remove the shield. Careful, the shield is thin and I got a papercut like slice on my hand, its not sharp, but be careful anyway. Now, with the shield gone , you can almost see everything, but the floppy drive is still not loose. Flip the unit over again and remove the 2 remaining screws. Sorry for the bad photo, but you can see this is also a Revision 5 Motherboard. So far, all my Motherboards are Revision 5. flip the floppy drive up and away noting the cable placement. To simplify this, I just put the replacement side by side and swapped the 2 cables Swap out the cables and your done! Now you get to put it all back together! This project should take less then 10 minutes for even the novice. Its a fast and easy way to get your A500 up and running again. I plan to take a break now and do some shipping for Burt, but I will be back later today with the A4000 Keyboard cleaning and replacement. I also have to tear down the A3000 and both A2000's again this weekend, so at least 3 more blogs in the next 2 days. -JOY! Sunday, May 10, 2009 A4000 Build up Part 1 Today, I had planned to wake up early and work all day on my Amigas, but, for some reason, I just couldn't focus too hard on it. This morning, I ended up putting more items up on my online store if you want a sneak peek, Click HERE Items are uploaded daily and we are still working out the shipping bugs. It will be up early next week and I will have proper buttons on this blog page. I then was going to crack open the old Amiga 2000HD and put the battery in. By the time I cleaned off the bench, swapped the A2000HD's around and reconnected everything, I decided to take a nap. I then decided that there was enough parts coming for the old HD to warent just packing it up for now untill everything arrives, so I put it in the closet for now. I then played my new XBOX 360 for a while and got a good start on the game MASS EFFECT, (my gamer tag is GLENVDB) so it wasn't till about 9 pm, I got around to my A4000. Once the cover was off, it was just a matter of lining up the Indivision card and pushing it over the LISA chip. once the card was on securly, it was just a mater of puting the ground wire to a motherboard screw. Next, I had to find a bracket for the VGA plug, as one was not supplied. I doug through my pile and found an S3 Virge DX Card. I had kept 4 of these cards around for a simple reason, the Promethus PCI card has drivers for it. I would have to invest a few hundred dolars for a PCI card for my A3000 or A4000, just to have a crapy video card, the Indivision was a much beter choice. To remove the bracket, just remove the 2 nuts on either side of the VGA plug. Darn Flash Now install it on the VGA cable: Plug it in and mount the bracket and you are done. I also took this time to put in the Video Toaster card. It was a tight fit, so I took the cage off to speed things up. Oh Oh, big problems! Something is not right here, It wasn't until I saw the above photos that it hit me, This was transfered from an A2000. The Video Toaster car is actually made up of four different pieces. It was made to "transform" and fit in any Amiga. So I got out the manual and took it apart. I also asked of the fourms, but found the answer before anyone replied. I also had to set the jumpers. I put it all back together. Unfortunatly an L shaped cover was suppled for the A4000, that was tossed by the original owner. I also wasn't too comfortable with the clearence of the Indivsion and the VT card, so I pulled the mylar sheet and put it on the reverse side, so nothing can short. Now the card fits and the Jacks line up. I then put the cage back in. I then out in the VGA slot and found covers to fill the slots. Unfortunatly the covers were a bit short, but better than nothing. I then tried to takle the broken screw in the cornner, but because it was about midnight now, I decied to use the Dremel at another time, or else someone would have been compalining in the Apartment. I then proceed to put the front bezel back on. In hind sight this probably should have been done first. The yellow LED is power, the Green is HD. This was the tricky part, plugging the LED's back in. Because the card is in the way, things are TIGHT. I could not get my hands in there, so I got out a long pair of tweezers and put them in. Put the cover back on and thats it. Tomorow after a trip to see MOM, I will clean the keyboard and maybe fire this pupply up.	SPONSORS OF THE LOUNGE ADVERTISE Your Company Here: E-mail the lounge for more information

Thursday, May 28, 2009

12 and 4

Sorry everyone, there is not much pictures to post today.
Yesterday was a mixed day of sweat and frustration for my Amiga's. I had planed a simple day of getting the drivers that I downloaded burned on to a CD, transferred then in my A4000 to floppies for the A1200. I also wanted to re-install the "boing Bag" updates for the A4000.
Seems simple enough, but since my OS crash on the A4000, it has been very wonky to say the least.
Since the A4000 crash, my CD -rom drive has not worked. Yes, it was all installed from CD, but since the last re-boot, the OS refused to access the CD drive. It could see it in mounter, but that was it. So, after trying everything I could think of to get it running, I finally resorted to a clean install.
Since OS 3.5 and OS 3.9 are ON CD, I had to install OS 3.1 first. The conundrum is I HAVE 2 copies of OS 3.1 and on both copies, the "workbench" disk has read errors. But e-mailed me another copy, but I had no way of converting it into a usable disk.
So, after swapping disks back and forth for what seemed like forever, I had formatted the hard drive and installed OS 3.1.
Still no CD. I then swapped out the CD rom again, nothing. Then I added a new CD file system, Nothing.
At this time, I was getting frustrated and installed the GVP A4008 Scsi card back in. I was going to use the SCSI cd rom.
This time, the machine would not boot (just a "indivision" screen, then Black). So I put the scsi drive back in and pulled the boot jumper.
Nothing.
Switched slots on the A4000.
Nothing.
Pulled all of the ram and set the jumpers on the SCSI board.
Nothing.
Not even my floppy drive was working at this point, so I could not even boot to floppy.
At this point I threw in the towel on the A4000. I will get back to it later.
Then it was on to the 1200, It booted flawlessly , but only recognized 16 megs of ram. I set the screen up and luckily I had the HighGFX drive on floppy and set it up also. AmigaKit even put their logo into the boot rom, but there was no wall paper to be seen on my system. I though that AmigaKit would have thrown a few of their logos in a cool background, but no.
I then took a break to have a bite to eat, and think on the next step.
It hit me, use the "Amiga Explorer" transfer program, through the null modem I had set up on my 2000, along time ago. I had also made a back-up floppy of the settings. But that was made in OS 1.2, could it work in 3.9? After digging through stacks of floppies, I found it, and it did work.

Now, one of the "pet Peeves" I have about the Amiga (I had ranted about this before) is how BLIND the OS is at seeing files in Workbench (the gui). I am spoiled in Windows, I put files in a folder and open the folder on the desktop, and low and behold! there they are. NOT on the Amiga.
I first saw this in Workbench 1.2, and I thought they would have fixed this horrendous bug in OS 3.9, but NOOOOOOO!

I transferred all my .lha, .dms and other files to my empty HD02 thinking they would be easy to find. I opened up HD02 and absolutely nothing showed up. Nata. Zip. Then its over to the "finder" program, and there they are. WHAT THE HELL IS HAVING A GUI GOOD FOR IF YOU HAVE TO USE A CLI or other software TO SEE FILES ON YOUR HARD DRIVE???
Then you have to open "Unpacker" once they are unpacked, MAYBE you can see them in the Workbench.
Now this was frustrating, but guess what? "unpacker" has no clue what .DMS files are. Why post driver files up on the internet, that "Out of the box" an Amiga can't deal with? What kind of brain dead person thought that one up?
So, it was up to Aminet to find a DMS program. After downloading over a dozen, and none of them actually worked (some needed other programs installed, and if you haven't had the PLEASURE of finding stuff on Aminet, do yourself a favor and skip it, I would rather have my teeth pulled than trying to sort through that heap for a good working program).
I finally at 11 o'clock found on Amiga.org a thread showing a step by step guild for a command line DMS program. I had started this at 9 in the morning, and worked until midnight.
You would think after all these years, SOMEONE would step up to the plate and make these "little" programs that would be simple to use for the newbe. But hey, that's just me.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

6 and 12

Yesterday, Before work, I wanted to install the hard drive and load this Junior up. I knew I was going to have to start out with OS 2.1.
When you first open an A600, you have to be careful of the LED cable. it simply unplugs, but you can't access anything until it's out of the way.

Once unplugged, you can simply flip up the keyboard and top shell out of the way.

Not much to look at with the RF shield in the way, but for now, we don't have to touch it.
Note the copper "tape". Below this is the Kick ROM, So in the future, when we upgrade it to a 3.1 ROM, we will know where it is at.

Now, my hard drive was already mounted on a hard drive cradle. Also there were no jumpers that I could see on the old 370 Meg Drive, so I just plugged it in and put the hard drive sled in the slots. That's it. (so it would seem...)

Now for the life of me, the unit would not close with the drive sled in. I had first though that one of the top support brackets was bent a bit and I tried adjusting it. No go. in the end, I removed the sled and just taped (with black electrical tape) the drive to the RF shielding) closed up the unit and hooked it all up. I found out the floppy drive was toast, but luckily, I could boot from my external floppy drive. The Hard drive tool kit could not recognize the drive, so I shut it down and will futz with it later when my new parts come in for it. I will have to order a new floppy from AmigaKit.

Today's Task was to find some EDO ram and install the M1230 board in my 1200.
I grabbed the HP tower from the other day , hoping to swipe from there.

But, to my surprise, this tower had PC100 ram in it. so it was off to the store room to find my EDO stash. I found it, but, I discovered the largest stick was only 32 megs, so I will have to live with that for now. I also downloaded the manual for it

I took this time to replace the battery. The old battery seemed to have a bit of corrosion on it, and it probably had died long ago

Now, according to the instructions, all you had to do was open the access panel and put in the card. Yeah, Right.

As you can see the card is way bigger that the opening. I tried every which way to put this card in, but it seemed that MENSA puzzles were easier to do this early in the morning. So I broke out the screw driver and (GASP) broke the warranty seal from AmigaKit, and opened up the case.
Once all the crews were out (I didn't need to remove all of them, more on that later), I noticed that I am not the only one who like to use the hot glue gun.

Every cable (which is a very good idea- my A3000 is going to get it) is glued down. Even on the floppy drive.

Now, from the top, you could slide in the board very easily. The only "hard" thing was trying to figure out where to push on the board, to plug it into the A1200, because it did need a bit of force to slide on the connection

Now it was just a matter of putting it all back together, but something didn't feel right. There was nothing to mount the hard drive to, that I could see anyway. I doubt if Amigakit shipped it just loose. I put the shell back together and the it hit me. There four screws under the top "Lip" . There is nothing in these left hand side ones, and the other side is the floppy drive, so that must be where they mounted it

Sure enough, I was right. Those four screws did not have to be removed, and you can see that AmigaKit glued a small plastic shield down on the indivision, where the hard drive touches it (or might)

Now, everything fit back together perfectly. and nothing is loose or rattling. Tomorrow is my day off, so I have to make an emergency back up disk on the 4000 and hopefully fix the OS on the 1200 and get everything running fine.

Monday, May 25, 2009

Another BIG BOX O' Stuff

I was woken up by the Postal carrier today, another Big Box of Amiga Stuff.
Last week I had won some incredible auctions on Ebay. Turns out the seller was an Ex-Amiga Dealer and had some other stuff, and I jumped on it.
First, He had an NTSC A600, I offered him $100 "sight Unseen" as I have been looking FOREVER for an A600. Now we all know how possibly this could have come in, but I was pleasantly surprised when I unwrapped it.

It looks almost mint! Nice and white, A PRIME example of a A600. Even the little plastic coating/cover over the Commodore logo is still there. This is a HD unit. The seller informed me there was no HD inside and was going to provide me with a HD kit.

I put the bic Pen there to show the small size. The unit is just over 2 bic pens in length. Perfect to slide into my BackPack for work

I then flipped the unit over and checked for an expansion. I didn't ask about one, as I can pick up a new one from Red's or AmigaKit right away.

Just my luck, nothing in this June Bug!
I then put it aside for now, and pulled out the other "goodies". The first thing was the boxed A520 kit. I have tons of pictures of those, so I skipped it. It didn't have a switch box in it, but I have a few kicking around.
Next was the hard drive Kit and a game called Tank Attack. He threw in the game for nothing. It looks like a "risk" game as it has a whole bunch of tiny plastic tank pieces in it.

Next was the whole reason I found him and this. The Auction on e-bay stateted this :

A "New in box" Blizzard 1230 IV card, these had everything on them including SCSI. I won the auction for an unbelievable $41 USD. These cards go for anywhere around $350 and up. This is where it became "too good to be true". Now before I go on, to be fair the seller did TRY to warn me. I was discussing with them how these had SCSI on them, and he sent me a link to the picture of the card on the BboaH. The like he sent me was NOT the Blizzard, but the Microbotics M1230 XA card. At the time, I though it was just a typo on the URL, but when I opened up the box, it was indeed the M1230 XA card. I was a bit disappointed, but then I remembered seen a disk for this in my Pile. I think my GURU Daryl (R.I.P- he pasted away last summer) had this same card in his A1200 that he had willed to me, but the estate couldn't find.

Also, these card take regular 72 pin simms for Ram, and the hold up to 128 megs, so I have to hunt down some from my pile. I will have that A1200 smoking long before the Typhoon card gets here if it ever does

Next, out of the box, was the KCS Power PC Board for the A500. This board was complete and gives the A500 a IBM PC capability (only a 286 if we are lucky) )

Last he seen me this big external drive bays. Thes can be used for the 1200 for external devices like CD-ROMS and such. It is huge!

I am off to disect the A600 now. More on that tomorrow.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Sunday Projects Part 2

My next Project for the day involved a bit of imagination. I DO NOT take any responsibility for broken hardware at this point. Do this at your own RISK.
I needed another CD- ROM for the A4000. I broke out the old HP Pavilion 6640C tower I had collecting dust. I WAS (more on that later) going to used the CD burner in this unit.

The design of this tiny machine will make it perfect for future projects (towered A600 Hummm)

I got the HP burner out now and proceeded to get the A4000. The retro look of this CD-Burner will look good in the A4000.
Now before we jump in and pull the DVD drive, I wanted to swap out the power supply fan. On the A3000, the Fan was just plugged in so a swap was easy. You will notice that this is a Skynet Power Supply Also.

Sorry about the flash, but you will notice that the fan is soldered to the board. Instead of pulling the supply apart and putting in an new fan, I will Replace this whole unit with a new ATX supply in the future. So I put it all back together.
Next on the list was cooling the Indivision card. I pulled the Video Toaster card for now, knowing I would not be using it here anytime soon.
I found a CPU fan that would be fine for now, as I didn't have anything smaller.

There are vent holes in the top of the card to cool the Lisa, but as all of us are finding out (on the fourms) that it may be not enough. There are soldering hacks to fix this, but I will not be attempting them, for it takes a very practiced hand to preform the hacks. Hopefully in a future revision of the card, there will be mounting holes for a small fan.
I put the fan down on the card and tried to figure out a safe way of mounting it without doing any damage. I didn't have zip ties long enough, so I opted to put a few drops of hot glue down.

I am not sure if this will do any good, because as the board heats, the glue might melt. its a long shot, but I had to try.
At this time I also installed a GVP 4008 card with no hard drive, just for the 8 extra megs of ram. I used the power plug to power the fan. I also too the auto boot jumper off. In the near future, I will be ordering an IDE terminator and using a SCSI solution, but for now I just wanted the RAM.

I then went to throw in the CD-Burner and found it way too long for the A4000. Matching it up to a regular CD -Rom, I found it was almost 2 inches longer. I then grabbed another HP drive (the black one) and it was only 1 inch two Long!
A quick trip to the store room and I pulled 2 more CD -roms from the stock pile. These are just 32X CD-drives and the fit fine.

Now I just taped the wires down on the 4008 board and neatened every thing up and then sealed it up.

I left the back slots above the fan open for some ventilation. Tomorrow I will test it all.

Sunday Projects Part 1

Today, I have two projects to do. The first one is the battery change in the A3000. I had been procrastinating on this for a while now because of the cramped way Commodore built this machine. I am debating putting in another SCSI controller for the simple fact, that every time you bump it, the SCSI cable comes out and it is in the most awkward location, you can't get at it without tearing everything apart .

You begin by tearing everything out. I already did a blog on the teardown, so I won't go too much into detail.

Here is the battery location. This battery was removed when I got the machine. A Very small amout of damage has occured, but not enough to wory about.

When removing the Power supply sled, don't forget about the one scew thats hidden under the cables.

Now remove the motherboard from the Chassis. Don't worry, there is no RF shielding to futzz over.

Now just do the soldering. I removed as much solder out of the holes befor hand to make things easier.
Yes its a bit crooked, but I had burned my finger badly and didn't care too much at this point to straighten it up.

Now just put it all back together. I really have to do something about that mile long SCSI cable.

And now we are done. Next the A4000.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Sometimes you win, and then there are days like friday.....

First, I want to say, I DID NOT win the 49 Million in the 6/49 Draw on Wednesday. Yes, it was won in Edmonton, But my life would be TOTALLY different right now if I had won.
Yesterday really kicked me back a notch. You will remember, I never claimed to be an expert on the Amiga, just a nube! Well I was feeling cocky and decided it was time to install the Video Toaster software and get my video editing groove on.
Now, I am really spoiled by Microsoft Windows, for normally, when you install things, you sit back, sip your coffee and let the installer do the work. 99% of the time (unless you are installing ANY Norton or Symantic product) you just expect it to work fine.
Such is NOT the case with any Amiga software that I have come across, You really have to follow the "read ME!" and follow every instruction to the letter. This usually involves manually copping files to Various places on the "C" drive.
I put in the Video Toaster CD and proceeded to read through the "Read ME". One very important line was missing from it - The information that said Video Toaster software WILL NOT WORK EVER ON OS 3.5 or .9!! I found this out the hard way and Burt later Confirmed it.
After the re-boot, Error messages were popping up:

"Cannot open "resource.library" V44 is the main one.
My dock would not open, nore my back drop (wall paper)

This is what I was left with. I could not even create new "drawers" on any drive.

when I went to WBPattern, I got the same error.

Incidentally, I was getting the same error on my A1200 right from AmigaKit. I had chalked it up to not enough RAM at the time, but now I see differently.
At This time, I was also noticing that the machine was getting very hot -especially in the CD rom drive. I know that the CD-Rom drive doesn't open all the time to, but I was warned about that.
It was at that time, I deiced to put the OS 3.9 CD and do a re-install, but it kept asking for me to install 3.1 ROMS and then quit back to workbench. I know I have 3.1 ROMS installed. It was at that time I had to go to work and ponder this over.
When I got home, I got an e-mail from Burt, He explained t0 NEVER install VT on 3.9, He also explained that the LISA chip heats up and because the indivision covers it, it might be overheating. To make maters worse, I have the VT card RIGHT in top over the Indivision, so cooling is not happening. So on Sunday, I will take the VT card out for now, replace the CD-ROM Drive and devise a sensible cooling solution, I have plenty of case fans left over form the computer store days.
This morning, I got the OS re-install working, and downloaded the Boing Bags (updates). Now, the CD -ROM is not working at all, so I can't update it yet.

The version still says 45.1, so I am Assuming that it always was 3.9 and they just left the 3.5 wall paper in (lazy gits).
I am now seeing some artifacts on the screen, I am not sure what this is, but I think it is because I switched from Video ram to other ram in the preferences, I pry its not the indivision card going this soon.

Well, I will just shut it down for the day, and tear it down tomorrow.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

A4000 Victory Day

Not really much to report today. I took the day off, from uploading to the online store, to working on my A4000

As you can see, I finally got the screen resolution looking great (with a flicker fixer). The problem is I wasn't "saving" the settings, as I could not see the "save" button on the screen. I then took a chance and use "Amiga"key and "S" and you can see the resolution is much better than they were.
I also found out that this is O.S 3.5, so soon I will attempt an OS 3.9 install on it.

After a bit more tweaking, I got the screen looking like this. Now, the A4000 runs a bit slower, similar to the A3000, but that's another blog for another day.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

CD32 Arrived today.

Well, I have spent the last few nights playing with my A4000. One thing I want to mention is how much faster is seems than the A3000. Booting, Everything works fast (it seems), In fact, If you put it side by side with a modern Windows PC, and booted them both at the same time, You would find that the Amiga runs way faster than the fastest Vista machine.
One thing I wanted to mention. So far the Indivision card has let me down. Maybe I was expecting a better graphics card, so far I can't even put a nice wall paper on , the resolution just isn't there, even in highGFX mode, the supplied wallpaper still looks like crap. I guess I will have to find a Picasso IV card for it or a Cybergraphics card. But as always, it is a work in progress.
I had an early start today. I was called into court as a witness, but as always, the guy pleaded guilty and we were not needed. When I got home, there was a tag in the mail box stating that there was a parcel for me. This, I knew either had to be my "Typhoon" card for my A1200 or my "NOS" CD32 from China. It was the CD32.

At first I was excited, thinking that they carefully wrapped the outer box like Amiga kit for the collectors. My Excitement, soon faded to bitter disappointment.

The outer box was a bit crushed shelf warn and actually DAMP! Boy did it stink! literally, it smelled like a Chinese vegetable warehouse. I am not trying to offend with that statement, but I literally had to open all the windows and spay air freshener around,

Once I opened it, it probably was never opened before, but the box had almost had it. I just prayed it worked and turned on.

I don't have any games yet to test it. I have heard that it is possible to download games and burn them to CD, but I will look at that later, for now its E-bay for good games.

I hooked it up to the 32 inch LCD and it works! Now to pack it all in the stereo cabinet above the CDTV.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Long Weekend Projects Part 4.

The last project for this weekend is my spare A2000HD. Truth be told, I like this one better than My supped up A2000HD, for everything fits together tightly and none of the holes are stripped. But its also the Achilles Heel of my collection. If you go back threw my blogs, you will see that this is the unit that the motherboard screws were stripped. Without the proper tools, its impossible to get this unit a new battery.
The first thing I had to do was remove the IDE CD-ROM drive. I had installed it with my "Budda" card, but because I didn't like the Budda, I sold it. So before anything, I removed the outer shell and put the 5 1/4 drive bay cover back on.

Next, I removed the Hard Drive Sled. I like this sled, because the cables are actually a few inches longer and I can move a bit more with it. Once the Sled was gone, I pulled the CD off and put it back on the pile.

I then pulled the GVP 4008 card and put it aside in an Anti static bag.
I then tried to get to work again on the motherboard. I got the dremal out, and actually got one screw out. I tried another one, but the tight space, I was cutting into the RF shield, I then noticed I put a very small Nick in the Mobo
.

Even though the photos are crap, you can see a small White line between the screw and the red sticker

This head was shaved off more.
At this point, I deiced to put A stop to it. I was not going to further risk damaging the board, for the sake of a battery holder on a spare A2000HD I was planning on selling anyway.

At this point, I switch gears and put the jumper on J301. I had missed this step before. The jumper lets the machine know about 2 Floppy drives.

Next was installing the A2620 Accelerator card.

It was now time to put the Power Supply Sled back in. and put it all back together..

Long Weekend Projects Part 3.

A2000HD Video Toster Unit

For the next Phase of projects, I broke out my Video Toaster A2000HD. The project is simple. I have to change the ROMS for the GVP '030 and upgrade the Commodore 2.4 Rom to 3.1.
As you know I both love and hate the A2000 design. I love the vertical Zorro slots, But I HATE the power Supply Sled design.. I would put an external power Solutiom or made the chassis a bit bigger and mounted it on the side, like the A4000 design. I say this, because in order to get anything done on the Motherboard, you have to fight with the power supply sled, and the cables are so short, it is a real work out.

Once you get the Video Toaster card out, then the power supply, you now have access to the GVP '030 Card and the motherboard. I removed the GVP card and proceeded to swap out the ROM and put the latest 4.1 Rom in.

Once that was done, it's on to the motherboard. I like to put the ROM in an extra Socket to protect the pins, because no mater how hard I try to be careful, the pins always seem to end up being bent

Thats it now I put it al back together and grabbed the spare A2000 HD unit. It has a lot of work on it. More on that later

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Long Weekend Projects Part 2.

Ok,
This is one of those projects I hate to do, Its very simple, but a long and tedious project.

A4000 Keyboard Cleanup
Part 1 Teardown and Clean up.

Now this keyboard was filthy. The smart people out there would simply tear it down and throw everything in the dishwasher, but I don't have one.So everything is done by hand. I would suggest a pair of rubber gloves for sanitary reasons. I picked up a package of 10 at the dollar store a few weeks ago in anticipation of the project.

First, let me start off that the A4000 keyboard is ,for all intensive purposes , almost exactly the same as the A2000 keyboard. The only differences are the shape of the outer shell and the plug. the plug on the A4000 is a PS/2 plug. The outer shell is held together by 6 screws on the bottom. There is only 6, so its a no brainer.

You can see here that at one time, spiders made their nest in here. It was probably in storrage for a few years,
Once the bottom shell is off, the teardown is the same as the A2000. Don't forget the grounding screw and un-plug the cable.

Now remove the 2 dozen or so micro screws.

The above plastic says "frame A2000" further proving that either the same parts were used or someone has already replaced this keyboard with A2000 internals.

Now comes the second long and tedious part, Slowly prying up the keys and removing them one by one. The "special" keys all have wires under them, so carefully pop the wires out. The "return" key is the real DOG.

While this was happening, I put the outer shell in the tub (yeh, its an old blue tub), and soaked it first in CLR solution, then wrinced it off and soaked it with "all purpose" cleaner.

You can see the All purpose cleaner caused the ink to run. I scubbed it down and dried it all off.

Now nest to each other you can see the A4000 shell (bottom) is a bit more yellow than the "new" Amiga technologys keyboard I got from my A3000.

Since the Commodore shell more closely matches the A3000, I think I will use it there.

After that break, I got back to removing the keys, needless to say, the base board was filthy.

I got the scrub brush out and went back to the tub, and tore at it, the results are quite good.

Now it's all clean and the next tedious part is cleaning each of the keys and putting them back on. This is going to take a while .

It's Now 1:45 am and I am almost done. I am cleaning, scrubbing, drying, the replacing each key one at a time. I broke out another A2000 keyboard as a template of where the keys go. The return key was almost impossible to replace with both Wires, so I left one out. It will not effect the key in anyway. I also was careful about scrubbing the stickers. Before you ask, Yes, I did contact Donny at Newtek about ordering a new set, but no luck!

As you can see, the keys cleaned up rather nicely and not much yellowing (if any) can be noticed on the keys themselves. I will Finnish up putting the keys back on and put them all together in the morning, as I am getting very tired.
This is how my kitchen table looks at 2 am.
I slept in and got up around noon, Made coffee and got back to work.

This is what it looked like when I got up.

Flip the board over and put in the "Caps" led. Then place the circuit board on top., then the metal frame.

Now its just a matter of putting back the 2 dozen Micro screws, Hooking up the cable and grounding screw.

Now, just put the shell back on and you are done!.
I found out the the Amiga Tech shell has slightly different stand offs, and needs a bit of internal modification to make the board fit. I then opted to use the original shell for now, and everything when back smoothly.

As you can see this is an easy project that anyone can do, but it takes a long time. A dishwasher should significantly cut off a few hours .
Now, on to the A2000's.

Long Weekend Projects Part 1

The last 2 days have been quite exciting on the Amiga Front.
I have been Updating and tweaking the on-line store, with a lot of help from my Web-Host Mike, we have a simple, but functional store Up and Running, but it will be improved As we go along.
Some people just cant wrap their heads around the fact that shipping is INCLUDED with the prices, so the whine that the prices are too high. I just can't see a problem with this, but we are soon going to remove the shipping and add it later in the checkout. I know I can't win with this, because then they will bitch that shipping is too high, but we will be using the Canada Post shipping Calculator. I am just charging a flat rate now, if I have charged too low, I now eat the difference. Their loss, not mine.
Friday, I (shockingly) won a fantastic auction on Ebay. I was watching the Auction for a Phase 5 Blizzard Turbo board for the A1200. These boards continually fetch between $3 to $4 hundred dollars each. This was a 6 day auction and it was NOS. Nobody bid on it. In the last 6 hours, I threw in a "joke" bid of $50, thinking that sniper's would drive the price up in the last few minutes. I was stunned to find when I got home from work that I won it for only $41 US!.
I am not sure of the problem, the seller has a fantastic feedback rating. I wonder is the economy dropped that much? Did he only post on Ebay.ca? I can't tell, but, I did get into contact with him and it turns out he is an ex-Amiga Dealer with lots of stuff in storage. In our communication, I found out he also had an A600 that he wanted to sell. Well, I got it too. An NTSC A600 will be shipped out Tuesday. I now have (with the exception of the "tower" systems and an ultra rare A500+) at least one of All the Amiga's. That enough is cause for Dance and Drink! A year ago, I had 2 systems that I could not even use, and now, I am swimming in them!

Which leads me up to this weekend. It is a long weekend here in Canada (Victoria Day- as in Her Majesty Queen Victoria) and I have a Ton of projects to do and list here. My first simple and easy task was to swap an A500 Floppy drive.
My friend Burt, fixes floppys and wanted my "Non-working" ones to fix, so I had a bunch of other stuff for trade with him, so I had to get the Non-working floppy out of one of my A500's. The computer does work though, and will be featured again, when I get around to other A500 projects.

A500 Floppy Swap

Here we start with one of my grubby A500 that I have stacked in my closet. I know this unit works, but the floppy was dead. I also have another A500 in Pieces, that the case was suppose to be painted my a professional painter a year ago, but If that ever happens is any ones guess. He has my A500 case and my A1000 case, so the parts are piled up here.
The first thing you have to do is remove the 6 -#10 Torx screws on the bottom. You may have regular cross head screws, as the torx were often replaced.

Once the top shell is off, slide up the keyboard from the bottom clips and flip it over towards the back. Ther is a very small grounding cable connecting the keyboard to the floppy drive, simply unscrew it and put the screw aside for later.

Once the grounding screw is gone, simply unplug the keyboard, and put it aside.

Now all you see is RF shielding. To remove it, first remove four Torx screws located 2 at the front, and 2 on the left hand side on either side of the expansion slot. (you really can't miss them).

Next, flip up the tabs, and then you can remove the shield. Careful, the shield is thin and I got a papercut like slice on my hand, its not sharp, but be careful anyway.

Now, with the shield gone , you can almost see everything, but the floppy drive is still not loose. Flip the unit over again and remove the 2 remaining screws.

Sorry for the bad photo, but you can see this is also a Revision 5 Motherboard. So far, all my Motherboards are Revision 5.

flip the floppy drive up and away noting the cable placement. To simplify this, I just put the replacement side by side and swapped the 2 cables

Swap out the cables and your done!

Now you get to put it all back together!
This project should take less then 10 minutes for even the novice. Its a fast and easy way to get your A500 up and running again.
I plan to take a break now and do some shipping for Burt, but I will be back later today with the A4000 Keyboard cleaning and replacement.
I also have to tear down the A3000 and both A2000's again this weekend, so at least 3 more blogs in the next 2 days.
-JOY!

Sunday, May 10, 2009

A4000 Build up Part 1

Today, I had planned to wake up early and work all day on my Amigas, but, for some reason, I just couldn't focus too hard on it. This morning, I ended up putting more items up on my online store if you want a sneak peek, Click HERE Items are uploaded daily and we are still working out the shipping bugs. It will be up early next week and I will have proper buttons on this blog page.
I then was going to crack open the old Amiga 2000HD and put the battery in. By the time I cleaned off the bench, swapped the A2000HD's around and reconnected everything, I decided to take a nap. I then decided that there was enough parts coming for the old HD to warent just packing it up for now untill everything arrives, so I put it in the closet for now.
I then played my new XBOX 360 for a while and got a good start on the game MASS EFFECT, (my gamer tag is GLENVDB) so it wasn't till about 9 pm, I got around to my A4000.

Once the cover was off, it was just a matter of lining up the Indivision card and pushing it over the LISA chip.

once the card was on securly, it was just a mater of puting the ground wire to a motherboard screw.

Next, I had to find a bracket for the VGA plug, as one was not supplied. I doug through my pile and found an S3 Virge DX Card. I had kept 4 of these cards around for a simple reason, the Promethus PCI card has drivers for it. I would have to invest a few hundred dolars for a PCI card for my A3000 or A4000, just to have a crapy video card, the Indivision was a much beter choice.

To remove the bracket, just remove the 2 nuts on either side of the VGA plug.

Darn Flash
Now install it on the VGA cable:

Plug it in and mount the bracket and you are done.
I also took this time to put in the Video Toaster card. It was a tight fit, so I took the cage off to speed things up.

Oh Oh, big problems! Something is not right here,

It wasn't until I saw the above photos that it hit me, This was transfered from an A2000. The Video Toaster car is actually made up of four different pieces. It was made to "transform" and fit in any Amiga. So I got out the manual and took it apart.

I also asked of the fourms, but found the answer before anyone replied.
I also had to set the jumpers.

I put it all back together. Unfortunatly an L shaped cover was suppled for the A4000, that was tossed by the original owner.
I also wasn't too comfortable with the clearence of the Indivsion and the VT card, so I pulled the mylar sheet and put it on the reverse side, so nothing can short.

Now the card fits and the Jacks line up. I then put the cage back in.

I then out in the VGA slot and found covers to fill the slots. Unfortunatly the covers were a bit short, but better than nothing.

I then tried to takle the broken screw in the cornner, but because it was about midnight now, I decied to use the Dremel at another time, or else someone would have been compalining in the Apartment.

I then proceed to put the front bezel back on. In hind sight this probably should have been done first. The yellow LED is power, the Green is HD.

This was the tricky part, plugging the LED's back in. Because the card is in the way, things are TIGHT. I could not get my hands in there, so I got out a long pair of tweezers and put them in.

Put the cover back on and thats it. Tomorow after a trip to see MOM, I will clean the keyboard and maybe fire this pupply up.

Sunday, May 31, 2009

AmiDOS