The Original 500 faulty motherboard update!

Hi there dear reader!

This is the end of the repair journey of this poor miggy 500!

A little flashback, bought an Amiga on eBay, 130€.

The miggy was shooting random gurus and was totally unstable, I tried all the usual fast repairs tests, reseated chips, tried good ones, cleaned etc... 

No luck! 

 

Btw I got a Plus board and used that as main amiga 500.

Some days later a friend comed to visit me and I showed him the board, while he was looking at it I was watching it from another angle, and saw that a couple of capacitors were leaked from below! Finally I had a concrete idea on what to do to fix it, recapping!

Here a couple of shots of the caps before replacement:

This ones were obviously leaking:

But I decided to replace even this one:

This is the position of the three caps on the board, circled in red:

Grabbed my solder, here the result:

Plugged everything back but... still guru...

But now the guru appear only with the expansion inserted, it was indeed something!

I tried another expansion, result:

EVERYTHING OK!!!

The next step was to find a keyboard a case and a floppy drive for it!

Went to the local italian amiga's forum and asked if someone had what I was looking for: Case, Keyboard and drive.

Waited a couple of days and found everything, belive me or not but each piece costed me 25€

So for 75€ I had everything I needed.

Pictures time:

The Drive 

(It's a PC Sony drive modded for amiga with custom 3d printed supports and button)

The Keyboard:

The case:

NOOOO sad stuff the postal service was able to destroy a 30 year case...

But thanks to my "glue skills":

Final result:

Now it's a great working miggy!

But the journey is not over, I'm fixing my Hardital 68030 Big Bang accellerator!

This thing is going to become a little beast!

Thanks for reading and FOREVER AMIGA

The PiStorm Revolution

I have finally recived my PiStorm kit!!

[pistorm board, raspberry zero 2 and a 32Gb microSD]

Got it for a reasonably good price (80€)

Here it is:

But what is it?

The PiStorm is an adapter board that connects a raspberry pi to the 68000 socket on the Amiga and driven by software it permits to emulate a CPU up to the 68040, expand memory, acts as a Plipbox for internet connectivity and as a Picasso96 RTG graphic card!

It's awesome, just keep on reading...

There are two software emulators compatible with the PiStorm:

Musashi and EMU68

Musashi: the original emulator project born for the piStorm, runs on linux and gives a very good speed boost.

Compatible with Networking, RTG, expands memory and gives up to a 68040 and games from floppies works really well.

Not compatible with ahi audio drivers.

As you can see 17 Mips! Incredible for an Amiga 500!

EMU68: A new emulator for the PiStorm, it's a bare metal emulation, so there is no linux, just the emulator smashing the rasp!

Compatible with RTG, HiFi Ahi Audio, expands memory and emulates up to a 68040.

Not compatible with Networking and to my "extremely limited" experience has some problems playing games from floppy (Monkey Island played without audio for example)

627 Mips? Yes I was shocked too!

Here a couple of screens of both emulators running the workbench side by side:

Musashi is enought powerful to surf the web while listening to some mod files:

Emu68 is a monster as you saw before from the sysinfo screen!

It's so powerful to emulate MacOS flawlessly!

Even with complex games!!

Emulation aside, this power gives the amiga almost endless possibilities!

Here an example of scummVM running MI3:

Here some mp3 playing while looking at some jpegs side by side with a screen of an mpeg video playing:

There is even a full distribution called CaffeineOS by Captain LeChuck that using emu68 gives you instant access to most of these applications, games and emulators!

Awesome stuff!

Right now there is only one thing missing, but the awesome people working on developing the pistorm are already figuring that out, whenever you launch an application or game not made for rtg the image is going to be displayed on the rgb out and not from the hdmi!

The solution will be a board to connect under the denise chip that will capture the video and send it to the rasp!

I would like to thanks all the guys from the pistorm developing team and all those who helped me on the PiStorm discord server!

THANKS!

Check the official pistorm page:

https://github.com/captain-amygdala/pistorm

From 500 to Plus

 As you probably saw in the previous post I got an Amiga 500 that I retrobrighted.

That Amiga 500 had problems with apparently random guru meditations...

So as usual I cleaned the board removed every socketed chip and reseated, but that was a "no go" still working just "sometimes". After a long discussion with many amiga experts we comed to the conclusion that the problem was the Fat Agnus and not the memory as I tought as Analyzer+ and Amiga Test Kit succesfully completed every mem test even prolunged ones...

So I ordered the Fat Agnus.

Being an 8372a F.A. and not the usual 8371 I did the1MB Chip Mod as seen in a previous post.

BTW, back on topic, replacing the Agnus helped and the Amiga seemed to be working well, but after some testing it started again to Guru...

I had no clue about what to do... But... I had the idea of testing the computer with a Gotek drive and to my surprise that worked great, so I tried with the floppy drive from my A1200 and boom, working!

So I ordered a new floppy drive! (Still waiting for it!)

BUT

While working on this Amiga I found a perfectly working Amiga 500+ motherboard! And as you may know these are really hard to find because the battery installed usually starts leaking on the board destroying it.

So I did the big step and bought this board along side a 1MB exp. to get full 2MB of CHIPRAM:

Right now i got this board installed and it works great!

About the case, the version I'm rocking has the same badge spot and size of the Plus model, so I decided to buy a badge too:

And this is the machine I use!

Here it is in all it's glorious desk:

So what about the other original board?

Don't worry, I got everything waiting for it to arrive, new floppy drive, new keyboard and new case!

It will be treated with the respect it deserves!

Keep an eye on this blog, I got some "Accelleration Adventures" on my way.

Back to the keyboard retrobright!

 Today it was a very sunny day, so after waiting a couple of cloudy days, I decided to do the last step of the retrobrighting journey of my Amiga 500!

So as a recap this was the status before this last step:

Just proceded remove again each key and use hydrogen peroxide:

After a day of sun, here is the result:

Yes, this last step wasn't a "game changer" as the first time, but a subtle difference it's visible. I think this is the best I can achieve.

Finally I can say I got a very clean looking Amiga 500!!

Stay in touch there is more coming in this commodore journey!

CYA