Another Word for Nerd

Before:

After:

My boss suggests we put a birdbath where the tree was. Cosmos suggests “a giant statue of Jesus and a tribute to George W Bush”. Maybe a Buddy Christ and a tribute to Bill Clinton..

Suggestions?

I managed to get AmigaOS 3.9 running on WinUAE, while waiting on parts to arrive so I can get the A4000 up and running.

We were informed today by the tree guy that the big tree in our front yard needs to come down, as its dying and will only continue to lose big limbs every time we have a decent-sized storm.

I’m kinda bummed out, as I liked the tree and had hoped that it could have just been trimmed a bit, but he showed where its rotting and will just start to come apart within the next 3-5 years.

Decided to fiddle with the Amiga a bit and see if the GVP ‘030 board works. Once I dug up the correct jumper settings for the 3001, it managed to boot to the “please give me a Workbench Disk” screen.

The floppy drive is bad, so I “temporarily borrowed” the floppy drive tray from the second A2000:

Using it and a Workbench 2.04 floppy, I managed to get a basic floppy-based system up and running:

Once that was successful, I installed the other cards - an Amiga 2091 SCSI controller/RAM expansion, and a SupraRAM expansion. So far, they appear to work together and give me a total of 1M “Chip” RAM, and eight megabytes of “Fast” RAM:

Now I just need to find a couple 50-pin SCSI ribbon cables and a small (4G or less) SCSI hard drive…

The box with the rest of the cables, mice, etc, arrived - but the monitor cable is a DB23 to DB9 for use with a Commodore 1080/1084 monitor.

I had to order a DB23-to-HD15 adapter cable. It will take a few days to arrive, so all the Amiga work is put off for another week or so. Hopefully my LCD will sync up to the native Amiga video frequency coming out of the A4000.

The Amiga 4000 and Amiga 2000 arrived today, along with their keyboards. The box of other parts and cables should be here tomorrow.

The 4K came with a slightly-fuzzy battery (which I quickly removed), a Retina BLT Z3 video card, an Emplant card, and a Warp Engine 68040 accelerator.

The 2K came with a GVP Impact A3001 68030 acclerator and two floppy drives. It had a fuzzy battery as well, and it was removed as soon as possible.

If the 4K works properly, the only thing I’ll need will be a Zorro-bus Ethernet card.

We had some storm damage to the trees in our front and back yards due to the short one-hour storm tonight.

I’ve got two limbs in the front yard that are too heavy (and wet) to move right now, and one in the back yard that fell straddled across where the power line comes into the house.

I went to install the replacement Amiga 2000 power supply, and discovered that I’d plugged the original power supply into the motherboard incorrectly, with the connector off-by-one. d’oh!

The original works fine:

At least now I have a spare, and it only cost me $12.

I won the eBay auction for a replacement Amiga 2000 power supply, but it hasn’t arrived yet.

A few days after I made the last Amiga-related post, I lucked into a great deal. This weekend an Amiga 4000 and another Amiga 2000 will be on their way to me, and I’m only having to pay for packing and shipping.

If anyone else has Amiga gear that they’d like to see go to a good home (what I can’t use, I’ll configure and give to friends), please give me a shout.

The Amiga 2000 arrived today. It came with KickStart 2.04 ROMs, and I *think* an ECS-chipset motherboard.

Now I just need an Amiga mouse, a SCSI hard drive (from my junk pile), and a set of Workbench 2.1 install floppies.

Update: Looks like the power supply is toast (no surprise; the machine sat in storage for 10 years). That’s not a problem - I’ve got an under-$10 bid now on eBay for a replacement, and if that falls through it’s an easy homebrew fix using a normal ATX power supply.