I’ve not had time to work on it in almost three months, so a friend is on his way here right now to take the Amiga hardware (two A2000s and an A4000) off my hands. He’s buying the A4K, but I’m giving the rest of it to him for free.
I’ll continue to work and play with the Amiga via emulation, but I’ve had to realize that I just don’t have the room and the time to work with actual hardware nowdays.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks to a friend in Austin, I have an Amiga 2000 system on the way! Getting it nicely equipped and upgraded will be fun; I was a huge Amiga fanatic from ’90-93 during high school when I had an Amiga 1000. I owned an A3000 in ’95, but never really got into using it as I discovered Sun workstations and Solaris around the same time. Unfortunately the friend that was storing the A3000 for me lost it during a move a couple years later.
Anyway, I’ve got an Amiga 2000 with a flickerfixer, A2091 SCSI card, floppy drive, ’030 accelerator, and an unknown amount of memory on the way. I’ll need to add a hard drive (of which I have plenty), external CD-ROM (got tons of those too), and find a mouse.
If anybody reading this has Amiga bits they’d like to get rid of, let me know.
Things I need to eventually pick up for the A2000:
- Kickstart 3.1 ROMs (so I can run AmigaOS 3.9)
- An extra floppy drive or two, along with lots of DSDD 3.5″ floppies
- PS/2 adapters for the keyboard and mouse (so I can use it on my KVM)
- Ethernet card (anywhere from $50-200, looks like)
- RTG or Picasso96 high-resolution video card
- PowerPC accelerator card (yeah, right, unobtanium)
- Spare power supply
I read on MetaFilter that Fred Fish passed away on April 20th at the age of 51.
I spent many an hour in 1990-93 using the (new, expensive) external CD-ROM drive attached to a PS/2 Model 30 at school, copying software from a Fred Fish CD-ROM to floppies so I could run it on my Amiga at home…
