Another Word for Nerd

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 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 screwed up my first attempt at a CMoy headphone amp by being in too much of a hurry (put the wrong part in a couple of places, then had to unsolder/resolder in the correct part), and ended up damaging the Radio Shack protoboard. The end result was that the right channel worked, but the left channel was completely dead.

I’ve got enough parts to build at least two more amps, so I’ll give it another shot (and take my time) on Sunday night.

Tonight (Saturday) I started and finished the crossfeed box and it works great - here are pictures of the end result, enclosed in a $2.50 plastic enclosure I found at EPO.

Yes, that is 3M blue painter’s tape. I have it on my workbench (to hold components in place while soldering) and used it to label and attach the bottom cover to the enclosure.

Last night we cleaned all of the junk and old furniture out of the garage, and managed to fill half of a 30-cubic-yard construction dumpster.

Once we move the last piece of furniture (a heirloom piece that we’re going to keep and have refinished) into the house, I’ll proceed to power-wash the concrete and prep it for paint and sealant.

Times like this I wish a friend of mine from Austin was around to help…

Finally got my electronics “workbench” set back up. So far, I’ve made a few custom audio cables (mostly 1/8″-male to 1/8″-male interconnects) and am working on an LED clock kit to get back up to speed on soldering. Unfortunately, the spring in the TC201T soldering iron for my WTCPT soldering station is wearing out, so I had to order another one and will continue working on things once it arrives on Monday the 16th.

I got a pretty good year’s worth of use out of this WTCPT station; it only cost me $29 shipped off eBay and had obviously been through many years of use before I acquired it. The base power unit should pretty much last forever, and with this new TC201T (a newer version than the one I currently have), I can simply replace the heater unit and switch (for $30) if it happens to wear out. All told, not counting tips I’ve only spent about $100 total on the original WTCPT and the new replacement iron - that’s still cheaper than $130-150 for a complete new station.

Once the LED clock kit and a couple more cables are done, I’ve got the parts together already to move on to making a CMoy Headphone Amp and a Crossfeed Board to go along with it.

After those are done, in a month or so I’ll be assembling my long-awaited P112 Z80-based single board computer kit. I’ve built a Z80-based SBC before (the Southern Cross I), but it was a simple trainer with not much I/O and a hex keyboard and display. The P112 is a “real” computer that runs CP/M and uses floppy disks (or IDE storage with the “GIDE” add-on board).

Eventually I’d like to build a Nixie clock using the IN-1 Nixie tubes I acquired back in September.

My ultimate goal would be to save up enough to build a new-reproduction version of the Altair 8800, but they’re $1500; for that much I’d rather just save the money to upgrade my Mac to the latest model in a year or so.

One of these days I’ll get around to posting my rant about the current state of hobbyist electronics that’s been bouncing around in my head for the past couple of years.

After owning it for a year but having the boxes sit in a corner for lack of space, I finally decided where the Bowflex (an “XTREME XTLU” model) would go and started unpacking it last night.

An hour and a half later, I had everything but the “optional leg attachment” unpacked and mostly laid out on a rug in the living room (since we have hardwood floors).

Tonight I’ll proceed to the actual assembly stage; it shouldn’t take me more than a couple of hours tonight to put everything together.

This will let me finally get rid of all EIGHT boxes this week when Big Trash Pickup Day rolls around on Friday.

I finished the lab cleanup and reorganization today. I think it looks much nicer, although I need to rent a floor scrubber.

I still have a couple green storage tubs full of junk and trash, but I have to wait until tomorrow afternoon to throw them away. I already filled both of our trash cans and pickup is tomorrow morning.

I finished putting together the shelves.

Tomorrow I’ll start putting stuff on them, and finish cleaning the room and throwing stuff away, then I’ll need to swiffer-mop and clean the floor.