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A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000

celso.io

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Re: A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000

#4

Post by kstrauser »

That was beautiful. Nicely done, and congratulations on your restomod A1000!

I’ve heard people describe it as a 16 bit computer a few times lately though and it always catches me off guard. It was usually referred to as a 32 bit computer at the time, and defensibly so.

Some of its implementation details were 16 bit, like the data bus and ALU, but they were largely invisible to users and programmers. Assembly code used 32 bit math instructions, even if the CPU executed them in 2 steps. It had a flat 32 bit address space, although only 24 address lines were implemented (kind of like how not all 64 address lines are available on a 64 bit CPU today). Registers were 32 bits wide. And later 68K CPUs could run A1000 software on pure 32 bit CPUs natively with no emulation or trickery.

Credit it with those extra 16 bits. It earned them.

Re: A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000

#7

Post by sys32768 »

My father bought me an Amiga 1000 at a Federated Group store in late 1985.

Coming from a C64, my mind was blown by the Amiga's graphics and the multi-tasking. I could run the amazing RoboCity animation demo and then drag it down half way and see my Workbench.

Marble Madness on the Amiga looked and sounded just like the arcade.

1985 was a magical year in general for me, but a big part of that magic was conjured by the Amiga.

Re: A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000

#8

Post by function_seven »

sys32768 wrote: post #7

My father bought me an Amiga 1000 at a Federated Group store in late 1985. Coming from a C64, my mind was blown by the Amiga's graphics and the multi-tasking. I could run the amazing RoboCity animation demo and then drag it down half way and see my Workbench. Marble Madness on the Amiga looked and sounded just like the arcade. 1985 was a magical year in general for me, but a big part of that magic was conjured by the…

Same story here. Christmas 1985. I remember distinctly how my dad showed me how to type "DPaint" at the "CLI>" line, and the magic that followed.

He made friends with a sales guy at Federated, so we got a bootleg copy of Workbench 1.2 when it came out.

I used that computer daily for over ten years. From 1st grade through my junior year of high school. While the TV played advertisements for Windows 95 in the background, I was still plugging away on my A1000 (with upgrades, of course. I had 2MB of RAM and a second floppy drive. Never had a hard drive or modem, though!)

I still have it in a closet. It booted up about ten years ago, but I'm afraid to power it up now without taking a look at all the capacitors.

Re: A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000

#9

Post by celso »

function_seven wrote: post #8
sys32768 wrote: post #7

My father bought me an Amiga 1000 at a Federated Group store in late 1985. Coming from a C64, my mind was blown by the Amiga's graphics and the multi-tasking. I could run the amazing RoboCity animation demo and then drag it down half way and see my Workbench. Marble Madness on the Amiga looked and sounded just like the arcade. 1985 was a magical year in general for me, but a big part of that magic was conjured by the…

Same story here. Christmas 1985. I remember distinctly how my dad showed me how to type "DPaint" at the "CLI>" line, and the magic that followed. He made friends with a sales guy at Federated, so we got a bootleg copy of Workbench 1.2 when it came out. I used that computer daily for over ten years. From 1st grade through my junior year of high school. While the TV played advertisements for Windows 95 in the backgroun…

> I still have it in a closet. It booted up about ten years ago, but I'm afraid to power it up now without taking a look at all the capacitors.

I was surprised that the capacitors and the motherboard in general on my A1000 looked so good ~35 years later. Either way, yes, replace them.

Re: A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000

#10

Post by celso »

kstrauser wrote: post #4

That was beautiful. Nicely done, and congratulations on your restomod A1000! I’ve heard people describe it as a 16 bit computer a few times lately though and it always catches me off guard. It was usually referred to as a 32 bit computer at the time, and defensibly so. Some of its implementation details were 16 bit, like the data bus and ALU, but they were largely invisible to users and programmers. Assembly code use…

> That was beautiful. Nicely done, and congratulations on your restomod A1000!

Author here. Thanks, had a lot of fun! Not sure why the original post from a few days ago didn't merge with this one, it's the same url ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42832032

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