I still have my A500 (with a 1084s), it has a failed floppy drive, but it still works otherwise as far as I can tell. I want to spend some time restoring it.
Maybe the FD just needs some lube. I’ve fixed many drives that way.
A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000
21–30 of 44 posts
Re: A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000
#22Great Portuguese computer stories ;)
Re: A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000
#23Excellent and quite nostalgia-inducing story, thanks!
One thing caught my eye:
> The PAL Amiga 1000 came later, and WCS was finally part of the motherboard with Kickstart on an actual ROM chip.
I'm fairly sure that no stock A1000 ever came with ROM chips, so Kickstart always had to be loaded from disk. Happy to learn otherwise if I'm wrong!
Re: A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000
#24Excellent and quite nostalgia-inducing story, thanks! One thing caught my eye: > The PAL Amiga 1000 came later, and WCS was finally part of the motherboard with Kickstart on an actual ROM chip. I'm fairly sure that no stock A1000 ever came with ROM chips, so Kickstart always had to be loaded from disk. Happy to learn otherwise if I'm wrong!
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Re: A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000
#25Excellent and quite nostalgia-inducing story, thanks! One thing caught my eye: > The PAL Amiga 1000 came later, and WCS was finally part of the motherboard with Kickstart on an actual ROM chip. I'm fairly sure that no stock A1000 ever came with ROM chips, so Kickstart always had to be loaded from disk. Happy to learn otherwise if I'm wrong!
Well, they did have bootstrap ROM chips that had enough firmware in them to get the Kickstart off the floppy and install it in the WCS. But I believe you're right that Kickstart in ROM wasn't until the A500/A2000 in 1987.
Re: A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000
#26That 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…
680[01]0 had only 23 address lines (A1-A23), 16-bit word size, thus 16 MB addressable memory.
There’s also LDS (lower data select) and UDS pins for 8-bit I/O chips.
Re: A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000
#27My career path was pretty much set in stone when I was introduced to an Amiga2000 with a Video Toaster. I watched so many different pieces of equipment get replaced by that one card inside this computer. The replaced equipment dollar value dwarfed the price of the Amiga + Toaster setup. Eventually, we upgraded the CPU from the stock 68010 to a 68040 with another expansion card which was an incredible difference.
This happened the summer between my junior and senior year in high school, and I spent every day that summer learning everything about what I could do with that Toaster. By the time I graduated, I was a pretty decent technical director being able to handle the lower 3rds, camera switching, and running tape playback (and rarely used those skills later).
The Amiga will always hold a special place for me. Any post like this will also keep me from doing work for longer time than it takes to read as I always go down a bit of nostalgia rabbit hole after reading.
Re: A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000
#28Re: A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000
#29My 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 recall the sales guy giving us copies of something too!
I used the icon editor until I got Deluxe Paint. My first real job was doing graphics for a couple of game companies, mainly cross-platform conversions by hand.
I still have my A1000 keyboard and the manuals and quite a few floppies, but the main unit kicked the bucket.
There's still a big Amiga scene and an active forum community over at https://eab.abime.net/
Re: A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000
#30That 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…
680[01]0 had only 23 address lines (A1-A23), 16-bit word size, thus 16 MB addressable memory. There’s also LDS (lower data select) and UDS pins for 8-bit I/O chips.
Modern AMD64 CPUs only have around 48 address lines, but we don't describe them as 48 bit. Registers and pointers are 32 bit, too.