Geek or Nerd?: news

Thwarted at every turn.

2010-09-03T18:36:18+00:00

So, I picked up a second-hand 68030+68882 accelerator for my Amiga 1200 last weekend (look, if you don't know what one of those is, visit Google). Tested it yesterday (I've been away). Worked, but got random errors.

Culprit: Probably the power supply being of insufficient oompf.

I'm getting tired of finding things wrong with this bloody computer.

Upgrades!

2010-08-22T08:52:13+00:00

My 'Turbo 1220' upgrade was collected from the sorting office, yesterday

This consists of a Motorola 68020 CPU + 68882 FPU, both running at 25MHz with a 4MB SIMM.

To the totally uninitiated, this was the equivalent of a low-to-mid-range computer, back in the 90's! 25MHz seems paltry when compared to even my 7+ year-old PC which runs at 2200MHz and especially against the 3300MHz 6-core CPU monsters you can now get. Still, it boots in around 10 seconds and shuts down in… well, instantly because there's no concept of shutting down when you're using an Amiga. You just turn the power off when you're done.

The Amiga is also lacking any fans for cooling. It doesn't need any. Imagine… a completely silent computer. You can build silent PC's, these days, but you have to pay quite a lot extra because you need a silent power supply, silent graphics card, silent CPU cooler, silent hard drive and then it all falls down if you include a DVD drive! They aren't at all silent.

Amiga 1200, now (mostly) working!

2010-08-20T14:17:37+00:00

I'm well on the way now. The replacement keyboard and set of Kickstart 3.1 ROMs arrived yesterday from AmigaKit.com (great products, slightly slow delivery). Fitted and working beautifully.

The floppy drive is dodgy. The eject button is faulty, the latch sensor (or whatever the heck it's called) is faulty and it when I put my only floppy in there (some utils for the Wizard mouse), it worked but it broke the sliding cover in the process. I'm possibly not going to bother repairing the floppy drive. I can easily transfer software to the CF card, if I need to.

WHDLoad isn't cooperating. It fails when launched from an icon (doesn't find 'disk.1') and Dungeon Master sort-of starts to load (when I go through the CLI) but the screen flicks on and off and it doesn't get to the game itself. Same happens under WinUAE. Turrican 3 appears to work, as does Leander. Haven't got a joystick yet though! I'll spend more time on this after I get the accelerator in there. Oh, I haven't mentioned that yet.

I've got a 1220 accelerator (28MHz 68020 + 8MB) on way as well as a Blizzard 030+882 50MHz with … 128 whole MB! My old Amiga had a Blizzard 030 but I never took it past 16MB (which cost me a good £130, back in the day). 128MB in an Amiga is probably equivalent to a modern Windows PC fitted with 16GB, in terms of usability. Luxury

I remembered my way around some programming, too. AMOS Pro (BASIC) and DevPac (assembler). A little bit rusty, but I've thankfully still got my DevPac manual and an AMOS book. Total! Amiga Assembler by Paul Overaa… really not helpful. Bad coding style. I didn't know this back when I was learning, but it's obvious now.

Anyway. Enough ramble. More updates as packages arrive.

My new Amiga… continued.

2010-08-17T12:29:19+00:00

OK, it's been a few days now and I'm a little frustrated with my new Amiga 1200.

First of all, it was filthy and rusty. I've never seen so much gunk, cat-fur and random detritus in one keyboard. So I spend a little while making efforts to clean it.

I order and receive 1x 2GB Compact Flash card and 1x 4GB Compact Flash card. I spend some frustrating hours fighting with WinUAE and the Compact Flash cards to get them formatted for the Amiga and the Workbench OS installed.

The Amiga is booted from the 2GB CF card successfully. Rejoice!

Then I find the keyboard doesn't work. Most of the keys are fine, except for the space-bar, numeric pad 9 and 3 and a few others. I trace this to some seemingly corroded tracks on the keyboard membrane. This probably due to the evident liquid spill which befell the Amiga in some distant past (which caused a whole heap of rusting problems).

I order a new keyboard and a set of version 3.1 Kickstart ROMs. Still waiting for those to arrive.

I set up Workbench 3.1 and some applications on the 4GB CF card.

So… whilst I now have an Amiga 1200, there's still not very much I can do with it. Oh, and did I mention that I've lost the Amiga->VGA adapter which I kept safely all these years? It's somewhere in the house. Somewhere.

Got one!

2010-08-11T19:50:21+00:00

I now have an Amiga 1200