Amiga on Steroids, Complete with Side Effects!

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Nestled snug in the corner of my computer room is an Amiga 600.  It was put there for one purpose: as a quick and easy game console for classic Amiga titles like Lemmings, Street Fighter II, and whatever else I could find on floppy that worked.

This was fine until the day I decided to put one of those pre-configured flash-based IDE drives off eBay inside it.  The hard drive came with a program called WHDLOAD installed on it, along with around a hundred games.  I was captivated, but very few of those games actually worked, and I was told it was the machine's fault.  So first I upgraded it to the latest Kickstart ROM, then I gave it 4mb of Fast Memory in the belly slot, and finally another 2mb through PCMCIA.  None of it was enough.

Then I heard about the Vampire V2 CPU card.  It promised to solve all my problems with an 80+mhz 68040 emulated processor, 128mb ram, and an sdcard slot for extra storage.  For the money, it was the cheapest and fastest 680x0 based cpu expansion for any Amiga.

So I placed my order, waited several months, paid the bill, waited another month.  And then one day...

The package came with the card, two little plastic mounting legs, a Q-Tip, and alcohol swab.  I used the Q-Tip and swab to clean the contacts around the existing 68000 processor, and after some moderate but careful violence, was able to push the card into place and screw it down.  I then put a cheap 8gb sdcard into the card reader and hooked it back up.

It booted right up, and a quick run of SysInfo showed that it was every bit as screaming fast as it promised to be.  I also ran AIBB, which contains numerous benchmark tests.  Generally speaking, it's screaming fast on CPU and integer intensive tasks, still Fast as Hell on Floating point tests, and (shockingly) slower than a 68040 (but still faster than a 68000) on graphics operations.

The sdcard was not recognized as a standard scsi device, so my first step was to discover, find, download, and install the latest drivers.  This took way too long to figure out.  Shipping the card with instructions on at least where to find drivers would have been nice.  Anyway, some time later, the sd card was partitioned and ready to receive data.  The process went something like this:

1. Download Saga Driver (as of this writing, 0.9c, requiring firmware rev SILVER6)
2. Copy sagasd.device to Devs, and SDDiag and VampireTool into C
3. Copy SDMount into System
4. Alter the "Information" tab on HDConfig to refer to the new sagasd.device
5. Using HDConfig, setup and partition the drive as normal.
6. Reboot
7. Run SDMount in the System folder.  It will appear to have done nothing.
8. In RAM:T/SDMount, you'll find some number of device config files equal to the number of partitions you created.  Copy these into your DEVS:DosDrivers folder.
9. Edit each of the new device files with a text editor.  They will have an empty "Filesystem =" entry that you must fill in.  For example, if you set up the partitions to use FastFileSystem, you would put: FileSystem      = L:FastFileSystem
10. Reboot Again
11. After a few seconds, the new devices will appear in Workbench.  Quick Format them.

It only took a few megabytes of copying data onto the new partitions to discover my error: The cheap (slow) 8gb flash card I used wasn't cutting it.  The OS would constantly error out as if the device was no longer there. It would ask me to reinsert the volume as if I had removed it. Hitting retry would usually work, but that's not behavior you want out of fixed storage.  Using a  higher quality (faster) $20 8gb sdcard did the trick.

Another problem I discovered is that running a computer with a 68040 but no FPU (Floating Point Unit/Math CoProcessor) creates confusion.  The Vampire team promises a core update with an FPU in the future, but until then, certain programs are going to be a problem.  Thankfully, they are always non-Game programs.

Commodore Collector Trudgery

I don't really have much exciting to say for this entry, but wanted to let blogspot know that I have been quite busy.

This beautiful Amiga 500 was purchased off eBay only because I wanted an earlier motherboard and the "Chicken Head" logo case.  The original box was bonus and might have been the best part.  It's gorgeous!

When it arrived, however, it had two flaws: a missing disk drive ejection button and a mostly malfunctioning keyboard.

The problem with the disk drive button was easy enough to fix, as I had a spare floppy to draw it from.  The keyboard, however, was tricky.  Upon very close inspection of the keyboard membrane, it turns out that several of the metal traces near the connector had gotten bent to the point of breaking.  I tried using some liquid carbon with the absolute finest tipped brush I had, but was only able to bring back two or three of the dead traces that way.  Luckily, someone on facebook routed me to sellmyretro.com, where someone was selling brand new (and compatible!) membranes.  I dropped my repair attempts (who knows how long that liquid carbon would have held anyway) and just got a new one.

While all this was going on, I was also contacted by a Houston resident who was moving out of the country and wanted to unload all his Commodore stuff.   Apparently, he was a big Commodore 128-mode and C128 CP/M-mode fan, as well as a Commodore 8-bit power user who kept up with all the latest storage, memory expansion, and accelerators.

I'm a big fan of CMD (Creative Micro Designs), who designed much of those later expansions, so I knew the deal would be a good and useful one.

Once I got as much of it home as my wagon would carry, it took weeks just to take stock. And then came very minor repairs.  A CMD Hard Drive got a new SCSI drive mechanism.  A pair of FD2000s swapped drive mechs so that the one with the functioning motherboard would be a fully functioning drive.  A 1581 had a shorted capacitor replaced.   And meanwhile, there were stacks of floppy disks to archive.  All of this has kept me extremely busy to this day.

Then, on top of all this, the power supply in my CBM-256 has gone out, again, I *think*.  This is the third of fourth time it has failed to power up.  Most times, tinkering with it for a few weeks would make it mysteriously start working again.  Once, all it needed was a new monitor fuse, but that won't work this time.  The symptom is, once again, an utter lack of voltage on all lines.

So, it's hardware that has kept me busy.  I've actually been looking forward to doing some software projects, but those will wait.

Project Batteries: Finished

The longest and most exhausting hardware "project" I've ever embarked on is completed.  I'm referring, of course, to the mission of inspecting every Commodore Amiga, PC-compatible, and PC-laptop for leaking or dead batteries, and replacing them.

The final computer to receive attention, out of the dozens and dozens, was this plain Jane Amiga 500 with an A501 memory expansion in its "belly".  The A501 provides this computer with an addition 512k of memory, as well as a real-time battery-backed clock.  However, that aforementioned battery was a leaky Ni-Cd barrel that needed cutting out and replacing, which I did.

All of the computers which required a battery replacement received ordinary lithium-ion "coin" batteries.  This represented a trade-off.  These batteries are not rechargeable, but they are easy to swap, since I always mounted a battery-holder for them, and they do not leak acids or bases over time, but simply fade into oblivion.

Safer computers was not the only thing I had to show for having done this project, however.  Since these computers were coming down from high shelves in some cases, being tested, and often disassembled to get to the motherboards, I took pictures.  Lots and lots of pictures.

A few also required repair, such as the Amiga 600 in the above picture.

Others got their hard drives reformatted for a fresh install of Windows 3.1, for no reason at all.  Such was the case for this Commodore Select Edition 286, with 80287 co-processor!

This Amiga 4000 /040 got a fresh install of AmigaOS 3.9.  It deserved it.

But most of them I was just happy to see still kicking after all these years, such as this Commodore PC10-III, which was one of my first Commodore PCs.  I remember using it for many years as a 64NET server for the 8-bits.  Later it got PC-GEOS installed on it for productivity use.

It's good to know these computers will be safe and secure for years of new joys to come.

The Strangest Collectables

Of all the things in my collection, printers and monitors are the strangest.  They serve very narrow purposes and tend to all do their tasks in about the same way.  Of the two, printers are the strangest. Monitors can often be justified due to the non-standard video output of some computers, especially the RGBI of the C128, the Chroma/Lumina of the C64, and the 15khz signal from the Amigas.

Printers, however, just print.  They take paper with tiny holes along the side, onto which they deposit letters by pressing a shape against a piece of cloth coated with ink.  And they are all either IEEE-488, IEC, or GPIB (Parallel).

This is a Commodore 4022P IEEE-488 printer.  It has enough processing power and memory to handle the IEEE-488 communication with the computer, and it prints.  It does not scan. It does not fax.  It has no lasers or jets of ink.

Instead it takes, as I mentioned earlier, a piece of cloth dipped in ink and rolled up in a continuous loop inside this plastic casing.  Much like the printers of today, every printer takes a slightly differently shaped ribbon cartridge, allowing the manufacturers to sell the printers at a loss and make it up on all the ribbon sales.

This particular model was made for the European market, having an AC 220V power input.  Inside is a step-down transformer and some sort of rectifier circuit to provide the DC current needed by the chips and paper motor inside.  The data port is, as mentioned earlier, IEEE-488, meaning it was meant for either the Commodore PET, CBM or CBM-II line of computers.