[HN Gopher] A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Am...
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A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000
Author : doener
Score : 108 points
Date : 2025-01-29 15:16 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (celso.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (celso.io)
| juancn wrote:
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| The floppy drive cries out to be replaced with an SD card
| reader, there are several on the market :)
| juancn wrote:
| I thought about getting a gotek and replacing it with that.
| trinix912 wrote:
| Maybe the FD just needs some lube. I've fixed many drives that
| way.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| celso wrote:
| > 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 -\\_(tsu)_/-
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42832032
| rcarmo wrote:
| Yeah, you posted it a few hours before I did
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42839928), and neither
| got voted up (and, mysteriously, mine was not detected as a
| dupe inside a very short time window, as it seems like it
| should happen).
|
| I'm going to blame the first part on us being in Europe and
| most of the HN crowd living in US timezones :)
| vardump wrote:
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| wk_end wrote:
| Likewise, the 6502 and Z80 had 16 address lines, but we
| never describe them as 16-bit.
| wk_end wrote:
| It was pretty commonly accepted at the time that the 68000 was
| a "16-bit CPU" because of its ALU and data bus width, despite
| the 32-bit being clearly ISA. The Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, for
| instance, is always referred to as a 16-bit console, even
| having it embossed right on its shell.
|
| The technical truth is that using a single number to describe
| the "bits" of a CPU is going to be inadequate in many cases
| (including this) so this was a choice by marketing.
|
| I'm not sure why that was the case; one would think marketers
| would have rushed to use the biggest, most impressive sounding
| numbers available. Maybe they wanted to keep something in
| reserve for when the 68020 came down the pipe? Maybe they were
| scared of being criticized or even sued for false advertising
| since the chip wasn't "truly" 32-bit?
| forinti wrote:
| > I'll never forget that useless N key.
|
| That was uncalled for. You had your C too. I mean, it was the
| perfect Iberian keyboard.
| celso wrote:
| :) fair
| sys32768 wrote:
| 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.
| function_seven wrote:
| 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.
| celso wrote:
| > 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.
| moosedev wrote:
| The earlier machines had much higher quality capacitors
| that are mostly still OK afaik. Consensus (if I may be so
| bold as to try to represent it) in the Amiga community
| today is: definitely recap the later Amigas (A600, A1200,
| A4000, CD32) with their cheaper SMT caps that usually leak
| and slowly destroy the motherboard, but A1000* and A500
| usually don't need it.
|
| *The caps on the motherboard, anyway. I am not sure about
| the durability of the internal PSUs. I haven't bothered to
| replace anything in either of the A1000s I acquired
| recently.
| sys32768 wrote:
| 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/
| iosjunkie wrote:
| Thank you for sharing! A year or two after you got your 1000,
| my dad bought the family an Amiga 500. It began my love of
| computing, gave me a scrappy hacker mind set (owning an Amiga
| in the US a rarity), and ultimately sowed the seeds of my
| career.
| huslage wrote:
| I have 4 of these sitting at my house. I should either do this
| sort of project or sell them off.
| celso wrote:
| You have four Amiga 1000 or Amigas in general?
| dylan604 wrote:
| I hear you can perform an incantation transforming 4
| Amiga1000s into 1 Amiga4000.
| mrweasel wrote:
| One of my absolute favorite series of YouTube videos is "Building
| a new Amiga" from RMC, where he basically builds a new Amiga 500
| with as many new parts as possible.
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECu6i6WR7mo
|
| 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87q-TTG48Ew
|
| 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va91bISkpKI
|
| 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EsRI-5fblM
| jamespo wrote:
| In a similar vein, I love this blog: https://linuxjedi.co.uk/
|
| He fixes Amigas, BBC Micros, Archimedes etc...
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Great Portuguese computer stories ;)
| Cockbrand wrote:
| Excellent 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!
| technothrasher wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| My 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.
| eggy wrote:
| Nice restoration and article, thanks!
|
| I bought my Amiga 1000 in 1986. I loved it. I was learning
| animation using Hash Inc's Animation:Master. People get impatient
| with web page loads today, but boy, waiting for a low-res
| animation to render could teach you patience!
|
| I had started in 1977 with a Commodore PET 2001, and was a
| Commodore person until I bought an Apple PowerPC and loaded
| MkLinux with the Mach microkernel on it. Later Minix was my
| choice. I always rooted for Minix over Linux years later, and I
| still think a microkernel is better than a monolithic one.
|
| Sadly, my Amiga 1000 was stolen from my NYC apartment in 1988,
| while I was at work.They left the HP laser printer which was more
| valuable at the time. I learned animation, kept up with
| programming from my PET days, and got into music trackers. I
| never bought an A2000 or A3000 or had a VideoToaster, although I
| really wanted one. Apple one the print/graphics market and
| Commodore lost its multimedia market with it.
|
| The Amiga will always be my favorite Commodore. I had a Vic-20
| and a C-128 at one point too.
| mightyham wrote:
| As a keyboard enthusiast, I'll add that the commadore Amiga 1000
| keyboard contains the fairly uncommon Mitsumi Standard Mechanical
| Type II tactile switch. The mechanism uses a horizontally placed
| spring, which gives it a unique feeling, in my opinion,
| comparable to a nice rubber dome keyboard but with a hard bottom
| out.
|
| [1] https://deskthority.net/wiki/Mitsumi_standard_mechanical
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(page generated 2025-01-29 23:01 UTC)