Big Amiga fan boy here! I had an Amiga 2000 with a PC bridge board. I remember walking into a PC shop and asking for a VGA card, the guy asks me what sort of computer it is for. I said Amiga, he instantly responded, "that won't work,' I then responded with complete confidence "yes, it will". You should should have seen the stunned look on his face. Anyway he sold it to me and it worked fine, I ran both Amiga and Windows 3.11 at the same time. I was amazed that the Amiga with only the 68000 felt faster to use compared to Windows eventhough the PC board had a much faster processor.
the mighty A2286, with a 386sx upgrade, i had that too in my A2000, best hacked machine ever....don´t ask for cost it was 5digits....i went from A2620 to 2630 to GForce040/33 and half a year later i bought the GVP Gforce GFX the first ever true 32bit GFX for the amiga. but i also bought the Picasso II and the picollo SD-64...i got a 3 monitor system. then i ditched the PC stuff for a Maestro audio card and 4 megs Z-II bus ram, to get rid of various crashed caused by programs that required real zorro-II FastRam. also i had 32Meg on the Gforce turbo-card but still some programs refused to work...sadly one day i got a surge caused by heavy lightning due to a thunderstorm and my GForce died... i worked again with the 2630 03 turbo but it felt like chewinggum....also i had the A1200, i upgraded it with the 1230/50 and SCSI...and i still own that machine. I donated the A2000 to a good guy and gread amiga programmer who told me a lot of C and how to do system friendly code on the amiga 3.1 OS
That is a standard ISA bus - it's just a backplane though - no connection to the rest of the machine. You could get Bridge Boards (I had an A2088) which were essentially an IBM Compatible PC on a card - they connected to both Zorro and ISA buses and let you run PC software in a window, just like we do now with VMs. There are also CPU and video expansion slots - the former for acceleration cards, the latter for things like the video toaster.
Philippe Benjamin Rymann no no no Amiga was made to mess in it internals I remember to solder more Zip RAM on the Amiga 68020 board for the Amiga 2000.
Will be to late. You need to check the CPU socket and replace it. And the second part is to checkt the ZorroII bus that will be defect too. And the traces from the custom chips that are corroded. This A200 looks really bad.
3:22 the far slots are zorro slots ( amiga proprietary slots) the closest are ISA slots , and the one in the middle which has both zorro and isa is to place a PC bridgeboard which could then make use of the isa slots. The isa slots on their own were not accessible by the amiga. Only by the pc bridgeboard, which was a fully functional PC. Somewhere in the 90's I got myself a 486SX bridgeboard.. not the commodore A2286 one, which was the "officially supported" one.
The only other MFM hard drive I ever saw was in my own Amiga 2000. Basically a glorified floppy controller adapted for hard disks. Thumbs up if you ever encountered one!
I was hoping it was going to let the smoke genie out ! Thanks for making this video Dave , when i watch videos like this it always makes me think of how far we have come in a couple of centuries ! Back then we were still sailing ships , riding horses and flying was just a dream ! Now we have put probes on other planets and the average smart phone has many times more computing power than that old unit.
I forgot to add... Some might have mentioned it as well... If you look at the label around 3:49, then you will see that it say fish and haynie. Fish did the pcb layout. Haynie is the only designer that worked on creating this machine. Just imagine that a single person have actually created this machine on his own. And that it became one of the highend home machines of that year.
Looks like you are getting a reboot to me! Screen should go white like that as part of self test. Normally if goes grey then white to indicate RAM test, then green if there's a RAM fault. Or if it passes the RAM test you should see the kickstart screen appear. Almost certainly some borked traces around the 68K. If you decide you haven't got the time and you want to part with it, please let me know - would love to buy one in this state.
Those chewed up traces are address and data lines, between the CPU and the ROM (and other stuff, but directly between the two). It's not going anywhere.
+Mr T. Guru For one that's passed Dave Jones - yes lol! I am sure there's cheaper slower shipping than $500! I missed the bit where it was owned by a museum though.
YAY! Got an A200HD that I need to crack open to investigate what I think is a bad hard drive. Always nice to see someone more knowledgeable show the way.
I have an A2000HD sitting in my Server Rack. Its been a while since I have turned it on. Last time I worked on it I replaced the battery with a coin cell, replaced the original SCSI HD then I converted the KVM connections to connect it to the KVM Switch. I do have an external connector that has the Apple ROMS which allowed me to run MAC System 7 back int he day. Those longer ports allowed you to install and IBM Bridge Board to turn it into an IBM PC. This is what peeked my interest in the Amiga when the A2000 came out. After seeing this I have the need to turn it on and see if she still works. It's an old friend that I have had since the Mid 1990's that ran a multi-line BBS until 1997 when everyone had more interest in the Internet. I also have a working A1200. The first Amiga I ever saw was at a friends house and I recall seeing Battle Chess running on it and it blew me away at the time. I am still fond of the old game but today it looks dated and cartoonish but back then there was nothing like it. Today its just easier to run an Amiga Emulator but from time to time I do enjoy powering up and original piece of hardware which reminds me I still need to get it talking on my network so I can archive the remaining software I have in my library but you know disks don't last forever but I am amazed at how many can still be read after all these years.
it doesn´t turn your amiga into a PC you´re in fact running a PC in parallel inside the machine. you can run the PC screen output in a workbench window.
Actually what you got there is a Autoboot capable harddrive controller. The 3 Bootroms on it are managing that you can boot up from that harddrive. The flashing LED though means the amiga crashed and is in a constant reboot loop, maybe just a defective harddrive making the amiga crash, i would try to remove the cards and power it up without them. Then oyu should see a insert disk logo. We reparied a similar Amiga on our channel with a similar damage from that battery! It is a verry good sign he still powers on ans shows the white screen, any error in the circuts would have caused a different screen. The connectors on the left are for LED. Ohyes the Amiga 2000 has ISA connectors! Its for so called Bridgeboard cards that have a complete PC on them, those cards run usualy a 086 268 or higher CPU andallows to run DOS/Windows to be run on them simultanisley. You can upgrade the Amiga there on the DOS side with several ISA cards once you have such a Bridgeboard card inside.
Martin Anon "Actual museums" if you're comparing it to Le Louvre, then yeah. But there are thousands of museums that don't have a billion dollar endowment to find that kind of stuff. So that's pretty ignorant. Even though that was a pile of worthless shit, it's a museum for people who like worthless shit.
Gotta love that weird in-between that came after classics like the ibm pc and mac 128k, (and commodore 64, etc) but still a bit before all those win95 beige boxes.
Blinking light is the CPU exception handler. The power up sequence shows a grey screen first, then a white screen, then it either boots or shows the "insert disk" prompt. If the ROM catches an exception during boot, that could be due to a problem with an expansion ROM (e.g. the SCSI controller, since it's supposed to be bootable), or bad address decoding for the RAM.
The various slots are 8bit ISA (the smallest) followed by Zorro II with 16bit ISA in front of those, the smaller socket to the right of that is the CPU slot for CPU upgrades to 68020s, 030s etc. and the final slot on the far side opposite corner to the front LEDs is the video slot for the Video Toaster - or least is for NTSC A2000s. That HD controller looks to be a A2090A, it doesn't have a Paula on it, that's a DMA controller there (MOS8727) and the Z80 I think is for the ST506 interface on the card. It's a decent enough board being a B2000 rather than the earlier German A2000 rev4 board, so if it can be salvaged, it's worth it :) I'd guess it's running Kickstart 1.3 as well looking at those ROMs :)
Amiga!!! The best computer ever. I had one of these with a turbocard back in the time :) I remember it sounded like a vacuumcleaner also when it was on. My family used to be annoyed at night :D
The power supply on my development machine had the fun feature that touching the pins on the power connector gave one a quick electric shock when fumbling about trying to plug the power lead in. I don't know whether that was fixed in later versions, mine had a very early serial number: 47 if I remember correctly.
Try powering it on with out the hard drive plugged in. on my A1200 it flashes a few times then boots into work bench. if no hdd is present it just shows the disc going into the drive animation. the amiga what a machine
yes but what he means is that when the hdd is disconnected the bios rom will possibly show an image of a floppy on the screen although I doubt the Amiga works with all these 'eaten through' tracks.
Amiga nostalgia. A classmate have a 1200, good times. @EEVblog2 I like to see, if possible, more videos about PC notebook/desktop architecture, power rails and chip functions, like what control fans in the motherboard. Thanks
For mine, the hardest part was repairing the vias. The plating was gone, and the solder that filled them was no longer conductive, and didn't like to melt.
As a kid, after having an Atari 520 ST, I somehow ended up with an A2000 as my Amiga. It was a bit disappointing because it was the same specs as an A500 (not an A500+!) so while other people I knew had the sexy kickstart and workbench 2.x, I had 1.3 and only 1meg of ram.
We might be Amiga fanboys. Though we hated the leaders at Commodore, that they had through the years of the Amiga. We love the workers, the designers and especially the engineer's. We love the machine it self, and not those that drowe the company to the ground. Not like those Apple pussies, that worshipped one man as a god. Our love goes deeper, and we refine stuff that we have instead of just getting new items every 6 month. Who else are still using the same unit some 30 years in a row.
brostenen as it sais in workbench 1.1 when you hit enough keys together? "we built Amiga, you f*ed it up". Greetings, Joe pillow and the dancing fools.
Peter Jakobs Well... I played a couple of games on my 500, with my daughter and my son today. They are 7 and 9, and they just love Great Giana sisters. It was like a trip to my childhood, when I saw how much they enjoyed playing. Totally social, responding to each others gameplay and they were fully submerged in the gameplay. More so, than any iPad can provide of fun.
I'm not.. sold my 500 and 1200 HD+CD around 1995-ish. But later on i traded a 486 laptop for a 1200/030 in the late 90s. Recently i bought an Amiga 1000 on eBay, and a 4000 and 500 from a friend who wasn't using them. The 4000 had a slight beginning of a battery leak, but i got to it just in time, have also got 4GB CF cards + IDE adapters for the 1200 and 4000 + Gotek drives and both of them have 16 MB ram installed. I'm considering buying the 256 MB bigram plus for the 4000 "just because", it has buster 11 in it and everything.
11:38 Amigas used to have a very basic "BIOS" ERROR REPORTING feature, depending on the color of the first video signals one could detect what failure the machine has. I think it was Black, Dark Grey, Light Grey, White and then the Kickstart would kick in...
I've got an A2000HD sitting in my basement in storage. Complete with original 1084s monitor, keyboard, mouse internal HDD, memory expansion card.. Worked last time I tried it a few years ago. Not sure what I'll do with it... just nostalgic from years gone by.
The interesting thing about the Amiga 2000 (and it's upgraded version, the Amiga 2500), is that it was built for desktop video editing. In fact, it was the model that the original Video Toaster was designed for (the 3000 was largely lambasted due to it's smaller form factor, making the Toaster impossible, unless you upgraded the case). Commodore learned their lesson when they released the 4000, but unfortunately they were about to go under.
of course, by now.......just place any PC of that eara beside it and the amiga will outperform all of them, easily.....By that time an almost six times the cost 386sx (fastest PC there was at the end of 1987) will have displayed just a single line via its 256 color VGA at 640x480 the amiga put a whole 4096 color (HAM6 mode) image at 736x566 on its monitor while its 68k CPU is almost idle... DMA...! Not that PC Polled IO rubbish... and while the PC goes beep, the amiga will do 4ch stereo 8bit sampled audio with DMA at the same time the image is dumped to the screen. Also you could sync the TV-output to your VCA and place a logo into your TV picture as the amiga is then synced to the TV video and by the same time you hear music and display a picture you could fly up to 8 sprites across the screen all simultaneously...while the PC is still busy displaying row after row of a picture loaded from its PC-AT-bus harddrive in polled IO mod....it´s CPU 100% busy the same goes for ram and ISA-AT-bus....
even my phone does...but that´s not the point here, (at least for me) as it´s just unfair to compare a 1987 machine with a today´s machine, if you compare, please compare two machines from the same year. That´s my point....:)
Almost all of the error codes on the amiga are shown via the initial screen colours it flashes when booting. It looks like you're stuck on white/black before it resets. Black - No CPU detected. White - CPU failure.
Design reminds me of the old Apple Mac II, very similar, with the hard drive controller that had to be upgraded when adding a 40 MB HD from the original 20MB or something.
it's trying to boot from the HDD but failing, the re-spin could be stuck heads (Actuator may have seized) without the HDD controller it should ask for the Kickstart Floppy (If Kickstart isn't on a ROM)
1:30 That's the place the accelerator card goes actually.. I was thinking backwards earlier... It's the slot closest to the CPU. You could stick an 68020 030 .. in there..
Ulrich Frank oh, I remember the Zorro 3 autoconfig. One Signal was routed such that it went to the 1st slot and the card in that slot was responsible to switch ut though to the next slot once it was fully configured. To get configured, it had to respond to a specific address and report the memory segment size(es) it needs and was then assigned memory location(s) that it was expected to respond on. Cool system this.
I have an Amiga 2000 that took battery damage. It only boots if I use the jumper to disable half of the chip memory. I hope to fix it someday. (I at least already removed the battery and cleaned up the acid)
Another retro machine damaged by those suicidal soldered-on batteries (those are probalby NiCd). A quick Google shows that these Vartas were quite common back in the day and they are notorious for leaking and killing boards. Good luck on your repair (you are going to repair it, don't you ?), hope you will resurrect this Amiga.
A2000s had zorro slots toward the front, but the last 4 expansion slots have pc isa slots for use with PC emulator cards. this provided isa bus card slots that the emulator card to use.
That harddrive looks pretty MFM'my to me.. That is probably gone.. No matter, there are plenty of options fitting some IDE type of gear to this machine. I was just wondering if this puppy has the same odd behavior you see in a A1000 machine where it won't do anything without a floppy disk drive attached. If that is not the case, you should be able to get a kickstart screen from composite.
Anamnesia I don't think any 010 was ever available from the factory. And the 010 was only a very minor upgrade with it's greatest trick being in essence a two word instruction cache (a.k.a loop mode) that allowed tight loops to run without I-fetch cycles. Those would be sped up by a factor of two or three, though.
The time between the reboots suggests an error. I have an A1200 with a duff ROM and the time between the flashes is exactly what I expected. I wonder if it's showing in B+W, because it should be red=ROM, green=RAM, blue=Custom, yellow=Interrupt/something else, which I can't remember. The keyboard LED will also flash a certain amount of times, but I doubt you have that. I know it's once for ROM error. Don't know the rest :)
When I first found out about the possibility of the battery leaking, I removed my battery in my A2000 and soldered wires to the motherboard and ran them out the front, so the battery would be outside the computer, so if if leaked, it wouldn't ruin the computer. Unfortunately some time later (a year?), my Amiga started randomly crashing for no reason and after some time of that, it wouldn't successfully boot anymore, so it essentially died before the battery could leak anyway. I was gonna point out the colors on boot, but I see others have mentioned it already/
Jan Wiersma Deffo get it out, but it's too late to really save this machine, any repair will be temporary now the electrolyte is under the solder mask :(
I'm sure you could do a really tidy job in 50-100hrs, but can you honestly get it to a point where it won't corrode further over time? I'd imagine you'd have to physically sand away or somehow dissolve the solder mask to clean it properly, then run a ton of wires to replace bad traces.. Fair play if you can though. :)
as the guru said it's a time consuming proces. it was more a shoutout to everybody who got one rip those batts out before it gets this far. i found out late myself for one of my A3000 's. so this needs work also.
L'A2000 e un'AMIGA straordinario,molto bello esteticamente,lo posseggo anch'io e ci tengo da morire.mi raccomando al tuo dagli una bella pulita,ne ha bisogno.E un gioiello e va tenuto bene.ciao.
3:27 well obviously the Amiga HAS PC ISA bus, but you need a bridge-board (PC-on-a-card type thing) to translate between that and the Amiga native Zorro II bus. Sometimes those ISA buses just used to power "non-interactive" cards (like time base corrector for a video toaster)
At one time, there was a board that connected the Amiga zorro bus to the ISA bus without a cpu. The Amiga could then talk to the isa cards directly, if you had or could write a driver. KI think there were drivers for network cards and some vga cards.
from what I can tell, 10 short, 1 long flash of the power LED is the Fat Lady (Agnus) chip. However, if the Agnus was actually dead, the CPU wouldn't even be able to write to Denise and turn the screen on. All access to the custom chips and motherboard RAM is via Agnus. You could try reseating it, but you probably just have broken traces.
no it was just a bunch of ISA connectors connected to power and thats it! but as you can see they are inline with 2 zorroslots.. where you could add a extracard that made a connection. but the amiga did NOT have a bus. without that extra biridgeboardcard it was just PCB space-waster
Mine (US spec) had 1 MB standard and then I got 2 more MB and installed the DIPs on the HD controller card for a total of 3 MB. Screaming. The slots are ZORRO but some were paired with ISA slots and Commodore had a "bridge board" (with various Intel CPUs over time) that would let you run MS-DOS and early MS-Windows in a window on the Amiga. Agnes, Denise, Paula, and Gary were the custom chips but I have no recollection what each did. The video on these was 640 x 480 max, I think, but it was like 15.75-Hz on the refresh ... doubt your monitor could sync ...
Great to see a Amiga 2000 on your channel, it's the older version i see, rev 4.3. I own two Amiga computers, and thinking about buying a Amiga 2000 again, had one but soled it, yeah i know stupid of me. Hope to see more of the Amiga 2000.
I still have my old A2000 main box. It was a nice machine back in the day. When I have time I'll have to retrieve it from the garage, open it up and inspect it as it has been sitting in a box unused for about 20 years. Seeing the problem with the battery makes me wonder about the state of my A2000's motherboard. IIRC, my machine has several boards in it: the 68030 CPU board, a LAN card, a SCSI hard drive controller, and (I think) a bridgeboard. My unit was in a storage locker and when I had to clear the locker much of the Amiga stuff got tossed but I kept the main box and a lot of the manuals and documentation. I don't know what to do with what I have left. The 68030 board was expensive back in the day. I don't think any of the parts are worth much any more.
After seeing this I was wondering the same thing. Just pulled mine out of the back of the closet (S/N ~12000... how many did they make?) and it still looks reasonably pristine. My battery leaked out a little toward the front side of the case (looks like it's all ground plane up there anyway)... you can barely tell so I guess it's luck of the draw in terms of how the battery went out. On the one hand, I'm glad it's still in good shape, on the other hand I'm still a little bummed that I traded in my A1000 for it... I always liked the quirky enclosure design of the 1000 and never really took advantage of the hardware expansion of the 2000 beyond the 2091 card that came with it. I think by the time I upgraded to it I knew in the back of my mind that the Amiga didn't really have a commercial future. But I have really been amazed to see people keep the platform alive for enthusiasts over the decades.
my A2000 I upgrade a lot. 68030 proccessor, 3D graphics card, Ethernet, USB card, and SCSI card with the correct rom, so it has unsigned address space. The original SCSI rom had Signed SCSI address space (so it went from -2Gb to +2Gb HD address space).
2 complement numbers start at 0 just like any other btw.. they just rollover to their negative couterpart in the middle of counting up. It's so binary math would still work. FFFFFFFE + 00000003 needs to be 000000001.
