Building a NEW Amiga 2000 in 2022 - Part 2. Zorro, bluster, keyboard and case 

By the end of the video you might be able to tell I was a bit tired (it honestly took about 3 hours to build into the case) and there were a few points I forgot to cover. 1. The gotek buttons were put at the back of the case just above the fan. Not the most practical position but it works. 2. The ATX power cable needs an extension to properly clear the zorro slots. One has been ordered and I'll post an update picture once it gets here. 3. I still hope to get the board professionally cleaned at some point but still struggling to find anywhere that can do it. If anyone knows of anywhere around Belfast, N.Ireland please let me know. 4. The cost, I can't believe I forgot to cover this but for anyone thinking of building an EATX2000, costs for my build to date are around £500. The board plus components etc were about £300. The A500+ from which everything was salvaged cost £60. The case was £70 then just allowing the remaining £70 to cover PSU, gotek and sundries.

Fantastic work Glen =D Thanks for the mentions - I will give you a huge shoutout to this series when I get onto a modern A1000 board build soon!

I only came here for the soldering montage, but stayed while you built an entire 16-bit computer...

Pretty cool. I am building an A4000TX in a black tinted glass Fractal Define 7 case with silent PSU (fanless) and the case has a 5.25 drive bay which have been all but exterminated on modern cases. Perfect blend of new and old.

GREAT JOB! 😊 Love the vids! I would like to say: You'r better in soldering the 'hardly' IC's, than the SMD chipcomponents 😅 (with that massiv soldertip!!) I have to take an IPC course every two years, to stay 'IPC certified' in (also) soldering. First lesson in soldering is: Tin all pads, and clean them afterwards with f.ex desoldering braid. By this, the pads have solder on it, and u allready can 'stick' ur component to the pad, like u did, just with heating both and without extra flux nor tin. Thats so much easier! From there, u did it IPC-like: solder 2 diagonals, and solder the rest with flux. Doing so also with chipcomponents will do the trick to not only funktional solderings, but also beautiful and clean solderings. But as said: lovely video!

That was just awesome! You do amazing work! I wish I had that ability. I can't wait to see how it goes. Great job!

Cracking outcome. Interesting take on the gotecs.

So much work! Thanks for the great video.

Its like the way i wanted you to do the case :) new but with respect :) great channel have a nice day

Amazing work, I'm speechless. I love AMIGA , Sharp's X line, MSX, Pc88 etc. Here in my country you don't have much access, MSX yes, but AMIGA, it's more complicated. I wish success to your channel and a hug here from BRAZIL. see ya.

for the floppy led you want to do it the A2000 way and pickup the HDD not the floppy. The floppy had its on light in a A2000

Great work and it looks fantastic.

I really enjoyed following your A2000 EATX build :) I resently assembled Amiga 2000 remake motherboard. Now I have a working A2000. I'm excited to find out what you do with your machine, it will be an inspiration for me :)

Nicely done :) But oh, the choices to fill those slots!

Looks like a satisfying project to build, you must be very pleased with it :) looking forward to seeing what upgrades you install :-)

Very nice workmanship CRG. I'm impressed with the level of detail, And can't wait for another episode on this. Cheers!

Nicely done. There aren't many Amiga births these days. A rare treat indeed. I really enjoyed every moment. Thank you!

Amazing work!!!!! I would go with a case with window and maybe some retro lighting , a warm white light 😊

Seriously impressive! I hope to have your skills one day, very well done!

I don't think I would've done anything drastically different other than buy more spare tweezers 😂😂😂😂 great job, looking forward to further videos, very interesting project. 👍

Holy cow that boots FAST! What was that? Two seconds max? Nice!

You mentioned doing lighting. I'd say do one of those fluorescent tubes you'd see in a lot of older 2000s case mods. It's a neat look and not too over the top and also something almost bridging the two eras. :p

This project seems to have turned out pretty well. There are a few improvements I would suggest though. 1) The LCD for the GOTEK drive is in a location which I can only imagine being quite hard to read. What I would suggest there is to move it so that it could sit in between the casing that hides the PSU and the glass. 2) Without a bridge board I think the ISA slots are probably going to be little more than decorations. As such maybe a bridge-board project could be a good thing to consider. 3) The keyboard looks a bit shocking without any casing around it. The only thing I could find that I would be sure to fit properly is a kit you can get from Checkmate which comes to £65. I would post a link but RU-vid doesn't seem to like me doing that. That kit is not exactly cheap but maybe you could get something 3D printed instead.

Awesome! I did 2 reamigas 1200 and one amiga 500 + sukkopera ... I need to build something like this.

Ooh yeah, all those nice slots to fill up with goodies... and no worries about hardware failures (well except for the original chips dying of course) since everything is modern tech. This is such a cool project. Can't wait to see what's coming in the future.

That's gorgeous mate!

Thanks for the video. Awesome build and congratz

Great Project! 👍🏻

fantastic job! For the cpu accelerator i suggest to try the pistorm emu68k, it is a baremetal cpu emulator so no loading times!

Now that's a amazing future amiga 2000 built.. credit to you and the hard work came out great.. only one more thing to do is maybe get a checkmate keyboard case for the keyboard 🤔

You ask what we would have done differently: I would probably have gone for a more retro-looking tower in white/beige instead of the black one, to make it look more like a machine that C= could have built back in the day. But that's a matter of personal preference. Awesome build never the less - I really enjoy your videos 😊

A very interesting project.

I would personally have gone with a case that has space for a floppy drive and a CD-ROM drive, but that's just personal preference. Using the built in USB ports for Goteks is a nice touch, and makes for a very clean look. It might be cool having an RGB controller cycling through the colours of the Commodore logo, but that could also get old really fast ^^ Nice build, and really cool seeing an A2000 board that fits into an EATX case :)

Great work!!!! 🙂

For all those Zorro expansions, how about a video toaster and you can add all the cheesy effects to your videos😁

Very well, good job.

Beauty of a build, man. Really, I think you may have just inspired me to do the same at some point in the near future. Turned out just great. Very nicely done. 👍

Great Job! Try mnt´s zz9000. It provides rtg including ethernet and flicker fixer on board. In addition you have the option for the ax sound module with ahi / mhi drivers on top. The card even comes with quite cool status leds.

the proper pins you should have been using for the bluster PCB contacts is Digikey ED3864-64-ND

Maybe mount the board in a metal fixture before adding the slots to keep them straight and possibly minimize the warpage?

Really nice job on the build! Honestly, I'm not much for surface mount projects (yet), but your cool/calm presentation made it look more approachable than ever... especially with this hybrid through-hole and surface-mount project that I did not know of before.

To really show off the board in there i'd put like an adhesive 12v RGB (or just plain white) LED strip in there and power it via one of the no doubt many cables from the PSU. Maybe the camera doesn't do it justice but it seems very dim from here. If you want more reliable hard drives in there there's SATA to IDE bridgeboards, although of course more modern HDDs don't have quite as audible seek noises.

Wow looks great in the case!

Good job 🙂

I just took another look at the keyboard pinout and it looks like a typical PC AT keyboard would would without modifications.

Another great video!!

No drive bays in a case, sigh, I have that covered in my Aopen ATX "Desktop" case(It's not a tower or a cube case), the case came with a 235 watt ATX psu, a Seagate Medalist 2.1GB 3.5" EIDE hdd, a Mitsumi 3.5" 1.44mb floppy drive in Beige, plus I added to this Beige case a Creative 5.25" 48x CD Rom EIDE drive in Beige(works). The case has 3-5.25" and 2-3.5" external drive bays and 2-3.5" hdd bays, of course the front is yellowed as are the 3 matching drive bay blanks(1-3.5" and 2-5.25"), the metal top and sides needed Mr Clean scrubbing pads and they worked better than Windex for the metal part, inside the case is some dust and no corrosion. I could set another PC or a monitor on this case as the case resembles 3 stacked pizza boxes. It'll make a purrfect home for an EATX Amiga 2000 motherboard, but that is for me, everyone else do what you want. Once the front plastic parts are cleaned, I'm not sure what to do, treat the parts and spray clear paint on the plastic to try and prevent a relapse into light yellow or spray paint. Treating with hydrogen peroxide and UV in the sun I've never done(retro brighting), though I've seen that being done, but spray paint I can do. I just need to solder about 135 components to the motherboard, my 600w iron will get a workout. Keep the good videos. I try and stay subscribed and I give "likes" like water flowing out of the faucet.

I like the ghetto macro lense. :D

Great vid!

That's a nice machine!

That looks amazing, Well done :) I wouldn't bother with the headphones jack due the the hard panning nature of Amiga audio, headphone audio doesn't sound that great, instead I'd replace it with a shaft encoder for the gotek. Ali express do large oled displays that will work with the gotek boards 128x64 rather than 32. I wonder if anyone is going to re-ignite the usb interface for the amiga. There was one that plugged into the clock port on the A1200. It would be amazing if someone did a zorro usb card. Also I didn't realise you had a patreon account. I'm there :)

the boot speed when Amiga's not held up waiting for floppy disk, to spin, it close, to hardware inbeded OS stuff, I do think if amiga the company had made more effete is getting more drives in the machines, it wouls made a lot of difrence to how amiga looked at, it did have bets it even had ram disk, and a virtual floppy in memory, but was just flogged to the public it will boot from one floppy, and it was left at that?

Great video followup, glad to have found your channel. Can you tell me which flux you use, please?

Glenn, there is a new Prelude 16 bit clone soundcard available for Zorro 2 on A1K and Amibay as well.

Please follow my enclosure/case recommendation and then USE THE SYSTEM TO EDIT YOUR VIDEO OF THE BUILD using of course Video Toaster SFX and any other goodies and toy enabled features that you get installed on this baby! My case opinion is late, but here it goes regardless! It should be a FULL TOWER enclosure, preferably from the first generations of ATX enclosures as later on Full ATX enclosures became quite rare indeed. This will have at least 5 5"1/4 drive bays and 2 3"1/2 drive bays, these being external, internally you will have a bunch of 3"1/2 disk slots typically completing the space from the last floppy bay to the bottom of the case and and few above the PSU section (if a secondary PSU is not used as FULL ATX will have space for additional power supply(s) above the normal ATX PSU. This would be the perfect enclosure for an Amiga fully equipped for video editing with Video Toaster, SCSI Disk controllers and storage and many other addon goodies that will easily fit such a case :)

This is fantastic 🙂

waiting for next videos

I loved this video! Hey, maybe next you can build a ux64/ATX64 Commodore 64 and find a nice Micro ATX case for it.

a finer tip on the soldering iron would have been better

You can get those amiga usb cards and route the ports to the case built in ones.

So happy it works for you, makes it all worth it in the end, doesn't it. Now, you might want a bridgeboard so you can use the EISA, a gfx-card, network card, sound card. And an accelerator, 2040 or 2060 should be fine.... uhm.... yeah, I'll stop dreaming now.... 🤣🤣🤣

I wonder if the name of the floppy activity signal in the A2K schematics might be a typo - in the A500 schematics I read the name as "MTR ON", which sounds quite reasonable. "MTR OD" doesn't make much sense to me.

I would love to build one. However, I can not do SMD, and need to buy one half made. But yeah. Would go nice in my collection, as I have build my own C64 in ATX form factor.

This is really nice! I'd like to do this myself. It was really exciting to see the Zorro slots working at first try, all 5 of them! I didn't comment anything on the first part, I know... I've asked for this but an A3000 remake in ATX form factor, I'd like that better than the A2000, as much as I do love the A2000... but for AGA, I already have my A1200 towerized with a Mediator PCI busboard, which is awesome in itself, it's running a Blizzard 1240 accelerator at 40 Mhz. As for the accelerator you wanna make, if I were you, I'd stick with an 030 accelerator, especially when it comes to an A2000. Since the architecture of the A2000 is still 16 bit anyway, I'd guess you'be mostly use if for stuff that works well with an 030? for compatibility reasons, and you can put an 030 at pretty nice speeds anyway. For a faster CPU I'd build an A4000 clone of sorts... but that's just my two cents! Anyway, really nice to see this done, and I really love the choise of case, I'm literally jealous :)

You used the rev c jed file to program the bluster but later show it's a rev b board. Presumably the pinout between the CPLD and the actual pins didn't change between the revs

Maybe a zz9000 for it one Day ?

Great video! I noticed you never mentioned reflashing the Rev B firmware onto the CPLD once you realised you had a Rev B Bluster instead of Rev C. Did you do that, or didnt need to?

Looks really good :) ... do you plan to get/make a case for the keyboard?

Love this Video! I would love to do the same but would love a Coloured PCB like Red or Blue tbh. Also, what do you do if you don't have a spare Amiga 500 keyboard? Can you use a PS/2 Keyboard? -Mark.

Nice A2000. The keyboard without a case looks like a slim Mac keyboard. Why not leave it as is and just make a base and cover for the LEDs?

But why even have the lights on the keyboard? I would say that the reset keys are more important.

I am about to start building one of these machines. How did you solve making the A500 keyboard into a nice external keyboard? I would like to somehow make it into a rather slim keyboard case, and it would be really useful with your feedback. Thank you.

What about an N2630? Great build you have done there.

where did you find the STL for the IO Shield?

Good build job but really don't understand in case choice, it's an amiga and does not belong in that type of case, I would of opted for a case with external bays for floppy drives + gotek + zip drives and cd drive!

👍

Thats great and all but.... Can it play Crysis???

I never liked to listen to Amiga audio in headphones since you usually only get one channel with drums in one ear (and so on), unless you go mono of course 🙂.

That looks amazing! I was wondering what you would do for a floppy drive with that case, until you said "Gotek." I absolutely love the way you integrated that in there. To your question of what we would have done differently, Similar to a comment I made on your last video, the only thing I would have done is to use a USB keyboard, the same way GadgetUK164 did, here (link with a timestamp added) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-X7wNfDoZChI.html That will be the solution I'm planning to use for my actual Amiga 2000, which is missing its keyboard, and a correct Amiga keyboard is absolutely cost-prohibitive. But I do love this entire project, here!

All that work for such an awful case. That is way too bulky and doesn't really match imo. Should have 3D printed a case for this, or went for a beige tower or something similar.

So basically you bought the wrong PC Case, the DeepCool E-SHIELD (€62 on Blamazon "remove Bl") has all you want, and a 5.25" front bay, were you can buy a cheap 3.5" to 5.25" Front Bay Adapter for, and you can always put 3 RGB fans in them, with controller. The Amiga 2000 EATX MB is fantastic, your soldering and more is good very good.