Great video/intro Adrian! It was great to meet you! I'm glad the A1000 is in much better hands and will be taken care of!!! ;-) I agree with the other post; style / design wise, the A1000 is my favorite Amiga. But I think I probably would have done more damage trying to keep it going. Also, I grew up with an A500 and A1200, both of which I have again. So I don't have an attachment to the A1000. I will definitely be following this repair!! :-) And good call on stopping at Tillamook for ice cream on the way back up. All that C64 stuff and the tape drive that someone gave me came from a barn in Grand Ronde, OR. No idea how long they were sitting in that barn. ;-)
Even though the Amiga 1000 is a nice looking system and the original Amiga, I probably would have gone the same route as you and kept the 500 and 1200. If you actually want to use your Amiga, the 1200 is the way to go with it's AGP graphics and IDE support, all in an easier to display package. Curating your collection helps you use and enjoy what you have... 🙂
I owned an A500 and an A600 back in the day (still have the A600), i liked the 600 so much because it was just so much more compact than the A500 which took up my entire desk at the time. The A1000 looks like it might have been even bigger, although it does have the internal power supply at least.
The 1000 is rather compact as far as Amigas go. It's not that much bigger than the 1084 monitor it would sit under... compare this to the Amiga 2000 which is honestly a monster machine. Ugly too!
I've been to the Tillamook factory half a dozen times (most recently a couple months ago), but they've never been running the cheese lines when I've been there. Great footage (and great ice cream)!
This was the OG Social Media of the 70's/80's. These were not your IBM white shirt and tie engineers, these were your counter culture, tie-dyed t-shirt, bearded, hippy dippy weatherman type people who loved technology and sharing knowledge. The OG hackers. And it was amazing to think you were a part of changing the world.
This video sure brings back memories. I did a lot of reports in college on an IBM and a classmate had one of the Amigas. They were so straight forward to use. I also used one of the first editions of Calc 123. It was a very basic spreadsheet but great for making tables for various reports. Thanks for showing Lincoln City. I live in Newport, OR which is about 25 miles south. Back in the 60s and early 70s you could actually walk on the manufacturing floor of the Tillamook Cheese factory. I remember looking over the side if the large bins where they were cutting the young cheese.
There's a really cool disk drive mod you can do. You can put the floppy drive internal, but set it to be drive 2 (via solder jumper or external switch), and the set the external gotek to be drive 1 for booting. (Again, you can set up a switch to choose the orientation you want, so you can switch between them easily.). There's videos out there that cover the mod.
Yeah, that would be the most useful. That said, i did that same mod on my Atari ST and it never did work right for me, but my ST always had some odd issues... in the end, after repeatedly been told by Adrians that I should stop wasting my time, I just installed the Gotek inside (with a 3d printed mount). Truth me told, having the original drives in them is good for looks, but in the long run, they'll serve no other purpose unless we can get someone to do a Kickstarter for new floppy disks. 🙂
The Amiga 1000 was definately one of the best micro's at that time. I had the A1000 with original Commodore 256kb expansion, and as i recall also real time clock in the same module. Later I got the Sidecar, which could run as a PC @ 4.77 Mhz. The biggest advantage of the sidecar was that it offered harddisk availability to the Amiga, which just by itself was quite expensive at lease in my country. I never got that far to have accelerator boards in it, and it was later stored and lost in my parents basement due to a flooding. I wish I had that A1000 today :) Looking forward to see more videos of the Amiga :)
Amiga 1000, my favorite computer of all time. Can't wait to watch the restoration. Even though I had a 500, 2000, 3000 and 4000, the 1000 holds a special place for me.
Great stuff as always, Adrian. The Amiga 1000 had 256K on that daughter board exclusively for the Kickstart ROM, so it does not take away any use RAM for the Kickstart. When you boot you should have about 2 MB total - 512k CHIP RAM and 1.5 MB FAST RAM, with the Kickstart ROM happily residing in the dedicated RAM on that board. The Paula Chip might be flaky, as that controls the audio. It also handles some floppy access too. Send me a message on Twitter if you need any help or advice on this beautiful machine. @10marc1
I spent two years growing up in Ocean Lake, OR in the early 1960's - which became Lincon City with Delake and Taft later. I lived 2 blocks from the ocean cliffs.
I never had an Amiga but always heard of them growing up. As I got older and learned about them I always wondered how things would have been different if they were still around and competed with PC and Apple. Great video can't wait to see what you do with this. :)
1) You can soft kick into higher Kickstarts. I'm running 2.1 on my 1000. 2) It isn't just the signatures of the PEOPLE that worked on the Amiga 1000 -- there's a paw print there from Jay Miner's dog Mitchy! As legend has it, he helped design the Amiga. Jay would draw something and look at Mitchy and if he barked, Jay would change the design. If Mitchy wagged his tail, the design stood. :) 3) The parallel port is standard; it's the RS-232 serial port that's different and there is power on a pin so BE CAREFUL. 4) If you need an original internal floppy drive mech, let me know and I'll send you one.
Those C64 power supply bricks were a real bane! I remember the day my father and I drove to Commodore's Toronto offices to get my C64c repaired and a new power supply to go with it -- he wasn't very happy with the failure and resulting expense! Had another power supply fail a few months later too. My friends and I subscribed to a rumor that some of the original C64 black power bricks weren't potted in resin and thus simple to repair on failure. This was likely fueled by a text file each of us had showing a very simple schematic of a DIY C64 power supply. Our holy grail of C64 hardware, which we could never find, and I'm not sure if such a brick ever existed.
Holy moley thats alot of amazing stuff! Im totally jealous of all those c64 main boards and the data set. Im a nineties kid, so my first computer was in the pentium 2 era. I think the 80's computers are so much more magical and nostalgic
My very good friend works at the Tillamook Creamery. For my last birthday he brought me some 30 year aged white cheddar. It was amazing! The ice cream is made in Hillsboro BTW along with the yogurt. Also, if you put a loaf of cheddar unopened in your fridge for 8 months, It's now sharp Cheddar. I think 2 years is extra sharp. The white cheddar ages the best. it's made with calf rennet instead of vegetable rennet. I know, way to much cheese info!
9:00 Loading Kickstart does not eat any system RAM at all. The Amiga 1000 has 256k on the WCS which is the daughter board on the top of the machine. This RAM is for the Kickstart!
I was very fortunate to persuade my parents to buy me the A1000 with ram expansion for Christmas 1985/86. According to the rep on the phone, it was the very first sold in the UK. Sold it in 96 at a boot fair for £100 and regretted it ever since. It was such a grown-up looking computer, especially coming from a c64. Spent every waking moment programming and playing games such as Interceptor and Fairey Tale Adventure. Good times! Look forward to seeing yours up and running.
Ouch that hurts £100. You probably got more since it was 1996 than it would have been worth in the early 2000s even. People just didn't care about Amigas anymore at that point.
@@adriansdigitalbasement By 1996 it all seemed over for the Amiga. I hadn't used it since around 1989 and to be honest, I thought I was holding onto an antique that nobody really wanted. I did not really appreciate what I had. If I had known there were people still out there keeping the Amiga flame alive, I would have dearly held onto it. £100 was nothing, even back then (included 100's of disks) but I was funding a round the world trip at the time. I do think of it every now and then and it makes me sad, especially as my parents were not rich and it cost a small fortune.
Interesting fact - the daughterboard on the A1000 was basically a lot of the logic that went into the later GARY chip (Gate Array) - and because it's mostly simple 74LS logic & PALs and the PAL equations are documented, it means the GARY chip is able to be reverse engineered - there's a community of people loosely trying to reverse engineer the Amiga chipsets for projects like the A500++ boards (reproduction A500+ motherboards), there's even an Agnus 8375 reproduction in the works!
Thumbs up. I remember that in high school only one guy had an Amiga 1000 in my class. All others had Atari ST (much cheaper). So he was left for dead when it came for getting his hands on "decentralized backup copies".
Just noticed Bryce Nesbitt's name on the RAM expansion. He eventually joined Commodore to work on the Amiga's Operating System. I remembered his name from the developer docs :)
Wanted an A1000 for years, never manage to find a good one, with keyboard, reasonably local for a good price. There's one in the same town currently for £795 which is crazy.
Thanks for a very fun channel Adrian! You made me get my old Amiga 1200 out, unfortunately it's not booting after being in a box for several years (?). I'm not sure i can fix it but I suspect the roms might be bad, everything looks physically OK, voltages seems OK too but that's as far i can go with the tools and knowledge I have but you made me have the courage to try. I would love to see you do some more Amiga fixing.
You mention it's good that you have the extra 256k because of the kickstart, but as you can see with the total ram available the kickstart isn't loaded into normal ram. There's a dedicated 256k available for that.
So there is 256k of chip RAM on the motherboard, the another 256k inside the machine for Kickstart, and then the front 256k RAM expansion card and then the 1.5mb of RAM? Is that extra 256k on the that extra card inside mounted over the motherboard?
@@adriansdigitalbasement I think it's like this: In Amiga terminology, Chip RAM is RAM that is addressable by the Amiga's custom chips -- the Copper and Blitter, etc. This RAM can be used for programs and the OS, but it is the only RAM that can be used for display memory, coprocessor instructions, and perhaps audio samples that can be played using the DMA hardware. 'Fast RAM' is memory that the CPU can address for programs, Workbench, and data, but the custom chipset cannot utilize on its own. Having more Fast RAM means that more or all of the 'Chip RAM' can be dedicated to graphics and sound. The Write Once Memory is on the daughter board piggybacked upside-down on the main board, and is _only_ used for Kickstart. Basically, it's a soft ROM. If I understand correctly, your A1000 has 256K of Chip RAM on the main board, 256K of Chip RAM on the perpendicular front memory expansion bay, and 1.5M of Fast RAM on the Insider II. (I happen to have an A1000 with the same Insider II board as well.)
My first Amiga was the 1000 in 1986. I bought a lot of software from an Amiga dealer in the Detroit area called Microworld. Doubtful the same place as your ram card dealer.
On being able to boot into other ROMs using a floppy to upgrade, I used to use one for my A1200 which loaded Workbench 1.3 into RAM to allow for better(it didn't always work) compatibility with older programs. It was called ReKick.
I bought a bunch of cheese to bring home but I was very annoyed they were totally out of the curds! They did tell me that in Portland I can have them delivered to my house... so I'm going to have to do that. I freaking love fresh cheese curds.
Awesome. I always wanted an A1000 but was glad I at least had an A500. Good stuff you received, should make for some great videos, which I am looking forward to. LOL on the MT RAM. Hopefully it is better then the 8-bit era stuff.
Yeah I had a IIc when I was a kid (around 1982) and I had the later rounded corner datasette with mine. This must have been from the early 1981 release of the VIC-20.
Kick work is great. If you can upgrade to 4MB you can also look at "Twinkick" which allows you to toggle between Kickstart 1.3 and 3.1 Very cool! Worth noting that also some of the early PAL machines had the daughterboard too, I have one here that does.
Finally an Amiga episode! I never really got into the c64, my neighbours and friends all had A500's and not one person had original disks for games lol.
Regarding the floppy drive - you should be able to use the mechanism from an external drive internally. You could also use the floppy drive from any other Amiga - the disk interface never changed. There is also the possibility to modify a PC floppy drive to work, but it's a bit more complicated and depends on the drive itself - some dont work very well after modification. Basically the Amiga has a standard "Shugart" floppy drive interface, and the PC standard modified this slightly. If you have another source of standard Shugart double density floppy drives, they should work without issue in an Amiga
My first computer was an Amiga 500 I bought at the base PX when I was 19 y/o in the Army stationed in Upstate New York. I would love to get ahold of another one someday and relive it.
Amiga 500 prices aren't totally insane yet -- but it does seem like all Amigas have really gone up in value, I guess because they were just not that common.
Yep, the external drives are as per the internal ones, they just drop right in... :) As for the computer itself, I don't think I've seen the Amiga 1000 myself, so will be fun to see how it evolved from this to the later Amiga models, I have two A600s myself (though one is semi-dead as spare parts), but also used to own an A500, remembering having to use the Kickstart 1.3 ROM disk to "downgrade" it from the later 2.x one the computer had to run certain games which refused to work with the newer ROM... :)
I´m glad you finally bought a heat-resistant silicone-mat instead of a cutting mat, now you don´t have to worry about melting your mat while soldering! :-D I got mine the other day hehe!
Sounds like a lot of awesome videos coming up, great! I just bought a big lot of various hardware to play around with, everything from 386 to i7 stuff, mainly got it for the old stuff though. This channel is a bad influence. :)
Reminds that one of my colleagues has an A1000 somewhere in his basement that he actually want to give to me, but he can't find it. All he found so far was the keyboard. Have to remind him to search again...
I bet that milling through components like a transformer made of copper and iron would be much more of a hassle than to just slam the entire thing against something solid with brute force to knock it free.
Have my Commodore CDTV (and the 4000) in the basement. The CDTV is almost not used at all, it was several decades ago it was plugged in. One thing I tried on the CDTV was a CD+G music CD with graphics. Think it was a Fleetwood Mac CD.
Commodore also made their own 256K memory expansion card, and I think you could just buy the computer with it already installed. My dad's had it. According to the manual for Deluxe Paint, higher graphics modes (640x200x16colors as opposed to just the four Workbench uses, and 640x400 with ugly interlacing) only work if you have the extra memory. Also, I could be misremembering, but I think that "TVMOD" DIN connector is the same one used by the VIC-20 and 64. Pretty sure I used my TI-99/4A antenna box to connect it to my TV once, just to see if it would work, and it did.
Interesting about that pin-out. I need to look at the pin out. As for the RAM card, indeed seemed it was a popular 3rd party add-on -- probably at a nice cheaper price than the Commodore one.
Preferred the A1000, but bought an Atari 1040ST because I'm frugal. Was very happy with it. Three C64s for free, at the very least valuable for the custom ICs.
Found your channel the other day and have been binge watching your videos. They're great! I do have a question though have you ever worked on HP handheld mini computers, I have a HP 660LX that I mistakenly plug in a 19v power supply instead of the 12v one. With the correct power supply installed I can get a green light with the battery removed but only a flashing green with a solid yellowish light with the battery installed. Of course the unit doesn't boot up.
I remember when I brought my C64, I really wanted the amiga 1000, but I couldn't come up with the extra money. I was a young sailor at the time, $600 a month doesn't go that far
I recall another disk for the A1000 called "Kickbench". It was basically the same as your Kickwork. Might be the very same thing but I like the name Kickbench better. :)
Nope, it didn't come with the Boing demo. You can find that demo on the aminet archive online tho. I remember being blown away seeing an Amiga demo back in the day, just Workbench running, but I could hear this BOOM.. BOOM.. Then the guy grabbed the Workbench title bar, dragged the Workbench screen down, and the BOING demo was running on it's own screen behind behind Workbench... That's when I started to understand multitasking... ;-)
If you want to send that C64 brick my way, I've been looking for one to do a video on. Just don't send it through my window lol. Great score, I have an A1000 and you're right, that center cover is pretty much impossible to replace. Mine's gone and it has no keyboard, so for now it's just a parts machine.
I wonder if that starpoint software is the same starpoint software that made stardos for the Commodore 64. As I recall it was a hardware snapshot system like “isepic” and it made horrible coffee according to the advertisement 😀
