The memories of moving from New Zealand to Australia and leaving my Amiga 1200 With mum only to find she threw it away cause she thought it was an 'old computer' I didn't need anymore... I think I am still crying 24 years later.
I know people. Ruthless people. Geeks who are vets at this sort of thing. Who have seen it all. Who have pirated disks despite the anti-copy warning. Who are part of a global geek club. Who have skills, special skills. Just saying. If you need to sort out your mother, I can get you in touch.
I am SO Looking forward to more Amiga content in the future, my mom learned a lot about computers from the Amiga and it was the first computer i had the fortune to use! You;re right, that black case looks beautiful! Thank YOU for being so awesome!
Hi Veronica - Im Andy, an ami/linux geek from New Zealand - Just wanted to let you know that if your floppy drive fails - you cannot replace it with a standard PC floppy. The circuit boards need a soldered jumper changed from df1 to df0 (which is what the A500 expects) and a wire from an IC to pin 33 on the floppy connector. There are plenty of tutorials on the net, but the mod required is generally different based on floppy manufacturer. But its fun to do it and replacement Amiga drives can be expensive. I just saw this video is a year old. But I love your vid's, educational and entertaining. I hope you are enjoying the break from work and cobol.
That's quite a strange feeling to watch someone on YT having the same enthusiasm I had when I unboxed my first Amiga 500 when I was a teenager 35 years ago.
We had brought our Amiga 500 to the childrens ward in the hospital for my brother when he had to lay in there for several weeks with a broken leg. A lot of good memories for a lot of kids on that ward. When did we forget to expect easy access, local multiplayer games on every computer?
You really brought back some beautiful memories with my favourite computer of all times. The dark case looks really awesome and cool 😍 Thank you for the wonderful video, Veronica ❤
"I eventually decided to ditch the RF shielding. " Agrrrr ! Having worked as a fabrication tech for project engineers in Aerospace, I can tell you that you may be running up against the law of unintended consequences. The components of the motherboard act like a tuned circuit for RF energy, hence the shield.
The RF shield was required by FCC regs to prevent home computers from interfering with television sets and (mostly) AM radio receivers. Is it a good idea to keep it? Probably. Is it going to matter if it gets tossed? Probably not. ;)
Could just line the inside of the case with copper tape maybe? I don't know anything about Amigas, but that's how you minimize 60 cycle hum with single coil guitar pickups.
Nice! I remember having the A500 and badly wanting an A3000UX. The closest I got was to write a terminal emulator for the A500 and connect a serial cable to a FreeBSD machine I had around :) No X window though, just text. Good times!!! Thank you for the trip down memory lane. Love your content.
I find it really amazing that in 2022 people still deal with the AMIGA. - Mine, along with the games and accessories, has been in the basement for many years. And if I get nostalgic, I just start my AMIGA emulator. - But that's it!
Hello, I recommend getting an ACA500Plus from Individual Computers. It will do everything you could want without any hardware hacks (i.e rom switching, PAL/NTSC switching, 68000 acceleration, more ram, 1 mb chip ram, df0: select, and WHDLoad ability). With df0 select, you can get a Gotek as an external drive and boot from it. That way you can keep your original floppy disk drive.
Another vote for the ACA500+. Jens makes really good products. I also have the ACE2b 2mb chip upgrade in my Rev 5 board which works great with the ACA500+
Thanks for another great video Veronica. Yeah, this happens often when buying Amiga. My A1200 also has been "dremel'ed" for GoTek but also for slim CD rom on the back. But it was poor job, whoever did this, couldn't cut a strait line. So I went for a black case too for A1200. It looks awesome. And yes, now I am thinking...hmm, the keyboard...should be different maybe... It's never ending thing...
Some quality of life Gotek improvements: When you want to mount the Gotek internally, you can save yourself some money and 3D print some brackets. I've used the ones that move the drive so the USB port is more central in the floppy hole. There's also a nice display mod that replaces the segmented display with an OLED and moves the display to the top of the case, so you don't have to crane your neck around to the side to see what drive image you've selected.
Well darn!!!!!! Wish I would have know about this! Just bought a used replacement off ebay. Anyway for those interested this is about $192 shipped to the US for the case and kit.
I'm Antonio from Italy, i have one Amiga 500 classic and 350 floppy disk with many games. The color black is smart because year after year the color remain black. The case classic white after 30 years (1988-2022) is yellow-brown...
I love the new case. Makes me lust after an Amiga even more. Can't wait to see the video about writing disks with Linux, too. Great video Veronica, thank you very much!
Dear Veronica, as a techie with an 80's/90's childhood, I have grown to appreciate your channel. Thank you for doing what you do, this is so much fun to watch and really educational. Some day, I want to pick up my own Amiga 500 and do what you do, for old times sake. The 500 was such an amazing machine for its day, and, in retrospect, I am so sad my 14 year old self traded my own for a 385 PC back in the day. Are you going to show more of the machine off in another video?
i bought the LE Scourge of the Underkind gray case bundle a few weeks back. I wanted to get new key caps but they didn't have any US keys available. I got really lucky today and won a set on eBay. I did end up doing a mod to use an old 4/3 flat panel with mine A500. I have an Amiga monitor but going to use it with my Amiga 2000 with Video Toaster once I get it all finished.
Wow! I had this computer in the 90's and it always seemed huge to me. Although I never learned to use it as it would have deserved. I look forward to the chapters you will show using such equipment and to learn from your "discoveries". Greetings and congratulations for the excellent quality of your videos.
Good ol' B52 Rock Lobster :-D Gonna upgrade my 500 too, one of these days. I remember a computer from the 80's called Enterprise. It was black with green, black, blue and red keys. I thought it looked pretty cool :-)
the TF536 is a nice Accelerator card. though, just remember that if you use the relocator adapter you will need aware of the rotation of the 2.5" IDE connector. at standard using those 2.5" IDE to CF adapters that 99% uses the drive would point upwards. however that would mostly end in that the card interfere with stuff on the main board/keyboard so you would need to use the relocator board. in combination with the relocater-board the TF536 is turned 90* with the IDE then pointing towards the right side of the case. for some that is great as they can then cut a hole and have easy acces to the CF card... but for us that say bought the Crystal Edition Case or in general don't like to do "plastic surgery" going ham on it with a dremel is not an option so we have to ether get a ribbon cable and an CF adapter with male IDE connector or one of those "flipped" adapters.
This would be a bit of work, but I wonder if it's possible to make a mould of the drive portion of the new case, then align that to the old case and fill it out with some colour matching material. Perhaps the shapes are not quite identical and you'd get bleed. Making moulds requires a lot of care and equipment too. Instead, I've repaired some cases (just small cracks/chips) with Tamiya's Epoxy Putty which comes in tan colours. It's like the Games Workshop greenstuff/kneadatite. Useful for securing, repairing, spacing, sculpting all sorts of things.
A500+ mounted a NiCd battery that... well... you know. Love your voice, it's pleasant to watch your videos. I honestly don't like it black, but an Amiga looks good whatever you dress her. Cheers from Italy!
This is super cool! But i have so much trauma from floppies going bad in school. That dreaded "This disk is not formatted" message haunts me in my nightmares.
On an A500, a *much* better way of doing the gotek thing is to put it in an external drive enclosure and then plug a Drive 0/1 switcher board into the PIA socket. You can get these boards for around £10 in the UK, so probably about $15 in the US. Means you can get the full A500 experience while still having access to disk images on USB sticks and means you don't have to butcher the case. Not quite as easy with later amigas of course.
Thanks for the amusing video, I just love hearing you talk 🥰 .. my first personal computer was a Commodore Vic-20 purchased on early 1982, I replaced it with a classic C-64 (not the slim one) on 1987. When the Amiga 500 arrived to my country, it was too expensive and so I went with a Mac 512ke instead ... but I always dreamed about having an amiga 500 someday. Well, about 15 years ago I purchased a 2nd hand Amiga 500 with original power supply, no cables, no mouse and a Commodore RGB Monitor, all for about US$ 80. Couldn't get the cables nor mouse, and thus I shelved this project for a while .. it is still on my attic, but thanks to your video I intend to give a try to get the parts from ebay and see if it still works ... looking forward to your video on making diskettes for it on my PC 😎 .. love your channel and have a nice Xmas.
Really nice case they got at a1200 dot net! I have the transparent one for my A1200. Amiga board and Floppy didn't fit 100%, I had to file a littlbe bit at the PCMCIA- and Floppy-slot of the case to make it work. You were lucky that you got the right floppy model for the eject button. I (and Jan Beta in his video) have a drive from Teac, with a completly different designed button!
Hey just wanted to say you got me hooked on Pop OS. I even bought a 128GB SSD upgrade for my craptastic old chromebook so I could install it on there. Works ok, little slow but this thing is ancient. Are/is your kids/kid big into computers as well? My kids love them but only for the youtube/gaming/social media (extremely limited and supervised) aspect. I've been trying like crazy to get my daughter into Linux and Ham radio and stuff but the interest doesn't outweigh the whole 8 year old attention span lol.
I'm glad you've gotten into Pop!_OS! It's a great distro and I very much appreciate what they're doing on it. We do a bunch of Python stuff- it's fun for them and they enjoy it, even if it's a bit of a slower pace. There are basic Python libraries which are easy enough to do on an older laptop but still has that "I did it!" feel to it when you finish a project. We got "Python for Kids" by No Starch Press and started with that- reminds me of the BASIC books I had growing up, but with a kid friendly attention span that seems to be working out.
I waiting 4 years for the black A500 case and the black Tankshell. Have it now 3 weeks and like it alot with my mint extern black CDTV diskdrive on it. Now i waiting for the black keycaps that makes my black A500 complete. Have also a rare Glow in the Dark GHOST A1200 case fron A1200NET and a Translucent A1200 case. Have a Rev6A motherboard in it with a ACE2 for 2MB CHIP RAM and a Indivision ECS V2 for VGA. Also have connect a ACA50Plus with a fast ACA1233n-55 turbo cart. Do only Demos and 64k Intros on it. Runs WB 3.1 with BetterWB 4.3 on a 4GB CF card.
Beautiful machine😍 What about putting the Gotek into an external case, configuring it as "DF1:". So you could have the convenience of a modern USB drive without touching your nice new black case. Greetings from Germany😊
That's what I'm imagining! I'd like to try my hand at printing an external enclosure for it, that way I can also use it with my Amiga 1200. And thanks for watching! :)
I still have my original 1200 Amiga (first computer I ever owned) in a tower and not in it's original keyboard case. It has loads of upgrades in and has set under my computer desk next to every computer I have ever owned. It will probably be buried alive with me when I die lol.
Amiga (and Amiga OS) has been a major source of inspiration for operating system gurus all around. Linux and Amiga is just a part of it.. BTW: As an art educator I need to point out: Is BLACK (OR WHITE) really a color? ;)
Hot damn! Great quality on that case, I absolutely love it. To think that even these pesky little standoff buggers could be so hard to get... They're very common on our side of the pond.
I think it's because it's metric? I could find plenty of standoffs and so forth, but nothing cleanly threaded inside the floppy. Nothing that wasn't just PC motherboard style (which didn't fit either, at least not the ones I had lying around).
I have one of these cases (1200, though) and it is absolutely amazing. Of course I immediately lost the VGA back plate when I set it aside pending the arrival of my indevision mkIII... so there's that. :) The brass inserts are so much better than the old stock wood screws into plastic.
Another great video! If I may ask, what do you use to edit these? Kdenlive, Olive, DaVinci Resolve, ...? Your title cards and transitions are really professional and consistent, and I wonder what your workflow is for accomplishing that. I'd love to see a video on how you make videos! P.S. I'm from the Twin Cities and smiled at the Menards reference. That, and Ax-Man, are the stores I miss the most since moving to Tampa Bay last year. I don't miss the lousy Smarch weather though!
No joke- I pulled an Ax-Man joke from that talking head because I was worried nobody would get it (and I even checked Ax-Man for the standoffs): "Ax-Man: your artistic grandpa's favorite store for over 40 years!" As for the editor, I'm using Kdenlive and I generally like it. I'm planning a "how I edit my videos" video, but I'm debating how I should do it (live stream vs something pre-recorded vs lots of little tip videos). It takes a bunch of work to edit the videos but I think it's going pretty well. Thanks for watching them! :)
I very much agree - don't "hack" the plastics. However, back in time, it was good practice to do it. And we should embrace this. So, better to use a case that was "hacked" back in the 80's or 90's, than replacing the case with some new plastics. The old plastic is more authentic, even though it has been hacked. I would never cut the plastic of an original Amiga today, imo that's blasphemy. So, I understand you replaced the plastic, and I might have done the same, as it has obviously been modified recently. My #1 would be to restore the plastic, but that would be very hard. But then again, that's just my opinion 🙂
I’ve no idea what to do with an a500. But i was born in 81, and my parents didn’t believe in home computers at all. All my schoolmates had something technology wise at home to type away on. I had encyclopedia brittanicas. They were terrible. The data was badly organized, and excessively/ needlessly long winded. (Think Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess Of Mars levels of long winded) So yeah i got a c64 maxi after discovering and getting the mini on a whim at a local gamestop and have had a blast with both. Looking forward to getting an a500 mini and throwing workbench at it (same as retrorecepies did) and discovering what it was that i missed.
Looks like you have one of the later boards as there is space for more ram on the board. I have an even later board on my regular Amiga 500 it's an Amiga 500+ board that say Amiga 500+ on it
You 3d printed those wow, I recently installed a emulator for the 500. I owned a Atari ST FM around about that time Amiga had the 500. But I wanted to know more about the Amiga.
FYI, you can dye keycaps using the same dye you use for clothing, but then you're modifying vintage hardware... But it's an option, since it's not in the original case, anyhow.
Hi Veronica, Thank you so much for such an amazing review! We'll noted the stand-off issue and we'll see to provide them on our site. What keycaps color are you looking at should you replace yours? Many thanks again, The Team.
Hi there! Thanks for watching the video, and thanks for all you do for Amiga- the new case is great! Right now this minute, I'm leaning toward red keycaps. I think it'll go great with the red Amiga logo on the badge. Of course, mixing and matching red/white/green would be really pretty too along with the black case. When they become available, I was thinking of buying a couple of different colors (probably red/green) and seeing what I like most. :)
There seems to be an obsession in the amiga/atari st/CBM community of fitting goteks, accelerators and various "things" but in my experience they just end up playing Populous or GODS. I get it, I do but it's like a boys club who modify their cars just to go around a parking lot. I use a pcmia hard disk but the amiga loads off FDD fairly smooth. I dunno I just think stuff is neat how it is. This video was funsies.
loved your video, it brought me back to younger years! I love the fact that you can get new parts for the Amiga, it was a lot harder 10 years ago :( I guess it's time for me to dust off my A500+ It's been a while since I played around with it ;) Also, why ruin an Amiga by replacing the floppy with a gotek?! The sound of the floppy is like music to my ears!! I would rather use the gotek as an external drive :)
Thank you! I have a short video planned about refurbing an Amiga trackball I got at Free Geek. Was hoping to go into how they work- I think it's pretty neat!
I do miss my Amiga 500 from high school. I didn't have enough money to get those fancy hard drives, but could justify an 8MB Supra 500RX expansion, 2 additional floppy drives, Fat Agnus upgrade, and a ROM switcher. RAMdisk the boot drive and you are off to the races! That black case does look pretty snazzy. Can't wait to see it in action! Do they have a mod for a matching 1084S?
I don't see one for monitors, but that would be fancy! I tend to use an LCD with my RetroTink for Amiga fun, but I've got my eye out for a Trinitron that could be useful across devices.
