 My very first Commodore Amiga. Hey ho, ho, that's bad. That's garbage. Ah, good grief, this is crusty. Now, nice and clean, this was all scrubbed. So I'm going to try and go through that pile of floppy disks to see if I can find a workbench disk. Okay, here we are. It is up and running. I have a big tangle of cables as this is going off to a video capture device. It doesn't seem to like the Amiga output very much as it just produces a black screen. But if anything shows up, I'll composite that on to get a better look. I went through the floppy disks. There's a lot of really filthy disks including copy of workbench. Four different copies of Xcopy. A couple of rather disturbing disks with scribbled on labels, so let me just try sticking a workbench disk in and see what happens. It doesn't really go in very well, I have to say. Bad noise, that's not registering. So, what's making the scraping noise? Is it the disk rotating? I mean, it looks clean enough. Ooh, that side doesn't look clean. It's got corrosion on it. Well, one pristine workbench disk in the bin. What about this one? That's dirty. That's dirty and bent. Can you see here? What's this side got? Well, okay, workbench gains collection. This is a magazine disk. When the days when you've got floppy disks given away in the front of magazines. This looks better to be honest. Is that going to pick anything up? That's going to try power cycling the machine. That will be a no. It's not actually even registering as a disk present. The Amiga's supposed to have automatic disk detection. I don't know if you can hear, I'll hold the microphone close. That noise, do that again with the microphone in place, that noise is it checking for the presence of a disk. And it drives you insane after a while. The case could be more firmly closed. You think the drive is faulty? Okay, that's another one. This may just be a printer driver, but it is labeled workbench 2.0. So let's take a look at the disk. That's not in great shape. That's quite dirty. Ew. Of course it's the inside that matters. It's not brilliant. Right, the disk is not actually going into place properly. Let's try that again with this. Yeah, I'm going to have to take this apart and fiddle with the floppy drive. Which is annoying. Okay, here we have it open and running with the lid removed. This gives me rather better access to the floppy drive, which is somewhat buried inside the machine. So that's not actually going in. Yeah, that is what I would call broken. So I was able to actually just pop the lid on the drive without having to unscrew it all, which reveals some rather interesting things, such as when you insert the disk, it gets about as far as here. It's supposed to then click into place and drop down. You notice that this moves. That's not supposed to do that. I think it's rather bent. Oh, that's better. Have I managed to cope this back into position? Well, the only way to find out is to plug her in and try. There was a plastic thing here that just popped back into place. So possibly that was it. Right, now it's popped back out again. Yeah, this is not a happy floppy drive. Okay, let's see what happens when we power on. Well, that's making better noises, but it's not booting. This, you can see the head moving. That's the disk auto detection. Right, it's spinning but isn't booting. Let's try one of the other disks. This is the one labeled workbench. Hey, it's actually working. We do have a AmigaDOS screen. I had unplugged the mouse. Let's plug that back in again. There's no keyboard. This is the original Commodore mouse. And I will actually post a picture up here of the mouse ball as I was cleaning it. That is why you need to clean your mouse balls. Well, there's some nasty burn in on my little monitor. I don't think that's the Amiga's fault. Workbench 2.0 has a checksum error on disk block 1738. So either that's a bad disk or a bad drive and it's wedged. Okay, let's try the games. I need to power cycle. This is clearly not a bootable disk or it's just too badly damaged for the computer to read or the floppy disk drive is damaged. These disks are revolting. Yeah, that's also not bootable. Okay, I did not find a Workbench disk in there. I think I'm going to go away and go and try and make one. So here is a copy of Workbench 2.05, which should work with Kickstart 2.0. I made this using Flux Engine. I downloaded a CryoFlux stream from... That was quick. From archive.org, decoded it to an ADF with Flux Engine and then wrote the ADF back to a floppy disk using Flux Engine. And... Well, I've got something. If DIR doesn't work, I really don't know where to go. Here in the selection of disks, I found a copy of Treasure Island Dizzy that looks reasonably clean. So this should be a booted game. So let's see what it does. Looks like it's booting. I'm not particularly convinced by the noises the floppy disk is making. Also the way it's just hung. So while I was rummaging through disks, this happened. So clearly it was just thinking, probably decompressing something. Does it work? Probably want a joystick, of which I don't have. So here we have Lotus Turbo Challenge 2, CBM Amiga, Piracy's Theft Gremlin. This seems to be reasonably happy so far. I think on the whole this machine does work fine. I need to find a workbench for it. I probably also need to upgrade Kickstart if I'm going to use a hard drive. The version of Kickstart in this apparently doesn't work properly with small hard drives. Sorry, with large hard drives. Which means any hard drive you're going to get these days. So I'm probably going to need to upgrade it to 3.x, which is the latest version, which you have to actually pay money for. That'll give me lots of bug fixes and some new features. And then I'm going to have to find a copy workbench and install that and then figure out how it all works etc etc. One of the reasons for getting this was to learn more about Amiga's and AmigaDOS, which I don't know much about. I can't think of anything to say while this loads. It's only 800k. That's a bad noise. Right, bad disk. Yeah, most of these disks are going to be pretty dreadful. This one doesn't even have a disk shutter. I think it was... It might have been made like that. Or somebody just pulled it off. But I think I'm going to call this done. I'll just... This is the best I have at actual workbench. Just wait for the... So something is not right about it. I can at least type, which lets me know the keyboard works. However, there don't appear to be any commands available. You notice the caps lock key has an LED in it, which is nice. These two interesting two blank keys, this one doesn't seem to do anything. This one produces a character that's too small to read in this tiny screen. Anyway, we see, DIR does nothing. I don't actually know any... Well, that does something. I believe that's told me what directory I'm currently in. The... Yeah. The AmigaDOS directory structure isn't the same as Unix. I'm going to have to go and read up on that. Anyway, I am going to call this done. There's some work to do. I need a kickstart ROM, workbench floppies, a Amiga to VGA video adapter so that I can use the proper monitor that's up here rather than this. This is doing a decent enough job, but it's just not big enough to read. The mouse works, which is nice. This is the original Commodore mouse. I haven't tried the other one yet. And above all else, figure out how this is actually supposed to work. Look what just showed up. This is a package of goodies for my new Amiga 600. So what we've got here is a kickstart 3.1 ROM, a copy of the operating system itself, workbench on floppy disk, plus a pre-formatted compact flash card, should be 4GB, an instruction manual, a... Hopefully this is... Yup, this is an IDE to compact flash adapter. So these are going to work as the hard drive. This will replace the old broken hard drive with something that is quieter, more reliable, less power hungry, etc. I've actually got the hard drive here. This is the one that was originally in the machine. A nice old Connor... I think it was... 60 megabytes. Mega, not giga. Sadly, it's completely defunct. And very importantly, we've got this, which if I can get it open, is a Amiga 2 VGA adapter. It doesn't do scan doubling, so it'll only work on the VGA frequency and screen modes, but hopefully it should give me a rather better workbench experience. You notice here the... This has been sliced away, because the Amiga video socket is a really weird size and you can't get them anymore. They're not in production. So to make these, they have to buy a larger connector and saw off the remaining bits. So, yes. And I got all these from amigastore.eu Nice and quickly. So, I'm going to install it. So first, we want to look at the instructions. Yes, those are instructions. Remove the ROM chip. Plug the new ROM chip in. Put the notch in the obvious place. Yeah, those are instructions. Okay, let's get the Amiga out and have a go. So before doing anything, I'm actually going to verify that it does still work, which it does. I'm using the little composite monitor again, that's what I've got. And we can see here, it says this is 2.0 ROM version 37.300 in rather small writing. Actually, I thought this was 2.1. I thought I had Amiga workbench 2.1 on floppy somewhere. But anyway, now let's turn it all off and open it up. And what we've got here is a really simple job. This is the old IDE cable, so all we need to do is to plug this in. And then we plug the compact flash card into it. So, and it would be nice to have somewhere to screw it down. It should screw onto this bracket and the bracket is not actually held in by anything. It just sits in slots on the motherboard. And then this top piece here and here are pressed against the top of the case, which both helps keep the case rigid and holds this in position. So, what have we got screw-wise? We've got metal on the bottom, which isn't a good start. I think screws are probably out of the question. I think I'm going to need to use a sticky pad, so I think I've got some somewhere. Let me go look. Here we are. These are like decades old. I'm not really a fan of these because they're quite hard to get off once you put them on. So, but they will do nicely for this job. So what we're going to do, if I can figure out how to get them off, is stick a couple of these on here and here. Pretty crudely. And then we push it down onto the bracket. I wasn't really worried I wanted to put it, to be honest, but it's stuck now. This is a little bit cramped. I'm going to come off again. No. So that is fairly solid. Right. The next thing is to replace the ROM chip. And the ROM has a huge serial number on top, which I'm going to have to pixelate out laboriously in the video. This is all, Workbench is all still commercial software, which is kind of weird for retro computing. But it's never been open source and you do actually have to get the ROM component and these cost money to make. So I will prevent people from stealing serial number. I need a good way to get this out. You can do this with a screwdriver if you're very careful. This one is stiff, really stiff. But you've got to be very careful what you're levering against. So I'm trying to go for the... That's not working. I'm trying to go for the chip socket itself and not end up levering against, for example, this irreplaceable chip here, which I do not want to damage. Just need a little bit of clearance. Get some leverage. I don't have a chip remover tool. I should probably get one. Fantastic. Let's find a smaller screwdriver. The pins will have welded slightly to the socket because it's been years since this thing has been removed. So once it moves a little, it will start moving more, which it's done. It's all unstuck now. Of course, if I lever up on one side, it levers down on the other. Anyway, it's out on that side. So here we go. Just being very gentle. Right. That is out. How does it look? The chip legs are a little bit discoloured. I'm going to give it a squirt of contact cleaner just to loosen things up a bit. So I will go and grab that. Yeah, after some time spent looking in my liquid drawer for the contact cleaner, I forgot that I had not actually put it away since the last Amiga video. So anyway, let's stick it on. Okay, that's all it needs. So we now take the Neurom and the legs need a little bit of bending inwards to make them fit because they always ship a little bit splayed for no readily apparent reason. Make sure the notch lines up with the notch on the socket and push. Done. Okay, so I'll put the 2.05, 37.300. I don't think this was the... Was that what the ROM was reporting when I booted it? So put this away and now we put the keyboard back on. And power. So signal is on. It should be booting from the floppy drive rather than going into the floppy boot process. So this should actually be doing a full hard drive boot. It hasn't done anything. Now it's possible it's actually gone into a screen mode but this thing doesn't support. So I'm going to just unplug this and plug it back in again. Yeah, I haven't seen the thing light up so I suspect it's gone into an invalid screen mode. I would have thought to be honest that it would have started up in the same TV compatible screen mode that you would... that the old Amigos would have but maybe that's not the case. So let's just plug in the video connector These... Those pins are in a terrible state so let's just put some of this in. I mean, there's nothing wrong with the contacts on this but they should clean up the video pins a little. And find where I put the VGA cable which is here for my workbench monitor. Plug that in. Okay, and power turn on. The monitor did just flash up. I don't think anything's happening. Yeah, we've got no signal there either. Right. That's not brilliant to be honest. Let's have a quick flip through the manual again. I'm relatively certain as I put the ROM in the right place I'll check that in a moment. So these pictures do not actually match here. Oh right, this is just how to remove ROMs. These are pictures from an A4000. This is from an A600. There's nothing useful there. Okay. Yes, I put the ROM in the wrong place. That was stupid. It's quite warm. I hope I haven't broken it. So the problem is that when the... If it's plugged in the wrong place then the 5 volt power connector is actually attached to a data pin. So it ends up short-circuiting through the ROM. Well, maybe I'm going to have to get a new one. That was incredibly stupid. What have we got now? Got a bit of a signal. Right, this monitor is complaining this is the wrong screen mode. So some software has running because it's actually trying to enable the video. Still nothing here. So there's a good possibility I have in fact just fried the ROM which is honestly pretty goddamn stupid. So... It's definitely cooling down. It's in the right place now. However, there's also a possibility that I've fried something else. So let us remove it. So much easier to get out now that I've applied the contact cleaner. And then reinsert our old AmigaOS 2.0 ROM here making sure that the hole's on the left empty and now apply power and see what happens. Good. That is a relief. Since this is now working it means that the Amiga itself is fine but the problem is mostly it's going to be probably this is dead. Well... Yeah, it was my own fault. I'm not going to dwell on it. I did actually notice that the ROM doesn't occupy all the holes in the socket. I just completely forgot about it when plugging the thing in. Yep, I think it's dead. I will try dumping the ROM using my ROM dumper to the actual PC and just see what comes out. I should be able to at least check some of it to make sure that it contains what it thinks it does. Given that I actually have a license hence all the pixelation I may be able to get a cheap replacement. Fabulous. Anyway, so we're going to plug this in and I'm going to put this back in just to see what happens. Now, that copy of workbench probably isn't going to work with AmigaOS 2 but I'll be interested to see what happens. Right, not a DOS disk in device GDH0. It's seen the PCMCA it's seen the compact flash card but it doesn't recognise what's on it presumably because it's just not going to do anything at all now. Okay, well looks like I've got some work to do I suppose I shall report back.