 my very first Commodore Amiga, a Kickstart 3.1 ROM. Yes, I put the ROM in the wrong place, which is honestly pretty goddamn stupid. Looks like I've got some work to do. Alright, it is now... couple of weeks later, a pile of new hardware arrived, including a new E-Prom, onto which I have written a copy of Kickstart 3.1. This should replace the one that I damaged, which is here. I suspect this might be irreparable, but we'll see. I'll have to wait for an E-Prom eraser to show up before I'll know for sure. But just to prove that the computer still works, here it is running Kickstart 2. I did try installing to onto the hard drive, which kind of worked. It's not quite right, but AmigaDOS has started, it just can't find any of the commands. So let's turn the thing off and replace the ROM. Luckily, I can get at by doing this. I don't have to unplug everything anymore. And this time, let's put it in the right place. You notice on the left here, that is not populated. So I need a ROM remover, aka a small screwdriver. Right. So let us remove the Kickstart 2 ROM, like so, and insert the Kickstart 3 ROM to get the legs straight. Systems that load their standard operating system on ROM are an irritating mix of awesome and maddening. That's not actually yeah. This is a salvage ROM. They don't make these anymore. So this has been pulled out of another computer and then erased by the manufacturer, by the distributor and programmed by me. But I discovered that some of the pins were a bit bent. Okay, come on. Get in there. Needs a bit more on one end. It's really not happy. Well, that pin bent for a start. So let's straighten that. Okay. That is now in place. The notch is on the left and those two pins are unpopulated. So moment of truth time. Let's turn it on and see what happens. I was expecting more. Oh, good grief. It works. We have a working Amiga. Okay, so now I need to get out my install this. Start with this one. Oh, yeah, we've also forgot to plug in the mouse. So let's just go and grab that. Right, it is still complaining about not enough memory. Luckily, I have a two megabyte PCMCA card. This shows up as a fast RAM. So if I plug that in the right way around. There we go. This should now appear as a three megabyte machine with one megabyte of chip RAM and two megabytes of fast RAM. So we should be booting from the install disk eventually. Eventually software failure. Press left mouse button to continue. Now I'm hoping that this is a problem with the hard drive, which is configured for Amiga DOS 2. So see if I can actually make it boot properly. Okay, so I was nearly there. You have to press both mouse buttons to force it to boot from floppy. So, right, oh, this is nice. I haven't seen this before. Boot options, display options, expansion board diagnostic. Okay, I was hoping I'd be able to get it to switch to a VGA text mode, but no. Boot options, select boot device DF0. So enable DF0, use, boot, hmm. Don't think I'm doing that right. Okay, I'm a little bit perturbed. I think we're going to have to unplug the hard drive. Can I do that without? Yes, we can. I don't want to have to unplug the keyboard, you see. So I can reach in here and just come on. Move the compact flash card. See, if the worst comes to the worst, I can stick this in the real PC and wipe it. But now I just want to see whether it's actually going to boot the install disk. Well, here is the 3.14 kickstart boot screen. I wonder if this thing's not working. Let's try that again. I gather the long pause on boot. Ah, it's because it's looking at the hard drive. Right, I think the problem is this. Oh, install 3.14 has a read error on disk block 144.7. That's not good. Fabulous. Well, this means that this is a high-density disk, which they've put a double-density disk format on, which is never a good idea. The case is a bit bent, so that does seem to be doing better. If you just keep hitting the retry button, maybe something will happen. It does actually seem to be starting up workbench. So what have we got here in the install disk? Nasty noises. I was hoping to see some kind of preferences here, but there isn't one. OK, I'm going to try putting the hard drive back in. Error validating work, not enough memory available. Oh, I know what that's doing. That's trying to do a file system check of one of the hard drive partitions, but there's not enough RAM to be able to actually do that. OK, disk errors. So I cheated, and I use an emulator to install workbench onto this. So we now stick it back in the machine, which is annoying. And let's give that a try. Yeah, I think the floppy drive is not behaving well. So notice in the drive, power on, and there's a long pause. OK, not enough memory. That's normal. There's two partitions in that disk, system and work, and there's something wrong with work. I've been unable to reformat it. There you go. It has booted. Nice and quick, actually. Let's just move the trashcan out of the way. OK, utilities. That's not the one I was looking for. System. Oh, no, I want prefs, of course. Don't have a lot of memory available, but it does seem to be working. OK, this pointer is really slow. So let's see if we can fix that. Interesting. So I think this is just editing the mouse pointer rather than lepting me change the speed. So screen mode, high res, low res, super high res. This tester is nicer than in the old version. No, high res is the only one. I'm still hoping to try and find a VGA screen mode, but I think that's going to be more work. Input. Here we go. Mouth speed, two, one, three. Oh, is that the fastest it will go? Wow, that's really slow. And the keyboard type is British. The double quotes there and an app sign there. The two blankies do nothing. Backslash and pipe does backslash and pipe. Anyway, this now seems to be like booting correctly. So let's try it with that RAM card and see if this improves anything or even works at all. And we wait. Yeah, interesting. Because I did try this with workbench 2 and that seemed to work fine. I was slightly relying on this to provide my extra fast RAM. So I wonder why it's not working anymore. So I might have made a bit of a breakthrough. Here is the machine running with the lid off. It's actually powered on. And if I stick my voltmeter probes one into the five volt line there and one to ground, you can see that the voltage on the voltmeter is kind of low. I'll try this in the... Yeah, there we go. That's better. This is the power supply as seen by the floppy disk drive. So it's a little way from the actual power converters here, but should be good enough. And if I stick a disk in the drive, it actually drops a bit. We could actually run all the way down to almost 4.2 volts, which is way too low. That might be explaining the problems I've been having with the PCMCA card. Because if this requires a higher voltage than the rest of the Amiga does, then stick a disk in the drive. Voltage goes just below the critical level. Everything goes haywire at the best of times. It's still rather low, so it doesn't always work. And it may also explain why these high-density disks aren't working in this drive, because floppy disk drives I've discovered are very sensitive to the input voltage. I've got one that works at 5 volts and does not work at 4.6 volts. And this is lower than that. So if the head amplifiers aren't doing their job properly at this voltage, then this may explain why it's all a bit weird. So I think the possibilities are either the power converter here is fried. Probably, if that's the case, it just needs recapping. I don't really want to recap an Amiga. There aren't very many capacitors, but they're mostly surface mount. The other possibility is that the power supply itself needs some work. So let's see if I can measure the voltage when it's not under load and see what comes out. So there's five, probably rather dirty pins. I should clean these. Can't get a decent connection. And there's five. These are all off. I think the Amiga power supply needs to be told to start up by the rest of the computer. So I could try and measure the voltages from the connector over here, but the pins are rather hard to get to without shorting something out and I'd rather not do that. I think I want to take the lid off the power supply and see if any of the capacitors look dodgy. Well, here it is, one rather grubby and yellowed power supply. It's surprisingly light. I expected it to have a bigger transformer in it, given the size. So let's find a suitably large screwdriver and take these off. I'm going to need to be careful because chances are all the caps are charged. I've just had it plugged in. And just to confirm, not plugged in anymore. I'm generally not a fan of vintage power supplies. Vintage computers are interesting. Vintage power supplies are not and tend to have nasty failure modes. Wow, that's complex and reasonably clean, which is nice. Yikes. This has been bashed around a hell of a lot. Chips coming off the PCB. And it's some nasty fiberglass. I don't know if you can see, but there's some browning here. Suddenly on the other side, nothing much. None of the caps look obviously melty. Let's just discharge some of these. Yikes. Yeah, I should probably have used a resistor for that. Anyway, that one's now discharged. That was more exciting than I usually expect. That one also popped a little. At least they're keeping charge, which is a nice thing. And this is the last big one. You can get modern Amiga power supplies that are high-tech and show current and have overcurrent protection and stuff like that. Not sure I really want to spend more money on this Amiga. I've already had to pay for the Amiga itself, which wasn't too expensive, plus a Amiga-OS kit, plus a replacement EEPROM. And look at that, the PCB is actually warped. Bloody hell. I suppose a new power supply will just help me validate the sunk cost fallacy. I would like to get this thing actually working. This thing looks dubious as hell. It's all quite clean, but I don't like that PCB. It may just be that it's made out of cheap and pretty nasty fiberglass. Maybe even paper. Yeah, I think it's resin. I think it's cardboard soaked in resin. There's browning here, but none of the capacitors look obviously leaky. None of them look obviously bulgy. It's all like enormous, great through-hole stuff, so it might be worth just replacing them. What are they? It's this one. This is a 47-microparad 385 volt. 4716, 16, 16, 16. They're all the same. I don't have one of these. I might have these when these little ones are 470 microfarad at 16 volts, 220 microfarad at 25 volts. Let's have a look at my capacitor collection. OK, I don't have any capacitors big enough. My small ones only go up to 47 microfarad, and I need 470s, 4700s. These are 4700. This is a 47-minute high voltage. These are just not big enough. This is a 1,000 microfarad. I've got a 47 in here, but I could replace these three, but it's probably not worth it. Yeah, so interesting. The simplest thing is just buying new power supply and giving the general bendiness of this. Yeah, look at the transformer is flat. The PCB is bent. So I wonder if it's pulling out of the solder joints. The solder joints look OK, to be honest. The one thing I could plausibly do is reflow some of them. But I don't think there's a problem. They all look nice and clean. So several pieces of good news. The first is I managed to dig up a composite to HDMI adapter, which I can't quite get on camera due to short cables. And that lets me wire the Amiga up to my actual monitor, which I'm recording from a phone. And via the magic of video editing, I should be able to display there. And that's a much better picture, both for me and on camera, so much better than the nasty little monitors I've been using. The other is that despite the fact that I said that I was going to get a new power supply, I thought, why not at least replace the two resistors that look like they were getting hot, which I did. They're just perfectly ordinary 41 ohm resistors. And well, if I take the voltage from the power supply for the floppy drive, you can see over there on the multimeter, five volts on the dot, which is a lot better than the 4.3 I was getting before. And you may notice up here, I have the memory card plugged in and it's absolutely fine. I ran a memory test and it just worked quite slowly. So I think that's a success. Sadly, the workbench installation discs still don't work. They show up with read errors on the Amiga. That was my 4 meter complaining. So I think they just don't work, but the floppy drive itself sounds a lot better. So let me just insert this disc. It sounds higher pitched. It's a little hard to tell because it's been about a week or so since I did the other bits of the video, but I think it's happier. Okay, here it is all zipped up and working. And here is a disc I've made. Moment of truth time. So we reboot it. Is it gonna boot from the floppy? It seems to be. This was written with Flux Engine, using some brand new code to write Amiga discs. And I've not tried this before. So this is, you know, first test for both the Amiga and the Flux Engine software. Fantastic. I don't have the audio hooked up yet. Otherwise you'd be hearing the soundtrack for Zenon 2, which is, frankly, the absolute best part of the game, which is iconic, but not really very good. Can I, I think I need a joystick if one did something. No, I didn't. It just, this is just a tracked mode. Right, none of the keys do anything. It almost started up the demo mode there. Fair enough. I'm gonna have to try and get myself a joystick or preferably a gamepad. I can't stand Amiga joysticks. I can use the, I'll have to investigate. I might be able to use the gamepad on my spectrum as well, which would be nice. I need to check to see whether the pinouts are compatible. It's all the same nine pin D connector. Okay. I am gonna call this done. I have a million clips of footage to edit together. So that will be exciting. Fantastic. I have a working Amiga. And look, it's got memory card in it. Ah, demo mode. Honestly, does look pretty cool. I hope you enjoyed this video. And as always, please let me know what you think in the comments.