danby's comments

> I think it's a mistake to apply power to them in their current state since that could cause damage.

One big issue is that these old electrolytic caps can leak and damage the motherboard and this is a common fail state for both the A1200 and CD32, as Commodore used some particularly low quality caps in the 1992-1994 era.

Even if you don't replace the caps they should be removed from the board before they go in to long term storage.

Powering up is unlikely to damage the machines. If the caps have already failed powering up won't cause any additional failure. A cap that hasn't been powered in a long time and is on the very edge of failure can be caused to fail by passing power in to it but that is a vanishingly rare edge case. The most likely issue for the caps, if they aren't working, is that they have already leaked.

FWIW amiberry is probably a better option for Mac/linux these days. At least until FS-UAE v5 is released

That and the fact that the CPU was nearly a decade old by the time they were buying them in bulk

FWIW when wire wrapping you can get handy little hollow tools. You feed the wire in to a hole in the tool, drop the tool over the pin and just spin the tool to wrap the wire round the pin. It's all very neat and tidy and requires pretty minimal hand-eye-coordination to get it looking nice.

I bought a tiny little one of the tools a while ago when doing some raspberry pi prototyping. Makes it easy to attach a wire to the GPIO header if it's not a dupont lead/wire

To be fair it's mainly just a case of changing the pin spacing

The Amiga's audio reproduction is an odd beast. Incredibly sophisticated one hand then completely hamstrung by the fact that stereo planning has to be done in software. So you either run it as 4 independent mono channels, or you devote lots of CPU time to software panning, which rules doing that if anything else CPU intensive is going on. So you basically can't have stereophonic audio in games.

Your PSU issues aren't actually all that common. The A1200 PSU being trash was a prime example of commodore's decades long costing cutting horrors.

Having different products for different market segments is often a good idea. But in many cases Commodore released simultaneous products to compete for the same market segment.

To be honest there's lots of little factual inaccuracies in that piece. The notion that the A600 was "fully software-compatible with the A500" just isn't true.

> * The A600 was squeezed in between the A500+ and the A1200, which means that in 1993, you could buy an A500+ for £199, an A600 for £199 or an A1200 for £299 - all of them supposed entry-level machines. Very confusing for consumers.

If commodore loved anything it was to release products designed to compete with themselves.

I think this the best analysis of the Vampire. To my mind it is more of an Amiga-compatible computer (with some odd graphics and CPU incompatibilities) than it is an actual extension of any Amiga platform ideas or plans.

Their odd instance on sticking with the "chipset architecture" also ensures it'll never be anything other than a niche device within a retro-computing niche.

I agree that it would indeed be more interesting if their 68080 actually extended the 68060 rather than branching off from the 68000. And their sAGA/Maggie architecture is a real deadend for programmers if, as they claim, they want to reignite Amiga's popularity. Commodore themselves understood that OCS/AGA was a deadend and designed their Hombre specification to replace it. If they implemented a 64bit version of Hombre than would be an intriguing thing I think.

Though frankly why you wouldn't just design for PCI based GPUs is anyone's guess but then you kind of have to admit your whole platform would just be better off being a PC

It isn't true though. C64 PSUs would fail high and fry downstream chips and passives. Amiga PSUs are designed to fail low, and with the exception of some exceptionally rare faults, they won't fry your computer if the capacitors fail

Is the pi usually on it's own power supply?

As I understand it the issue is that when the old c64 power supplies failed the 12v line would go overvoltage and fry your computer. The amiga power supplies are designed differently and don't have this "feature".

Though it is often worth replacing the original amiga power supplies as the capacitors are often shot by this point

Most amigas users are using some kind of solid state storage these days which will ameliorate this a little. But many/most are using assorted expansion and accelerator cards which can substantially increase the power draw.

It's a bit if a moveable feast how much power an amiga is drawing these days. Certainly, back in the 90s, the original a1200 power supplies often needed to be replaced with something that could deliver more, and the a500 supplies were favoured

It's hard to make a modern comparison. You simply can't visit most of the web because javascript doesn't work. This limits you to the handful of sites that are configured for amigas to visit. Those usually use very small pages with very lightweight use of HTML and few assets. so there's usually not too much to decrypt and pages load in ok time.

Timing Feels a lot like trying to use the web over 3G with first gen,2008 era smart phones. Though with many fewer sites to visit.

If you're willing to mod the case (or buy a new case you're willing to mod) I can strongly recommend a CF2IDE relocator

https://retroready.one/collections/adapters-interfaces/produ...

Ok so it's worth noting that the AmigaOS has two completely separate branches in use today: 3.x and 4.x

4.x is targeted to amigas with PPC CPUs or PPC based accelerators (mid to late 90s accelertors and some newer things like the X5000)

3.x is targeted to amigas with m68k CPUS (all the commodore era machines)

Both 3.x and 4.x are under active development today. The latest 3.x is AmigaOS 3.2.2. The latest 4.x is AmigaOS4.1

With regards support, the A500 is still the best supported Amiga. Its install base and current user base dwarves that of all the other models and accelerators. There were just so many more A500s sold than any other type of amiga. I would not be surprised if you told me that there 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more A500s than PPC amigas out there. So if you are developing for the amiga and want your software used by lots of folk then targeting the A500 will get it infront of the most eyeballs.

Today though most people buy some kind of accelerator for their amiga and the Terrible Fire (TF536) or Individual Computers (ACA500plus) accelerator cards seem to be the most favoured modern choices. Neither of these choices are PPC based cards and the amiga community still favours m68k CPUs.

WRT the battery, the standard A500 did not ship with a battery on the motherboard, only the A500+ did. Some RAM upgrade cards do have a VARTA battery and those could still damage the RAM upgrade card and should be removed.

Sidenote: AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 are actually a kinda separate abandoned branch but features of these have been backported to the 3.2 branch.