Amiga 2000

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So I have been using an Amiga 500 1.3 with a hard drive 2MB ram for a while, and I am happy with it, but it has its limitations.

Today I got a free Amiga 2000 from an Amiga club member. He is moving and downsizing his collection.

We did not know this originally but once booted we discovered that this thing is a beast:

Kickstart 40.63
Workbench 3.1
Cpu 68030 24.20 Mhz
4MB Fast Ram
1MB GVP 32 Bit RAM (don't know what that is)
4MB GVP 32 Bit Ram (Again don't know what that is)
512KB Slow Ram
512 Chip Ram
250 MB Hard drove
CD Rom

Now I love my Amiga 500.  The Amiga 2000 well, its butt ugly (sorry) and the PSU is super loud.  And who knows how reliable it is.

So I am trying to decide if I should invest in maybe a quieter ATX PSU & Amiga Kit cable or should I just transfer the kickstart chip & processor into my A500 (upgrade to 3.1) and  keep the A2000 as a backup.

I want to love this thing but its so dam ugly and loud,  help!

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Also: where is your Amiga club located?  

Our club is located in Calgary, Canada.

http://www.amuc.ab.ca

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Sounds like you have some kind of Rev. 4 board or older. I'd do the modification to convert that "slow" ram to chip. Also you can replace the PSU fan with any standard 80mm PC fan. Note when I did this on mine the two wires had to be flipped at the connector, but that might've just been the particular fan I used.

My A2000 gets a lot more use than my A500, more fun to tinker with. Also don't forget to replace the battery with one of those coin cell conversion kits AmigaKit sells.

Oh I am totally going to do that tonight!

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I should add the 2000 also came with 2 extra Zorro cards, a PC Board with an 8080 and an extra Hard Disk controller (which I don't think I need)

Is there anything I can do about the hard disk, I am sure it is contributing to the loudness as well and who knows how reliable it is after all these years.  Is there some way to upgrade it to a standard IDE or SATA or CF?

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I ditched the hard drives in my systems and went with CF. The easiest way is with one of the MechWare SCSI card readers, however they're no longer available from him and expensive when they pop up on ebay....

That is by far the coolest A200 I have seen so far.  I like the SCSI card reader idea but I am sure it is going to be hard to find.

Is there anything I should know about which SCSI hard drive would work.  I am guessing it is 80-Pin, but do I need to worry about different SCSI protocols, max size, max speed etc?

For example would this drive works:

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1591964&CatId=2346

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Another option to use CF is a SCSI-to-IDE bridge, then an IDE-to-CF adapter.

Yah the problem is if I am going to spend $200 I may as well just try to get an Amiga 1200.

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Most Amiga SCSI controllers use the 50-pin connector (exception being some high end Phase 5 stuff). Any 50-pin drive should be compatible with your GVP controller. You may have to partition it to use only the first 4GB of space (or other limitations) depending on what version of the OS and file system you use. You may be able to get different types to work using adapters, but I have no experience with those.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313&_nkw=50+pin+scsi+hard+drive&_sacat=0&_from=R40

Thanks, I am guessing it's probably very difficult to find a new 50 pin scsi drive these days.

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Sounds like you have some kind of Rev. 4 board or older. I'd do the modification to convert that "slow" ram to chip. Also you can replace the PSU fan with any standard 80mm PC fan. Note when I did this on mine the two wires had to be flipped at the connector, but that might've just been the particular fan I used.

My A2000 gets a lot more use than my A500, more fun to tinker with. Also don't forget to replace the battery with one of those coin cell conversion kits AmigaKit sells.

I did check the battery and in fact it was leaking.  Fortunately I don't believe it affected the motherboard, I think I got it just in time.  

I am looking at the fan but it seems to be bolted to the PSU, how did you cut the bolts off.

Also I checked it is a revision 4.

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Update:

So I managed to get the old fan out by using a drill, replaced the fan with a new quiet one.  Added some missing screws and placed the A2000 under the desk like a tower.  Worked like charm the A2000 is now very quiet.  

Its growing on me but I am not ready to replace my A500 yet.

I will post some pictures soon.

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As promised here is the Amiga 2000 all setup with an Amiga monitor



Here is my Amiga 500



And just to close the circle here is my old but still working Amiga 1000



Which one would you use?