Whoohoo! Got my New (to me) A2000 today!

[TheBilgeRat]

She's a beaut!  I had snagged it off of CL sight unseen with not a whole lot of description, but I was pleasantly surprised today when it arrived.

It ended up being a Rev 4.X board inside (a sticker on the board says 4.3, the graphics on the board say 4.1), the battery had been removed long ago with no signs of leakage.  It came with a 2091 SCSI pre installed with a Hard drive already loaded with programs.  Also a SCSI Cdrom loaded with stuff I can't even read due to the fact I have it plugged into a TV and the output is black and white

The floppy drive is a bit borked, but works.  Now begins the exploratory fun, right after I snag up a monitor to run with it.

sysinfo says its ECS Agnus, 1M chip ram, 2M fast on the SCSI card, workbench 40.5 and Kickstart 40.63.

[TheBilgeRat]

There's already a SCSI CD-ROM there :lol:

At the moment, I think I just want to wade around and test the waters, beat some of those old games I never got around to doing, and then I kinda want to see how productive I can make it.  I'd like to turn it into my dedicated word processor with the old HP Laserjet I have, and then maybe try to track down an Xsurf card mostly for the samba possibilities, maybe save up a bunch of money and buy one of those new GVP 060 accelerators or graphics cards.  For now, I'm just going to enjoy it!

[TheBilgeRat]

So-what is the reason people prefer the rev6 and later boards?  is it because they have ecs already on board?  Or does it just have more mojo?

[TheBilgeRat]

I have a rev 6 MB but its still OCS...although it does have a 1 Meg Agnus.

I believe the REV 6 MB's were engineered differently and have many bug fixes, somebody else may be able to give details. Also if you check out the big book of Amiga hardware I'm sure it details the differences there.

ooh ooh!  where is this big book of amiga hardware?  THat sounds like an awesome read...

[TheBilgeRat]

How much did you get her for?

120 including shipping

[TheBilgeRat]

awesome!  thanks!

Interesting-the one in the icture has the 4.3 silkscreened on the board, whereas mine has 4.1 and a small sticker saying 4.3.  It must be one of the earlier ones.

[TheBilgeRat]

So, upon my perusals of fleabay and amibay, I notice crystals for sale to up or change the oscillation of expansion cards.  Are these for altering, say, a 33mhz 030 to a 50 Mhz 030 by simply replacing a crystal?  Or is it more complex than that?

[TheBilgeRat]

Sorry to hijaak the thread, but Matt_H: That 'hideously, hideously dirty' happens to quite a few Amiga drives. I managed to fix a 1011 by completely disassembling it, and using tuner cleaner on all the micro-switches... In my case, it was the the disk protect switches....  AFAIK, the drive is still working, tho' the buyer complained about it being so yellowed.... Isn't that right, Save2600?  :laughing:

I'd advise to not throw out any Amiga drive, until you have made sure it truly is dead....

No problem!  Mine is borked in that it is missing the front plastic fascia.  It is kind of cool to watch the big mass weight on the bottom spinning when it read up, tho

[TheBilgeRat]

Well, I've been digging into the system a bit more.  I get the feeling the PO may have reoved some of the more pricey items from it before selling...unless 3.1 comes with 68040.library pre-installed.  Also, 2 of the expansion plates in the back are missing, the one on the far right side from the front (far left if you're looking at it from the back) and the one by the CPU fast slot.  Not really a big deal to me-far be it to begrudge a man for making some honest scratch.

I think my next stop is sourcing either a Mini-Megi and that 8M ram board, or springing for an '030/8m GVP 3001 I saw on the fleabay.  Also, I need to do some more research into the why's and how's of kickstart switching (1.3, 2.x, 3.x, etc).  I guess my first destination is to get this puppy to do any game not AGA either by disk or WHDload, while also becoming my word processor (I used final writer 2 back in the day-I'm open to suggestions to better word processors).