That's it!

[bhoggett]

vortexau wrote:
Wayne opinioned that:

it's 8 year old hardware with a designed shelf-life of 5 to 7 years

Balderdash! The "designed shelf-life" usual with x86 maybe!
Amigas are made of sterner stuff .... Like my 1989 A2000HD where only DF0: has died!

Which proves nothing really. Sure, there are plenty of old Amigas out there that are working fine, but equally there's a whole bunch of them that have long since failed. It's not just the basic systems, but all the additional cards etc one gets to rely on in their Amiga. These are failing at an increased rate, and replacing them is simply not financially viable for most people.

Generally speaking Wayne is right. As for the build quality of Amigas, this tends to vary quite a bit from model to model, and even between revisions. Some are very sturdy, and some are complete pieces of #@$%.

[olegil]

The good news is that all the systems that still work are not those who failed immediately :-)

The bad news is they're now also approaching the normal life of a doohickie-thingie. I'm on the second A500 and the second A1200. The Apollo 1240 has needed some fixes already, but I'm not afraid of working the old soldering iron on it (I've already fitted an extra memory-slot I got from a non-working RS/6k motherboard (I still have two working ones, so no biggie :-) )

The thing is, for some of us these machines represent a lot of past and present fun, and should not be thrown out just because they might fail. However, once they DO fail, there's sadly not much you can do. That said, the thing that most often does fail is CIA chips, and these can still be fixed.

[downix]

What I'd like to know is if the ESCOM manufactured A1200s (subcontractor solectron???) was based on Commodore made AGA chipsets or if (solectron?) had the plans to make AGA chips???

They had plans to make them I believe.  I remember a big statement by Bill McEwan that they'd finally gotten rid of the chip masks from Escom, so that there would be no more AGA chips.  (really stupid IMHO, considering how expensive a chip mask is)

[downix]

I remember reading that either C= in the last months or it could even been Escom, it was that long ago, got AGA into one chip.

In an interview with Dr. Hepler, they discussed the single-chip AGA design a bit.  Essentially they were going to put AGA and a 68k core onto a single chip for laptops.  But that project faded away with the shift ot Hombre.