Picked up a 1000 today...

[DonutKing]

@DonutKing,

It looks like the A1000 you have went to the right guy.  It is great to see that you are spending the time to lovingly restore it and find the missing chips.

Thanks for the kind words

How does that GBA1000 come? Is it just a bare board and you need to source the components yourself?

You might take  a look at, unforetunatly most in German.

http://www.a1k.org/

Markus

Thankfully one of the users at a1k.org was kind enough to identify and dump the missing chips for me

:confused:

[560SL]

Totally brilliant work! Great to see this machine brought back to operational state. Keep up the good work!

[Markus_Bieler]

Thankfully one of the users at a1k.org was kind enough to identify and dump the missing chips for me

:confused:

I missed that. But i'm glad we, over at a1k.org, have help you.

Markus aka Ché (@a1k.org)

[DonutKing]

I missed that. But i'm glad we, over at a1k.org, have help you.

Markus aka Ché (@a1k.org)

yes I'd be lost without their help

[TheGoose]

That is an amazing Amiga Phoenix 1000 you found, and glad to see you fix it up so methodically. You are a very lucky man.

More pics!

[DonutKing]

Did a bit of work today on the standard A1000



On the right you can see the two LED cables that had been ripped out of the front panel. First job was to solder new LED's on to these.


Interesting thing about this A1000 is that its an NTSC board, and Australia is a PAL territory. I noticed this mod on a chip near the composite output jack:


Looks like a crystal oscillator and a tuning cap. I'd hazard a guess and say that someones modded this A1000 for PAL composite output, because this looks very similar to a mod I did to my PAL sega megadrive to run at NTSC speeds.
Not a big deal though as I won't be using composite anyway


The RCA jacks on this board were pretty tarnished too so they got replaced


Finished product:


Above are the two repaired LED connectors.
You might notice that I used a different kind of RCA jacks on this board compared to the Phoenix. Well for some strange reason, the polarity is different between the two boards. The RCA jacks have 3 terminals, on the A1000 the outer terminals are for the signal and the centre one is ground. On the Phoenix the outer terminals are ground and the centre one is signal...
Why? I dunno. Its pretty annoying though. I had to order the Phoenix ones online because my local electronics shop only carried the 'outer terminal signal' ones.

Success!




Not much more I can do with either of these boards until the parts I've ordered arrived... and since we've recently had some airline strikes and coming into the holiday season I think I could be waiting a while :mad:
Both boards are fully operational but at the moment the Phoenix is functionally identical to my A500.

[Debaser]

This is a great thread. What a great find. I look forward to the updates!

[Snoozy]

Congrats donutking looks like your doing a great job of fixing this up.
 
How does the A1000 compare to the A1200?

[DonutKing]

They're generations apart.

The 1200 has IDE, PCMCIA, and a CPU expansion slot... the 1000 has none of these, it only as 256KB RAM on the motherboard (compared to the 1200's 2MB) and you need to load a kickstart disk before any other disks (later amigas had the kickstart in ROM).

There's very few upgrades you can do to the 1000 in comparison to the 1200.

The phoenix board at least has kickstart in ROM and 1MB on the motherboard, its functionally similar to an Amiga 500 with memory expansion. Of course the Phoenix has a few other upgrades you can do as well.

Of course the 1000/phoenix and 1200 have different chipsets but that's probably one of  the more subtle differences really...

As far as this project goes... my USB programmer arrived today but none of the GALs have shown up yet. hopefully they aren't too far off...

[Aegis]

It's great to see so much TLC being put into a classic Amiga restoration - really looking forward to seeing more!

My personal dream Amiga is a 4000T but I doubt I'll ever have one - next on the list would be a 1000 - I hope you get a nice case for her!

[save2600]

Saying that I am green with envy would be an understatement. Wow, incredible work!

[TheGoose]

Saying that I am green with envy would be an understatement. Wow, incredible work!

Yeah, you got the 2 biggest A1000 fetish doods lookin hard. Eyeballs push back into sockets....

[DonutKing]

I hope you get a nice case for her!

I was toying with the idea of mounting the Phoenix in a different case, but that's going to be a lot of effort... It would make it a lot easier to mount a hard drive,  a B2000 CPU accelerator card and a video card though. (although a quick check suggests that there isn't a whole lot of useful video cards that will fit in the slot on the Phoenix... please correct me if I'm wrong


The plastics for the two original cases are pretty ratty. retrobright didn't work so well, it dried out in the sun and left white splotches on some parts. I'm investigating alternatives, vinyl dye unfortunately isn't available in any colour close to the original (closest is either pure white or a dark tan). I'm thinking maybe some weak acetone followed by a very light sanding, but I need to test on some unimportant plastic first

I've managed to find the appropriate Agnus chip on Amibay that will let me use 2MB of chip RAM, without the U60 PAL chip that I don't have the code for... just waiting for it to arrive.
I also ordered a SCSI hard drive off ebay, was advertised as 50 pin SCSI-2... when it arrived its a 68 pin SCSI-3... sigh. was only 10 bucks plus 10 for postage but still a pain in the arse. I was hoping to find a SCSI-IDE adapter so I can just use a CF card but the acard ones are too rich for my blood. There is a Yamaha one, the V769970 but they seem rare as hens teeth.

I did manage to get the G540 programmer working, despite its best attempts to confuse me with its broken english. I don't have the GALs but I pulled the EPROM BIOS chips off a couple of old 486 motherboards I have here and it read them perfectly I actually have new BIOSes I want to upgrade those machines with, but I don't have an EPROM UV eraser, nor any compatible Flash EPROM parts... that's another story though. At least it works once you get your head around what its trying to say :confused:

so yeah, that's where the project is at the moment... moving ahead but very slowly

[save2600]

I'll trade you a mint A1000 case, complete with all plastics for that Phoenix board.  :laughing:

[Erol]

Your not the guy who brought an agnus chip?  lol

I've actually sold a brand new mint A1000 Keyboard, shame you weren't around earlier.
This machine looks better than the A1000, booting kikstart from floppy was a headache if your drive failed.. lol

[DonutKing]

So the mailman dropped off some GAL chips today I've managed to get everything programmed without too much fuss, unfortunately installing and testing them may have to wait for another day...

I've wasted some time fiddling with that XEL sidecar I posted earlier in the thread. I bought some 1Mbx4 RAM chips to upgrade it to 2MB total. It came with 1MB of RAM, in 8 256x4 chips. It can be jumpered for 2MB.
So I tried to install 4 1Mbx4 chips in alternating sockets, leaving every second socket empty. The amiga will boot in this configuration, but it gives a guru error straight away on every boot - once you're past that it boots fine.

Sysinfo detects the 2MB of RAM. On the Phoenix utilities disk there are a couple of RAM testers. Both of them fail with 2MB of RAM, but they pass with 1MB.

One doesn't give an address but one does, it seems everything after address 280000 fails. On Wikipedia there is a Zorro memory map, which says that 200000 is the start of an 8MB of address space for Zorro expansion RAM- 280000 is half a megabyte into this range, If this is not correct please enlighten me
Since the capacity of my RAM chips is half a megabyte (4 megabits) it sounds like the second chip is dodgy... except swapping chips around has no effect, it always falls over at that address. I've even tried 4 different chips and it has no effect.


No other configuration of RAM chips will boot. Swap empty/populated sockets, all four chips next to each other on the left or the right side... If I fill all eight sockets with the 1Mbx4 chips it will boot, but will fall over at the same address. Using eight 256x4 chips and jumpering for 1MB works perfectly without errors....


So have I overlooked something, or am I just being greedy for wanting a 2MB fastram sidecar... :/