Amiga mods, is it worth it?

[azhoward]

I'll have to keep this short for the moment since I'm watching the MLS playoffs between LA Galaxy with David Beckham and Robbie Keane and the Seattle Sounders. (Keane scored just before half time!)

Anyway, I found in storage several A500s, an A3000 with CD, several brands of 3 button mice, a couple of Microsoft bus mice with Amiga adapter, a SupraRam, and a GVP Impact A500 hard drive and memory. I also found a complete A500 tower kit with 020 accelerator and memory. This "towerized" A500 is modded to accept an external keyboard, has a clockport adapter, and has a four zorro slot expansion that I had forgot about producing. It also has a zorro video card that I don't know if it is working or not. I used the A500 tower case to put a PPC towerized A1200 into and had forgotten about the 500 stuff. The A1200 is the one I use now and have added a Subway, Mediator, etc.

Since I think it is perfectly ridiculous to have all this equipment going to waste, I would like to sell them to a good home. However, is it worth it to do a few upgrades to them first such as ROM? Most have 1.2 and 1.3. And would it be worth it to put the modded A500 back in a tower. It's not a lot of work, but there is the expense of buying and fitting out a tower case. Of course, I would prefer to make or buy the proper ATX adapter for the power supply. A reset is already done and it's got 2meg chip, of course. Is it worth the time and expense?

[NovaCoder]

Only you can say how valuable your time is but I'd say sell the lot as-is and let some other people enjoy them.

[Lurch]

Wow I'd have the broadest smile ever if I had any of that. The A500 tower kit sounds interesting.

Would love an a3000 ahh one can dream :-)

[azhoward]

I hate to say it, but I can't remember how all this came into my possession. In fact, I keep finding things such as a PC XT keyboard adapter. At any rate, I may just unload the A500s as is because I realize that some find fun in upgrading as NovaCoder suggested. However, I may do the 500 tower whether I recoup the cost or not. After thinking about it for awhile, why would you not want to see a tricked out 500 tower in a sleek case? It even has a RGB to VGA adapter! Oh, another thing, I just found two A1000s with keyboards. Will have to look further if there are expansions for these. I've read that working A1000s in the USA are rare, although I'm not altogether certain about that. Even so, I'm not looking that much for profit, just to connect up with people who would actually use them.

Quick question: what was the highest version of ROM for the A1000?

[azhoward]

I hate to say it, but I can't remember how all this came into my possession. In fact, I keep finding things such as a PC XT keyboard adapter. At any rate, I may just unload the A500s as is because I realize that some find fun in upgrading as NovaCoder suggested. However, I may do the 500 tower whether I recoup the cost or not. After thinking about it for awhile, why would you not want to see a tricked out 500 tower in a sleek case? It even has a RGB to VGA adapter! Oh, another thing, I just found two A1000s with keyboards. Will have to look further if there are expansions for these. I've read that working A1000s in the USA are rare, although I'm not altogether certain about that. Even so, I'm not looking that much for profit, just to connect up with people who would actually use them.

Quick question: what was the highest version of ROM for the A1000?

[Lurch]

Well if you ever think about selling some of your gear I'd like to put my hand up :-)

As for the 1000 kickstart have only seen them with 1.3.

http://wiki.classicamiga.com/Kickstart_Roms_Explained

[psxphill]

As for the 1000 kickstart have only seen them with 1.3.

1.3 was the highest official kickstart disk made. It might be possible to move some of the libs from the later roms onto disk, but you'd probably need a hard drive and quite a bit of ram or it would be far too annoying.
 
It is possible to put a kickstart rom in an a1000, you need an adaptor that plugs into the boot rom sockets which also needs to attach to some address lines on the motherboard.
 
http://lab.amigalounge.com/A1000_ROM.html
http://www.amigaworld.de/hardware/kickstart-adapter/
 
It should also be possible to use 256k x 8 bit eproms (27C020), with legs bent up to attach the extra address lines to. If you don't want to get into making a board to route all the wires to a 16 bit kickstart rom. You might need to use something to raise the roms, like an extra socket.

[haywirepc]

I'd be interested in buying your a500 tower for sure.:smack:

[kickstart]

I enter to this thread thinking on modules, something traditional on the amiga world... but not.

[azhoward]

I'm finding quite a bit. What I'll have to do is gather everything up, assess what I have, and then test what's working and what is not. So far everything works; that is, all the 500s boot up. Fortunately, I also found plenty of power supplies as well. Need to check the A1000s. The 3000 is a little awkward since it has a full size CD drive which doesn't fit the case. (It has a SCSI to IDE adapter.) I wonder if a slim drive could be made to work? I also found about 10 SCSI hard drives and plenty of cables and terminators. What a job just sorting all this stuff out!

On thing I found is interesting. I found an adapter that I had built to allow an external monitor for an old Mac SE 30. Yes, I am finding some old Mac stuff as well such as modems, keyboards, PPC CPU cards and adapters. I even found an old PPC iMac. Ironically, the Amiga stuff is probably worth much more than the Mac. :-)

[som99]

I would love to buy the A500 tower kit I think you should keep stuff you think you got use of, also keep extra hardware as spare parts if something breaks

[J-Golden]

I enter to this thread thinking on modules, something traditional on the amiga world... but not.

:rofl:

I thought this was going to be another letter to the Mods of A.ORG!

[J-Golden]

also keep extra hardware as spare parts if something breaks

YES!!!  DO THIS!!!  DO THIS A LOT!!!

I FINALLY resurrected my A4000T by getting a HD Floppy drive for it and it turns out that it would have still been an uphill battle if I didn't have an old floppy drive to stick into my PC so I could transfer needed files from on to the other.

I won't even go into the cables I would have had to spend $$$ on if I hadn't stored them away many moons ago...