"Genuine Sanwa arcade parts" is now an expression I use and I've yet to find anyone that understands the reference. "That thing is really neat but does it have genuine Sanwa arcade parts?"
Update: A couple of people mentioned that the PSU PCB does not appear to be grounded to the case, and in this edit it isn't! A huge number of hours get chopped up when editing these episodes so things can be missed but I think it's important to highlight this if anyone is attempting the same mod. Please ground your board to the PSU case and perform a continuity check to make sure it is. Here's a pic of mine for reference: drive.google.com/file/d/1WMnLxt_819zh2OPhjRntfqRq0VWsr_dL/view?usp=sharing Thank you for watching! I'm exited to share that Dave Haynie will be making an appearance in part 3 of this series which I'm working on now. All videos are released to the Patrons who support The Cave first, 1 week early with no ads. If you'd like to help support the videos I make and get perks like early access then I'd love to welcome you over at patreon.com/retromancave - Thank you for your support! Neil - RMC
@@Caddy666 what has that got to do with anything? You do realise when people buy computers they do so to have a computer, not because it may be valuable some day? Stupidest comment I've seen in a while.
Neil, you mentioned the need for a flicker-fixer to reduce eye strain when running higher resolutions than 640x480, however I have a stock A1200 (+ 4MB FAST RAM) with a 1438S monitor, and on that combo i can comfortably use 800x600 (up to 913x626 with overscan) and the picture is just completely rock-steady. :D
Hi. I went thru the same choice in 1993, when I sold my Amiga 2000 for which the parts were really expensive, for a 486DX33 PC, soon upgraded with a 486DX2-66, a VLB graphics card, and a hard drive I couldn't afford the only controller for the A2000. Too bad Commodore, maybe you should have sourced your chipset to chinese compatible makers, and also demand Microsoft to port Excel...
this video is not to be watched by Medhi Ali therby you must confirm that you are not Medhi Ali or not Associated with Medhi Ali. just like Anish Kapoor, Fuck you Medhi Ali!
In 1987 Bobby Kotick, currently of Activision Blizzard, tried to buy out Commodore but was turned down. I often wonder how that timeline would've played out. Might as well be like swapping the plague for cholera, but we'll never know for sure.
Yeah. I also found out that one Steve Jobs talked Kotick into pursuing a career in computer software. Before that he was supposedly studying for an art degree.
Mehdi Ali put on his resume that he had overseen a turnaround at Commodore. This is certainly true: He took a $6 billion a year industry leading company and drove it into bankruptcy.
I personally blame Irving Gould, he was the one who who fired Jack and hired all the CEOs afterwards. From what I've read Gould got rich from a lucky encounter by the inventor of the shipping crate. He got his wealth through luck and he used to fly out of the US every x number of days to avoid paying tax. That's why the Pet Jet existed. But Ali was hired obviously due to his experience (because selling sugar water means you can run a tech company lol) and the fact he sounded like Jack. He was also as rotund.
@@CantankerousDave When he was at Commodore, he was paid nearly $2 million a year. That's $12-$14 million before taxes. Some of that money is probably what allowed him and his son to start Stone Ridge Partners, which is a private equity firm that buys struggling companies, in 2013. He also sits on the board of another private equity firm. In-between Commodore's bankruptcy in 1994 and the founding of Stone Ridge Partners in 2013, if I remember correctly, he tried to open a management consultancy business, which is where he bragged about overseeing a turnaround at Commodore. However, given that the website for his consultancy business disappeared just a few years later, I'd imagine that everybody took a look and said "turnaround at Commodore? Oh, he's _that_ guy. No thank you!" Or maybe he managed all his clients into bankruptcy too. So my guess is, he didn't start to "fail upwards" until the early 2010s. He struggled a bit (if you can call being a multi-millionaire "struggling") for a few years first.
THis is such a depressing memory. I was a commodore owner from the 1983 onward. I LOVED my Amigas when they first came out. It the late 80s, it was the best gaming machine you could own, and it still did everything else. Even ran MSDos if needed. But from 1990 onward, it was mistake after mistake after mistake. It became very hard to support the Amiga
The best thing Commodore could have done with the AAA chipset would be to stick it on a Zorro 2 card. They could theoretically have also done a version on PCI to get in with the PC crowd but in the end that was not to be.
I read an interview with one of the engineers that worked on the chipset and he basically said it was pretty underpowered compared to the then upcoming playstation 1 and still wasnt as good as a decent pc so probably wouldnt have helped commodore in the long run.
You desoldered the remnants of the old power supply cables which means you didn't really need to cut the cables in the first place. Thanks for the video. These Amiga related videos keep making me want to drag my A2000 with its 68030 CPU card out of its box and get it running again.
@Dr ROLFCOPTER! It looks like they are trained to stick with their magical "sugar water" recipe and fear to make changes. Which obviously do not apply to a fast paced, innovative industry.
the engineers gave Ali the best mousetrap the world had ever seen up to that date. Unfortunately Ali didn't have the slightest clue what a mousetrap was...
Read Alis bloomberg profile, he writes he turned Commodore around. He threatens people with legal action if they say otherwise. He was hired as he looked and acted like Tramiel.
I always thought David Pleasance and Jeremy Beadle were the same guy. I didn't know about him when I was a daily Amiga user but he's been pretty active since the retro stuff started and I kept wondering why Jeremy Beadle was in loads of videos about Amigas.
Another excellent video. I was in the same position as you in the 90s, but I had (and still have) a 1200. I would have loved to upgrade to a big box Amiga, but I had just started a degree, and *really* needed a PC, and only enough money to upgrade my Amiga or buy a PC. I was starting a degree, and as I needed a PC to complete my studies, I had no choice really. Regarding Commodore, they always seemed like a company that consisted of a *lot* of excellent engineers backed up by ineffectual or incompetent management and bad marketing. Not, that's at an international level. Commodore UK actually had good management, and fairly effective marketing, although I felt their efforts were often hampered by a lack of support from Commodore International. I have a Ryzen 5 based PC now which is hundreds of times more powerful than my Amiga 1200, and also a Macbook. While I like both, I felt more for my Amiga than either. They are just tools. Tools that I work and (in the case of my PC) I play on, but just tools. My Amiga felt almost like a companion on an adventure.
I bought an A1200 when it came out and was quite happy with it as well. I found myself in a similar position with needing a PC for education purposes within a few short years though. Had I possessed psychic foresight I would have traded in my original A500 for a used A2000 or A3000 instead of getting the A1200 and I could have just bought a 486 bridgecard for half the price of what I ended up spending on a PC and kept the Amiga dream alive a little longer in my life. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.
That PSU upgrade was a lot of work! My philosophy is that the only things like to fail in a PSU within my lifetime are the electrolytic caps, so a recap should get it through at least another 30 years. Fan bearings can go too of course but I tend to cross that bridge when I get there, i.e. replace the fan when it gets noisy.
As a kid in the US I was the only person I knew with an Amiga. These videos make me miss my 2500 Video Toaster equipped big box. I ultimately switched to a pc compatible in the 90s when Amiga in the US was long dead. But I was so upset when my family donated my Amiga.
Former A1200 owner here... it was a great machine and I had the zappo external CD drive for it to play CD32 games. good times back then. Walker is still one of my fondest memories.
I was an A3000 owner when the A4000 was released, and Commodore's product line was a major disappointment. The system was nothing like the rumors we had read about AAA and could not match the graphics that were already available in the IBM compatible market. The lack of a built-in flicker-fixer and SCSI on the A4000 just poured salt in the wounds, and so the computer that replaced my A3000 was a Pentium. I still miss the Amiga Workbench and boot it up in emulation regularly to mess with the software I wrote from the Amiga or to play a game of Stunt Car Racer or Pinball Fantasies. I question whether what killed Commodore was the guy who put Mehdi in charge (Irving Gould) since the company could have made it years and possibly decades longer with proper R&D funding and not killing off the projects that were pushing the platform forward.
I remember when I came to upgrade from an A500 I faced a similar choice. However, at the time, there were quite a lot of people upgrading from the 1200 to PC so 1200s were available second hand for only around £200 - £250. So that's what I went for in the end and I had a couple of happy years with it.
I don't regret buying my A1200 in 1993. Glorious - and a machine that maybe never full-filled its promise. But now I am glad about GOG because I can go back and see what I missed.. ah, being a retro gamer is sooooo comforting.
I was looking for a new high-end PC at the time... the Amiga unfortunately was absolutely no competition. So I built from components a 486 machine, with a Soundblaster and Tseng Labs ET4000-W32, and used it as a Unix workstation - Linux by then supported some ethernet cards, the ET4000, the Soundblaster, and felt more nippy than the Unix workstations we had at uni. It was nerd heaven.
I know that pain leaving! I started Amigas back at the beginning, having perhaps the third (?) A1000 in the East Coast as I worked as a buyer for a major electronics retailer. Later, I worked for a Colorado-based Amiga hardware manufacturer and had a 2000 with the fastest '030 then available. I had years invested in the Amiga, what seemed like dozens of magazines over the years and a few hundred 3.5" floppies...but, that Christmas season, when Commodore's big TV push was a kid being visited by Buzz Aldren?!?...I had had enough. Watching it all dwindle away, while my work increasingly pushed me towards more powerful software on the Mac...I sold everything just before the holiday (for slightly more than I paid for the computer, evil that I was then) and jumped ship to the beige side, bought a used Quadra 800 and never looked back.
You and me both. It's an instant blood pressure spike to read or hear his name. Fuck Irving Gould too for driving Jack Tramiel out of his own creation and allowing all the disasterous CEOs including Ali to be hired.
Back in the 90s I modified a Supermicro server case to house my A4000/060+Toaster/Flyer/KitchenSync, and about 6 years ago I installed an SSD drive. This was a follow-up to my modifying a tower case to house an A2000/Blizzard060. The two systems are still in my home office.
Speaking of David I have him booked in for a chat in a few weeks, looking forward to it. C= UK has a reputation for being one of the better arms of the company when it came to marketing and organisation, but they weren't calling the hardware shots
I nearly cried when Commodore went under, I had always been an Amiga fan. I always wondered what Commodore could of achieved if they had stayed around, but we will never know. Great vid cant wait for next one.
I support you replacing the insides of the power supply, and am glad you said you'd keep the original contents safe for posterity. I replaced the electrolytic capacitors on a Timex/Sinclair 1000 with ceramics and taped the old electrolytics to the board in the old positions so that people could see what was originally in place.
Something Commodore easily could (and should have) done was upgrade the Paula chip. It was fantastic in the 1985-1990 era but was slowly beeing superseded by the competition. The Archimedes has 8 channels of PCM audio, so did the SNES and the Sega Mega CD. Why didn’t they put two Paula chips in the A1200 and CD-32? It would have complimented the AGA chipset nicely. It feels like Commodore somehow overlooked this by their management decisions.
If you were serious about computing and it's business / productivity uses in the future, the only road was PC. The serious software alone was enough, for me it was commercial sign making, accounting software and vector and pixel based design software. If you could afford both, well that would be rare.
8:17 Ha! Thunder Board! That was my very first sound card. I remember putting it into my Amstrad PC1512 and firing up "Prince of Persia" and having my 5th grade mind blown when the intro music started playing LOL.
As a power supply tester I can only recommend to replace the old power supplies if this is possible. I would have done it similar to you in the video. But I think there are better power supplies that have stronger 5V lines. From experience I can say that many high quality power supplies not only withstand much higher loads but are also so developed. The power supplies are then limited to the 100W 3,3&5V Combined Power. One reason is the 80% certification, the 12V line is more efficient so the manufacturer can also achieve higher efficiencies and certification. The problem is to see from the outside if the power supply can deliver only 100W or even 150W without problems. I'll see if I can find a link to the power supplies that are better suited for such projects . BR Thomas
@Deep Throat I haven't tested it but for smaller retro systems this industrial power supply might be interesting. It only has 12V & 5V and 54W. If more power is needed I can check the test protocols which power supplies can handle stabile higher loads at 5V. asset.conrad.com/media10/add/160267/c1/-/en/001293114DS01/datenblatt-1293114-mean-well-rd-50a-acdc-netzteilbaustein-geschlossen-54-w.pdf
My first Amiga was the original 500 and I upgraded it quite a lot over several years. From there I went to a 2000 with the slightly upgraded chipset and CPU upgrades. I was doing professional graphics for video production. Used several different 3D animation programs and eventually went to Lightwave for all of the 3D work. I couldn't wait for the A4000 to come out, but waited for the 68040 upgrade. I was initially very impressed with the machine. I was actually happy to have the IDE drive interface, as the drives were WAY cheaper and capacity/$ was a bigger priority for me. I seem to recall there were better tape backup options too (I had a DAT backup drive). Anyway, as you pointed out, PC's were rapidly becoming faster and cheaper. When Lightwave was released for PC I bought a 486 box mostly for rendering, but it slowly became the primary design machine too. For rendering in particular, the 486 was significantly faster. Somewhere around '93-94 I ended up selling my A4000 and demand was so high that I got back pretty much all the money I had put into it! It was a sad day when I retired my last Amiga.
I so so SO shared your pain, brother. By 1991 my precious Amiga 500, expanded by an insanely noisy 20mb HDD (Not even in a sidecart but kept in a seperate box outside the sidecart that held the boot-ROMs) just didn't cut the mustard any longer. That 7Mhz CPU was worthless when trying to run games ported from the PC used to not utilizing the Amiga's custom chips but just the brute force of the CPU made a mockery of the A500 by running grapical gems like King's Quest V or Wing Commander in 16 colour mode at 1/4 the speed of the average 286/386 of the day. An A1200 or A4000 would have been a short term upgrade, but I knew it wouldn't be enough. And my HDD was so loud it could give one headaches just running. When accessing data you could hear it 2 rooms away, and 20mb was just not big enough when Ultima VI could eat up 1/4 of the entire HDD. I had to give in and sell it to combine with my savings enough money for my first PC, rocking an AMD 386DX-40 Mhz CPU, 4mb of RAM, a 105mb internal HDD and an SVGA card capable of 1024x768 resolution at 256 colours as well as supporting a VESA 2.0 framebuffer in himem (gave a good 10% performance increase in games like Wolf3D and eventually Doom) and I cursed Medhi Ali regularly for gutting Commodore's R&D, especially as the proposed AAA chipset would have sent the Amiga's 3D graphics capability into Sega Saturn territory by 1995 with a 68060 or PPC CPU. (sigh)
Living in the Midwest USA, I had not heard of Amiga until almost 2000. My first computer at home was a VIC20. My best friend had a C64 and found Elite early on. I craved the power of the C64. I was not allowed to touch the IBM pcs at school because of the things I was able to do with the Apple II and IIGS in elementry and middle school. When I got to college we were required to have a computer, specifically Mac, which I guess is unusual for an engineering school. One of the guys that was going for his master in computer science while going for comp engineering had a C64 hooked up to a surround sound system and had GEOS running. I fell for the C64 again and almost got a C128 when I went shopping for a better Mac. This was around 93. I stayed Mac and then Mac & Linux till Mac os X got to be an annual "gives us your money for update" I think it was panther. Now I am Linux exclusive, but I wish Commodore had kept going. I liked coding on them better than Pc or Mac or even Apple II.
Wow I'm absolutely loving this series. The history combined with the fixing up of old hardware is just perfect. Growing up in America as I barely heard of an Amiga at the time, and it's really interesting getting a survey of their landscape at the time.
When i read first of the A600 (and A4000) in a Magazine it was "April" so i thought, it has to be a bad joke. I had already changed to PC with a 386DX33 and DX40 from my A2000, because the A3000 was so expansive and one year later at that time owned the 486DX2-66 with 16MB Ram in 1994, when i was 18 years old. The 8MB Ram Expansion cost me 800 DM, i remember well. I paid all that stuff from selling about 3000 pcs of 3,5" discs in Posso-Media-Boxes from the Amiga. There was no chance for coming back to the Amiga. Later i bought A600 for 50 Euro in 2002, just for some fun. I was surprised about the small thing by the way.
I really lusted after an A4000 back when I had my A1200. A bit ironic because my A1200 had an '030 accelerator, fast RAM and a hard drive. So for general use and gaming, it was essentially identical to a big box Amiga, as long as you didn't need to use any of the expansion ports.
awesome job! always wanted to do this to a gorgeous sony vaio case a relative gave me, the psu is a proprietary shape with two pegs that lock the whole case together.
As a casual consumer of retro tech videos, I don't know too much about the Commodore Amiga history. It was unfortunate I had to learn of Mehdi Ali's existence and his unfortunate impact on computing history.
My brother and I have a large Amiga tower with 68060, Picasso IV and disk drives (including 5.25") that could write disks for many systems. Eyetech said its the most work they have ever done hooked up to A1200 on its side. Cost a fortune with our expensive multi-sync monitor. Now it's sat in my brothers bedroom too worried to switch it on in case it pops!
I made the step up from A500 to A1200. Later I upgraded the A1200 with Bizzard PPC 060/603e board in the horrific plastic infinitiv 1200 tower and added a Catweasel and a Picasso IV. I loved that computer and only sold it to raise funds to move. I ended up with a PC next after commodore imploded. Amiga could have been even greater 😫it was legendary in the A500/A1200 era.
Another great video! I was tempted by the A4000, but my A3000 was still serving me quite well. I was in wait and see mode from '93 until Commodore went belly up, trying to decide between upgrading to an AGA machine or not... Then she. They went under my decision was made for me. Now that I own an A4000 I really love it!
I saw that the old PSU case is grounded, but in the design, the original PSU PCB would also have been grounded through the stand-offs and possibly another lug connection. You really do need to ground a switch mode PSU as leakage currents are normally present, leading to the possibility of a shock off of metal parts of the Amiga. The new PSU will have a ground point on it and also the holes for the stand-offs will also be connected to that ground. I'd do this sooner rather than later....
I got an Amiga4000 and it was my main machine well in to the new millennium and was quite heavily expanded. I even got a complete new mother board so now have two, one in the original case and my expanded one in a full tower case. I would have loved it to have had AAA that was a great loss. So yes Damn you Mehdi Ali.
nice job done dude...👍 love these trash to treasure series. I had literally just watched the first part and sat there saying just stick a SFF PC PSU inside it..glad to see you did. Word to the wise for people on a restricted budget the HP/Delta SFF PSU's can be had for under £20 for units a couple of years old and for less than £6 on fleabay if you don't mind one 5-6 years old.... you just have to desolder the modern sata and pcie connectors just like you did. I used one to repair an old philips industrial vision system last week...I had to make the mounting from polycarbonate sheet....I wish my workplace would buy a 3d printer ..but tbh using flat polycarbonate was probably quicker anyway.
Honestly I was happy with my A2000 which ran my BBS until 1997 when I took it down due to lack of activity because by then everyone was using the internet. Signs of the times. Long before that I had migrated over to the PC because I got more bang for my buck then what Commodore had to offer but mostly because I needed compatibility with work and that was all PC. I was never much into games for me it was always productivity and telecommunications. The Amiga served me well back them and I can remember my PC friends would often say their computer was more powerful than my A2000 but they could never understand why I could do much more then they could until Win95 then they would call me to let me know now they could multitask and my reply was the Amiga was doing it in hardware not software but as time moved forward I was with everyone else using PC's for work. I kept my A2000 and its still alive and well and I do use it and enjoy using it. I got the retro bug and well now I own more Amiga's than PC's and MAC's. Mac's I could careless about. I need a PC for work but they are just disposable throw away computers where as my Amiga's are precious to me and no I am still not into games but when I turn on an Amiga there is always a big smile on my face something I can't say about a PC.
Nice video. I think the biggest mistake Commodore and Atari made with their business machines was keeping a consumer styled motherboard for the 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000, and the MEGA / Mega STE and TT range. Instead I think they should have had a motherboard with separate slots for CPU, Graphics, Sound, and HDD interface. This would have allowed much more expansion and upgradability from both companies and third party, and also kept them competitive with IBM. Then for the consumer line, they could have periodically took the best hardware combination and implemented that in an all in one motherboard for the Amiga 2400 or whatever.
You weren't a fool at all! It's not like anyone knew back then that Amigas would suddenly become valuable again in the late future. It made sense that people sold their Amigas at the time.
I may be alone in this but the one 3D print finish that I think is sexy as hell is carbon black filament with hexagon infill. The little distortions that remain on top of the infill look really nice on external panels to me. Of course it has to be the top face of the print facing outward.
For the consumer range of Amigas, it was certainly a good thing - I have an A1200 myself, and the ability to just pop in a 2½" harddisk was something i appreciated a lot.
Awesome video. I remember in my younger years I was hell bent even into the late 90s that Amiga was far superior than the PC. The brand loyalty to it held on despite commodore ruining it. 3rd party upgrades and even big box conversions for the 1200 kept it up. But it was a one legged race sadly. Good memories though :) So did you make a mistake back then? Yes and no. Going for a PC mid 90s gave you superior hardware and a better computer, that was easy to upgrade due to modular design. But you didn't live the passion of the Amiga community. Hanging on to a hope and being part of a cause though Escom/Gateway buy outs etc that Amiga could come back against the PC giants. Or the thrills when someone created something that pushed more out of the hardware than what you ever thought possible. And you had to suffer Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Which I would take Amiga Workbench over any day ;)
Great video looking forward to the rest of the series. It's my understanding that PSU fan in the A4000is what cools the whole case. it draws air into the case from the from the holes on the back of the case near the expansion cards then the air travels across the case through the PSU and out the case. this is why like in my A3000 the fan has a high airflow rate (loud) adding the temp sensor and not maintaining the flow rate by slowing the fan /airflow to the case based on the temp of the PSU may casue hot spots in the case especially if you plan on adding upgrades in the zorro slots. I recommend replacing the original loud PSU fan with a quiet continuous speed fan that has the same CFM rating as the original to ensure proper cooling of the whole case.
I built my own PCs and kept my original A500 and Towered my A1200 (BlizzardVision PPC). Whilst adding a spare A1200 (040 still going strong), a very yellow A500, A500+, A600 and CD32.
Being an Amiga user since 1987, I remember when the A1200 & A4000 came out in mid 1992! Sure we all dreamed of having an A4000! A4000 was a rip off! Over $4000 in Australian dollars without a monitor! A1200 was very affordable! In comparison! I personally bought a CD32 with an SX1 expansion which was my first AGA Amiga! Still have it! Bought an A4000 Desktop & A4000T years later!
Yes, I remember shopping about at the same time, and had resisted the Clones until then. The socketed CPUs were being made by many vendors, so there was competition for all the pricey up-gradable components. With our tablets, phones, SBCs, and econo-PCs with 6-layer boards ... the trend is back towards integration. May have been easier for you to use an ATX with pluggable (modular) wire leads.
I got to meet Dave Haynie at VCF East a few years ago. Brilliant engineer who was singlehandedly designing many parts of the Amiga over the years. I don't know what folks were expecting clamoring for more CPU in the A4000. The most Apple shipped was a 40Mhz 68040 in the Quadra 840AV. The lack of performance from 68k is why they went with the PowerPC. The AGA chipset was too little too late though. Even though it could do 640x480 in 256 colors, performance was...... lackluster. An off the shelf PC local bus video chip from 1992 runs circles around it. No surprise the 3rd party Amiga video cards landed up using them.
I had pretty much the same Amiga to PC experience--I looked at the price of Amigas in 1993, when my Amiga 1200 was already looking a bit wimpy, and then found I could get a 40MHz 386SX based PC with VGA graphics and a hard drive for £400, and it was a no brainer. There is no way on this Earth I could have afforded near 2 grand for a high-end Amiga.
When it comes to animation and 3D creation the pc was still an also ran compared to the 4000. I managed to do so much with my dad’s 4000 and the ton of 3D software that was available. When I looked at the PC side of things, there was 3D Studio R4 and that was pretty much it. It was a brilliant creation engine.
Had an A4000/EC30 with a cyberstorm mk2 060/50 with scsi add on, and a Picasso IV with a Concierto 16 bit sound card add on in excellent condition. Sold it a good number of years back but really wished I'd kept it, especially considering how hard they seem to be to find now. Same goes for the mint boxed A600 and my original A500 with 2.5mb memory expansion. I still have a 1200 - but all the "cool" modern gadgets and cards seem to be for the other machines so far.
I always enjoy your videos, Neil, but I have to say I am extra-enjoying this series. Great content (love the history aspect you throw in) and very well, produced, as usual. Now to that A4000 I have sitting in a box somewhere.🤔
Nice! Someday I will convert my A1200 (with 2 ATA/IDE 3.5" hard-drives, Blizzard 030/82@40Mhz) into an old AT PC case with PSU... Can't remember what the original A1200 PSU had but I think it was something like 36 Watts total... and it usually worked with the old (powerhungry) IDE drives somehow... but not always and I do remember it failed more in the later years... It was done in mind of a PCMI card and one 2.5" hard-drive in mind more or less. I remember my friend buying a AmigaOne (I think it was called that) and I though that the only thing he bought was an expensive PC AT case and PSU... with fittings to mount he's Amiga motherboard... Today I wish I bought that thing :-) ----edit Was the Amiga 4000 a good thing (in my opinion :-) I think so, as I wanted one :-) you could upgrade your Amiga 1200 to Amiga 4000 speeds though but there was more "place" to do more in a Amiga 4000. AGA chipset, it was a "small" but significant upgrade. I do wish they would have added the CD32 Akiko chip (with some logic that made it faster with a chip that was like the blitter but handled chunks and interacted better with the rest of the Amiga hardware). Even though the hardware at that time was good (absolutely not superior in anyway at the time) the AmigaOS/Workbench was superior to anything. And it would (I think) would easily make it "multiuser" and MMU friendly and still compatible to older software and to the new times of computing circa 1992 and onwards. I still miss AmigaOS...
Great video yet again mate. I think it was a smart choice to use a modern PSU and keep the old shell. Great job! I should probably research how to do some maintenance on my old IBM PS\2. Doubt I can replace the insides of the PSU there since it's using a slot based connection for power to the motherboard.
Wow, TFX - I remember going to a computer show at the NEC with a friend who's dad had just bought a 486 - the purpose was to buy a sound card, CD Drive and joystick for an upgrade - they also came away with TFX which blew my mind when they spanked however many £££ on that lot - there was me still mithering for an A600 which at £299 was still a bit steep for my parents :/
I still have my 4000 desktop and my early 4000T ... +plus my 3000.... I've just taken themout of storage and am looking at having to do this stuff so "timely". thanks.
"Genuine Sanwa arcade parts" is now an expression I use and I've yet to find anyone that understands the reference. "That thing is really neat but does it have genuine Sanwa arcade parts?"
It's first question you should ask any perspective lover!
You have to pronounce it “Sanwahr”. Try that.
Update: A couple of people mentioned that the PSU PCB does not appear to be grounded to the case, and in this edit it isn't! A huge number of hours get chopped up when editing these episodes so things can be missed but I think it's important to highlight this if anyone is attempting the same mod. Please ground your board to the PSU case and perform a continuity check to make sure it is. Here's a pic of mine for reference: drive.google.com/file/d/1WMnLxt_819zh2OPhjRntfqRq0VWsr_dL/view?usp=sharing
Thank you for watching! I'm exited to share that Dave Haynie will be making an appearance in part 3 of this series which I'm working on now. All videos are released to the Patrons who support The Cave first, 1 week early with no ads. If you'd like to help support the videos I make and get perks like early access then I'd love to welcome you over at patreon.com/retromancave - Thank you for your support!
Neil - RMC
I cant find the link to the psu 24 pin adapter, its not in the description :)
on your choice of 486 upgrade - how much value does that hold now? i bet its not as much as the 4000.....
@@Caddy666 what has that got to do with anything? You do realise when people buy computers they do so to have a computer, not because it may be valuable some day? Stupidest comment I've seen in a while.
Neil, you mentioned the need for a flicker-fixer to reduce eye strain when running higher resolutions than 640x480, however I have a stock A1200 (+ 4MB FAST RAM) with a 1438S monitor, and on that combo i can comfortably use 800x600 (up to 913x626 with overscan) and the picture is just completely rock-steady. :D
Hi. I went thru the same choice in 1993, when I sold my Amiga 2000 for which the parts were really expensive, for a 486DX33 PC, soon upgraded with a 486DX2-66, a VLB graphics card, and a hard drive I couldn't afford the only controller for the A2000. Too bad Commodore, maybe you should have sourced your chipset to chinese compatible makers, and also demand Microsoft to port Excel...
"Thanks for watching, unless your name is Mehdi Ali."
I came for the computer restoration, stayed for the roast!
this video is not to be watched by Medhi Ali therby you must confirm that you are not Medhi Ali or not Associated with Medhi Ali. just like Anish Kapoor, Fuck you Medhi Ali!
In 1987 Bobby Kotick, currently of Activision Blizzard, tried to buy out Commodore but was turned down. I often wonder how that timeline would've played out.
Might as well be like swapping the plague for cholera, but we'll never know for sure.
Yeah. I also found out that one Steve Jobs talked Kotick into pursuing a career in computer software. Before that he was supposedly studying for an art degree.
Mehdi Ali put on his resume that he had overseen a turnaround at Commodore. This is certainly true: He took a $6 billion a year industry leading company and drove it into bankruptcy.
I personally blame Irving Gould, he was the one who who fired Jack and hired all the CEOs afterwards. From what I've read Gould got rich from a lucky encounter by the inventor of the shipping crate. He got his wealth through luck and he used to fly out of the US every x number of days to avoid paying tax. That's why the Pet Jet existed.
But Ali was hired obviously due to his experience (because selling sugar water means you can run a tech company lol) and the fact he sounded like Jack. He was also as rotund.
And I bet he still worked a series of increasingly lucrative CEO jobs for the rest of his career. Failing upwards is definitely a thing.
@@CantankerousDave When he was at Commodore, he was paid nearly $2 million a year. That's $12-$14 million before taxes. Some of that money is probably what allowed him and his son to start Stone Ridge Partners, which is a private equity firm that buys struggling companies, in 2013. He also sits on the board of another private equity firm.
In-between Commodore's bankruptcy in 1994 and the founding of Stone Ridge Partners in 2013, if I remember correctly, he tried to open a management consultancy business, which is where he bragged about overseeing a turnaround at Commodore. However, given that the website for his consultancy business disappeared just a few years later, I'd imagine that everybody took a look and said "turnaround at Commodore? Oh, he's _that_ guy. No thank you!" Or maybe he managed all his clients into bankruptcy too. So my guess is, he didn't start to "fail upwards" until the early 2010s. He struggled a bit (if you can call being a multi-millionaire "struggling") for a few years first.
@@SpearM3064 they were getting more $$$$$ than IBM & Apple CEO’s at the time!
@@6581punk Irving Gould and Medhi Ali both sucked Commodore dry and they both need to burn in hell for it.
THis is such a depressing memory. I was a commodore owner from the 1983 onward. I LOVED my Amigas when they first came out. It the late 80s, it was the best gaming machine you could own, and it still did everything else. Even ran MSDos if needed. But from 1990 onward, it was mistake after mistake after mistake. It became very hard to support the Amiga
The AAA chipset had 8 channel sound, chunky mode, and faster blitter. What a shame we never got it! :(
Would the sound still have been 8-bit, or would they have upped it to 16-bit?
@@BertGrink 16 bit up to 100Khz for each channel.
Someone should finish it off ;)
The best thing Commodore could have done with the AAA chipset would be to stick it on a Zorro 2 card. They could theoretically have also done a version on PCI to get in with the PC crowd but in the end that was not to be.
I read an interview with one of the engineers that worked on the chipset and he basically said it was pretty underpowered compared to the then upcoming playstation 1 and still wasnt as good as a decent pc so probably wouldnt have helped commodore in the long run.
You desoldered the remnants of the old power supply cables which means you didn't really need to cut the cables in the first place. Thanks for the video. These Amiga related videos keep making me want to drag my A2000 with its 68030 CPU card out of its box and get it running again.
RMC "Please don't hate me for doing that"
ME "I hate him for doing that"
It seems like Ex-Pepsi people were a menace to the computer industry.
@Dr ROLFCOPTER! It looks like they are trained to stick with their magical "sugar water" recipe and fear to make changes. Which obviously do not apply to a fast paced, innovative industry.
the engineers gave Ali the best mousetrap the world had ever seen up to that date. Unfortunately Ali didn't have the slightest clue what a mousetrap was...
Read Alis bloomberg profile, he writes he turned Commodore around. He threatens people with legal action if they say otherwise. He was hired as he looked and acted like Tramiel.
when out of the can they loose all the "fizzing" , not good anymore.
@@6581punk Well, I suppose he kind of did. He turned it from a company with a history and a future into one that was simply history.
I always thought David Pleasance and Jeremy Beadle were the same guy. I didn't know about him when I was a daily Amiga user but he's been pretty active since the retro stuff started and I kept wondering why Jeremy Beadle was in loads of videos about Amigas.
Now there's an image, David Pleasance pushing your transit van off a dock.
@@vix_in_japan Lol! As long as the van is full of Atari ST's
Watch out, Pleasance's About?
@@Kumimono You better watch out, because Pleasance is about...
Well David has 2 well proportioned hands for a start......
Another excellent video. I was in the same position as you in the 90s, but I had (and still have) a 1200. I would have loved to upgrade to a big box Amiga, but I had just started a degree, and *really* needed a PC, and only enough money to upgrade my Amiga or buy a PC. I was starting a degree, and as I needed a PC to complete my studies, I had no choice really.
Regarding Commodore, they always seemed like a company that consisted of a *lot* of excellent engineers backed up by ineffectual or incompetent management and bad marketing. Not, that's at an international level. Commodore UK actually had good management, and fairly effective marketing, although I felt their efforts were often hampered by a lack of support from Commodore International.
I have a Ryzen 5 based PC now which is hundreds of times more powerful than my Amiga 1200, and also a Macbook. While I like both, I felt more for my Amiga than either. They are just tools. Tools that I work and (in the case of my PC) I play on, but just tools. My Amiga felt almost like a companion on an adventure.
Is the Amiga the Alfa Romeo of computers I wonder 😄
I bought an A1200 when it came out and was quite happy with it as well. I found myself in a similar position with needing a PC for education purposes within a few short years though. Had I possessed psychic foresight I would have traded in my original A500 for a used A2000 or A3000 instead of getting the A1200 and I could have just bought a 486 bridgecard for half the price of what I ended up spending on a PC and kept the Amiga dream alive a little longer in my life. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.
@@RMCRetro I think it is..
That PSU upgrade was a lot of work!
My philosophy is that the only things like to fail in a PSU within my lifetime are the electrolytic caps, so a recap should get it through at least another 30 years. Fan bearings can go too of course but I tend to cross that bridge when I get there, i.e. replace the fan when it gets noisy.
Priced to Fly - priceless advert in a hilarious way XD
As a kid in the US I was the only person I knew with an Amiga. These videos make me miss my 2500 Video Toaster equipped big box. I ultimately switched to a pc compatible in the 90s when Amiga in the US was long dead. But I was so upset when my family donated my Amiga.
Former A1200 owner here... it was a great machine and I had the zappo external CD drive for it to play CD32 games. good times back then. Walker is still one of my fondest memories.
Got my old A4000 out of storage. Thanks for this video to motiavte me to repair it!
This is an amazing series! I can't wait for the next parts!
I was an A3000 owner when the A4000 was released, and Commodore's product line was a major disappointment. The system was nothing like the rumors we had read about AAA and could not match the graphics that were already available in the IBM compatible market. The lack of a built-in flicker-fixer and SCSI on the A4000 just poured salt in the wounds, and so the computer that replaced my A3000 was a Pentium. I still miss the Amiga Workbench and boot it up in emulation regularly to mess with the software I wrote from the Amiga or to play a game of Stunt Car Racer or Pinball Fantasies.
I question whether what killed Commodore was the guy who put Mehdi in charge (Irving Gould) since the company could have made it years and possibly decades longer with proper R&D funding and not killing off the projects that were pushing the platform forward.
I remember when I came to upgrade from an A500 I faced a similar choice. However, at the time, there were quite a lot of people upgrading from the 1200 to PC so 1200s were available second hand for only around £200 - £250. So that's what I went for in the end and I had a couple of happy years with it.
Commodore never failed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory
Fantastic re-purposing of the original PSU shell using a modern PSU.
I don't regret buying my A1200 in 1993. Glorious - and a machine that maybe never full-filled its promise. But now I am glad about GOG because I can go back and see what I missed.. ah, being a retro gamer is sooooo comforting.
I was looking for a new high-end PC at the time... the Amiga unfortunately was absolutely no competition. So I built from components a 486 machine, with a Soundblaster and Tseng Labs ET4000-W32, and used it as a Unix workstation - Linux by then supported some ethernet cards, the ET4000, the Soundblaster, and felt more nippy than the Unix workstations we had at uni. It was nerd heaven.
I know that pain leaving! I started Amigas back at the beginning, having perhaps the third (?) A1000 in the East Coast as I worked as a buyer for a major electronics retailer. Later, I worked for a Colorado-based Amiga hardware manufacturer and had a 2000 with the fastest '030 then available. I had years invested in the Amiga, what seemed like dozens of magazines over the years and a few hundred 3.5" floppies...but, that Christmas season, when Commodore's big TV push was a kid being visited by Buzz Aldren?!?...I had had enough. Watching it all dwindle away, while my work increasingly pushed me towards more powerful software on the Mac...I sold everything just before the holiday (for slightly more than I paid for the computer, evil that I was then) and jumped ship to the beige side, bought a used Quadra 800 and never looked back.
Just hearing the name Mehdi Ali still makes me angry, 30 years later.
You and me both. It's an instant blood pressure spike to read or hear his name.
Fuck Irving Gould too for driving Jack Tramiel out of his own creation and allowing all the disasterous CEOs including Ali to be hired.
Mini van, amigo is just slow as hell as a "mini VAN"
Just seen a new release on amiga recently so it still lives
Back in the 90s I modified a Supermicro server case to house my A4000/060+Toaster/Flyer/KitchenSync, and about 6 years ago I installed an SSD drive. This was a follow-up to my modifying a tower case to house an A2000/Blizzard060. The two systems are still in my home office.
Yet again Neil providing a fab history lesson now I know what happen to commodore and here is me thinking after all these years it was David Pleasance
Speaking of David I have him booked in for a chat in a few weeks, looking forward to it. C= UK has a reputation for being one of the better arms of the company when it came to marketing and organisation, but they weren't calling the hardware shots
@@RMCRetro I will look forward to that Neil
I nearly cried when Commodore went under, I had always been an Amiga fan. I always wondered what Commodore could of achieved if they had stayed around, but we will never know. Great vid cant wait for next one.
I support you replacing the insides of the power supply, and am glad you said you'd keep the original contents safe for posterity.
I replaced the electrolytic capacitors on a Timex/Sinclair 1000 with ceramics and taped the old electrolytics to the board in the old positions so that people could see what was originally in place.
Great mod with the PSU! I was originally in the "repair and keep the original" camp but I loved the way you did it, super clean and clever.
Something Commodore easily could (and should have) done was upgrade the Paula chip. It was fantastic in the 1985-1990 era but was slowly beeing superseded by the competition. The Archimedes has 8 channels of PCM audio, so did the SNES and the Sega Mega CD. Why didn’t they put two Paula chips in the A1200 and CD-32? It would have complimented the AGA chipset nicely. It feels like Commodore somehow overlooked this by their management decisions.
If you were serious about computing and it's business / productivity uses in the future, the only road was PC. The serious software alone was enough, for me it was commercial sign making, accounting software and vector and pixel based design software. If you could afford both, well that would be rare.
8:17 Ha! Thunder Board! That was my very first sound card. I remember putting it into my Amstrad PC1512 and firing up "Prince of Persia" and having my 5th grade mind blown when the intro music started playing LOL.
As a power supply tester I can only recommend to replace the old power supplies if this is possible. I would have done it similar to you in the video. But I think there are better power supplies that have stronger 5V lines. From experience I can say that many high quality power supplies not only withstand much higher loads but are also so developed. The power supplies are then limited to the 100W 3,3&5V Combined Power. One reason is the 80% certification, the 12V line is more efficient so the manufacturer can also achieve higher efficiencies and certification. The problem is to see from the outside if the power supply can deliver only 100W or even 150W without problems.
I'll see if I can find a link to the power supplies that are better suited for such projects
.
BR Thomas
@Deep Throat I haven't tested it but for smaller retro systems this industrial power supply might be interesting. It only has 12V & 5V and 54W.
If more power is needed I can check the test protocols which power supplies can handle stabile higher loads at 5V.
asset.conrad.com/media10/add/160267/c1/-/en/001293114DS01/datenblatt-1293114-mean-well-rd-50a-acdc-netzteilbaustein-geschlossen-54-w.pdf
My first Amiga was the original 500 and I upgraded it quite a lot over several years. From there I went to a 2000 with the slightly upgraded chipset and CPU upgrades. I was doing professional graphics for video production. Used several different 3D animation programs and eventually went to Lightwave for all of the 3D work. I couldn't wait for the A4000 to come out, but waited for the 68040 upgrade. I was initially very impressed with the machine. I was actually happy to have the IDE drive interface, as the drives were WAY cheaper and capacity/$ was a bigger priority for me. I seem to recall there were better tape backup options too (I had a DAT backup drive). Anyway, as you pointed out, PC's were rapidly becoming faster and cheaper. When Lightwave was released for PC I bought a 486 box mostly for rendering, but it slowly became the primary design machine too. For rendering in particular, the 486 was significantly faster. Somewhere around '93-94 I ended up selling my A4000 and demand was so high that I got back pretty much all the money I had put into it! It was a sad day when I retired my last Amiga.
I so so SO shared your pain, brother. By 1991 my precious Amiga 500, expanded by an insanely noisy 20mb HDD (Not even in a sidecart but kept in a seperate box outside the sidecart that held the boot-ROMs) just didn't cut the mustard any longer. That 7Mhz CPU was worthless when trying to run games ported from the PC used to not utilizing the Amiga's custom chips but just the brute force of the CPU made a mockery of the A500 by running grapical gems like King's Quest V or Wing Commander in 16 colour mode at 1/4 the speed of the average 286/386 of the day. An A1200 or A4000 would have been a short term upgrade, but I knew it wouldn't be enough. And my HDD was so loud it could give one headaches just running. When accessing data you could hear it 2 rooms away, and 20mb was just not big enough when Ultima VI could eat up 1/4 of the entire HDD. I had to give in and sell it to combine with my savings enough money for my first PC, rocking an AMD 386DX-40 Mhz CPU, 4mb of RAM, a 105mb internal HDD and an SVGA card capable of 1024x768 resolution at 256 colours as well as supporting a VESA 2.0 framebuffer in himem (gave a good 10% performance increase in games like Wolf3D and eventually Doom) and I cursed Medhi Ali regularly for gutting Commodore's R&D, especially as the proposed AAA chipset would have sent the Amiga's 3D graphics capability into Sega Saturn territory by 1995 with a 68060 or PPC CPU. (sigh)
Very nice PSU surgery, sleeper components (especially when modded into original cases) can be a fantastic upgrade for vintage stuff.
Living in the Midwest USA, I had not heard of Amiga until almost 2000. My first computer at home was a VIC20. My best friend had a C64 and found Elite early on. I craved the power of the C64. I was not allowed to touch the IBM pcs at school because of the things I was able to do with the Apple II and IIGS in elementry and middle school.
When I got to college we were required to have a computer, specifically Mac, which I guess is unusual for an engineering school. One of the guys that was going for his master in computer science while going for comp engineering had a C64 hooked up to a surround sound system and had GEOS running. I fell for the C64 again and almost got a C128 when I went shopping for a better Mac. This was around 93. I stayed Mac and then Mac & Linux till Mac os X got to be an annual "gives us your money for update" I think it was panther. Now I am Linux exclusive, but I wish Commodore had kept going. I liked coding on them better than Pc or Mac or even Apple II.
Wow I'm absolutely loving this series. The history combined with the fixing up of old hardware is just perfect. Growing up in America as I barely heard of an Amiga at the time, and it's really interesting getting a survey of their landscape at the time.
When i read first of the A600 (and A4000) in a Magazine it was "April" so i thought, it has to be a bad joke. I had already changed to PC with a 386DX33 and DX40 from my A2000, because the A3000 was so expansive and one year later at that time owned the 486DX2-66 with 16MB Ram in 1994, when i was 18 years old. The 8MB Ram Expansion cost me 800 DM, i remember well.
I paid all that stuff from selling about 3000 pcs of 3,5" discs in Posso-Media-Boxes from the Amiga. There was no chance for coming back to the Amiga. Later i bought A600 for 50 Euro in 2002, just for some fun. I was surprised about the small thing by the way.
I really lusted after an A4000 back when I had my A1200. A bit ironic because my A1200 had an '030 accelerator, fast RAM and a hard drive. So for general use and gaming, it was essentially identical to a big box Amiga, as long as you didn't need to use any of the expansion ports.
ditto :-)
awesome job! always wanted to do this to a gorgeous sony vaio case a relative gave me, the psu is a proprietary shape with two pegs that lock the whole case together.
As a casual consumer of retro tech videos, I don't know too much about the Commodore Amiga history. It was unfortunate I had to learn of Mehdi Ali's existence and his unfortunate impact on computing history.
My brother and I have a large Amiga tower with 68060, Picasso IV and disk drives (including 5.25") that could write disks for many systems. Eyetech said its the most work they have ever done hooked up to A1200 on its side. Cost a fortune with our expensive multi-sync monitor. Now it's sat in my brothers bedroom too worried to switch it on in case it pops!
I am always stuck between original and longevity/usefulness. I like your rationale for this video with the PSU. Thank you for the good video.
I made the step up from A500 to A1200. Later I upgraded the A1200 with Bizzard PPC 060/603e board in the horrific plastic infinitiv 1200 tower and added a Catweasel and a Picasso IV. I loved that computer and only sold it to raise funds to move. I ended up with a PC next after commodore imploded. Amiga could have been even greater 😫it was legendary in the A500/A1200 era.
Another great video! I was tempted by the A4000, but my A3000 was still serving me quite well. I was in wait and see mode from '93 until Commodore went belly up, trying to decide between upgrading to an AGA machine or not... Then she. They went under my decision was made for me.
Now that I own an A4000 I really love it!
I saw that the old PSU case is grounded, but in the design, the original PSU PCB would also have been grounded through the stand-offs and possibly another lug connection. You really do need to ground a switch mode PSU as leakage currents are normally present, leading to the possibility of a shock off of metal parts of the Amiga. The new PSU will have a ground point on it and also the holes for the stand-offs will also be connected to that ground. I'd do this sooner rather than later....
I'll certainly go and triple check that thank you
I got an Amiga4000 and it was my main machine well in to the new millennium and was quite heavily expanded. I even got a complete new mother board so now have two, one in the original case and my expanded one in a full tower case. I would have loved it to have had AAA that was a great loss. So yes Damn you Mehdi Ali.
nice job done dude...👍
love these trash to treasure series.
I had literally just watched the first part and sat there saying just stick a SFF PC PSU inside it..glad to see you did.
Word to the wise for people on a restricted budget the HP/Delta SFF PSU's can be had for under £20 for units a couple of years old and for less than £6 on fleabay if you don't mind one 5-6 years old.... you just have to desolder the modern sata and pcie connectors just like you did.
I used one to repair an old philips industrial vision system last week...I had to make the mounting from polycarbonate sheet....I wish my workplace would buy a 3d printer ..but tbh using flat polycarbonate was probably quicker anyway.
Honestly I was happy with my A2000 which ran my BBS until 1997 when I took it down due to lack of activity because by then everyone was using the internet. Signs of the times. Long before that I had migrated over to the PC because I got more bang for my buck then what Commodore had to offer but mostly because I needed compatibility with work and that was all PC. I was never much into games for me it was always productivity and telecommunications. The Amiga served me well back them and I can remember my PC friends would often say their computer was more powerful than my A2000 but they could never understand why I could do much more then they could until Win95 then they would call me to let me know now they could multitask and my reply was the Amiga was doing it in hardware not software but as time moved forward I was with everyone else using PC's for work. I kept my A2000 and its still alive and well and I do use it and enjoy using it. I got the retro bug and well now I own more Amiga's than PC's and MAC's. Mac's I could careless about. I need a PC for work but they are just disposable throw away computers where as my Amiga's are precious to me and no I am still not into games but when I turn on an Amiga there is always a big smile on my face something I can't say about a PC.
I was an Amiga fan forever. The thing that turned me was a video of Alone in the dark (Featuring Peter Molyneux). I saved really hard for that 486.
@referral madness Ha, yes that does sound Ironic. I do miss those playground arguments though.
220V making it's way into the Amiga 4000 is 'worse still' than going into you. Now, that's love and devotion if I ever heard it. ;-)
Nice work. I think it is better to place the sensor directly on the aluminum heatsink.
Nice video. I think the biggest mistake Commodore and Atari made with their business machines was keeping a consumer styled motherboard for the 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000, and the MEGA / Mega STE and TT range. Instead I think they should have had a motherboard with separate slots for CPU, Graphics, Sound, and HDD interface. This would have allowed much more expansion and upgradability from both companies and third party, and also kept them competitive with IBM. Then for the consumer line, they could have periodically took the best hardware combination and implemented that in an all in one motherboard for the Amiga 2400 or whatever.
What a nice exquisite job on that psu. I have my atx using the 3d printed bracket that you showed but may revisit this. thanks
I miss my A3000 so much. I never should have traded it. What a fool I was! LOL
You weren't a fool at all! It's not like anyone knew back then that Amigas would suddenly become valuable again in the late future. It made sense that people sold their Amigas at the time.
With a series this good I just had to watch it again. No doubt I'll be back soon, looking forward to the next episode.
I may be alone in this but the one 3D print finish that I think is sexy as hell is carbon black filament with hexagon infill.
The little distortions that remain on top of the infill look really nice on external panels to me. Of course it has to be the top face of the print facing outward.
these videos are the closest I'll ever get to one of these beauties (basic salary sucks:p)
@Phil Low a few thousands if you can find one
Im so happy Commodore added IDE instead of SCSI drives
For the consumer range of Amigas, it was certainly a good thing - I have an A1200 myself, and the ability to just pop in a 2½" harddisk was something i appreciated a lot.
Another classy video! I am a big fan of the presentation style!
Excellent!
Awesome video. I remember in my younger years I was hell bent even into the late 90s that Amiga was far superior than the PC. The brand loyalty to it held on despite commodore ruining it. 3rd party upgrades and even big box conversions for the 1200 kept it up. But it was a one legged race sadly. Good memories though :)
So did you make a mistake back then? Yes and no. Going for a PC mid 90s gave you superior hardware and a better computer, that was easy to upgrade due to modular design. But you didn't live the passion of the Amiga community. Hanging on to a hope and being part of a cause though Escom/Gateway buy outs etc that Amiga could come back against the PC giants. Or the thrills when someone created something that pushed more out of the hardware than what you ever thought possible. And you had to suffer Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Which I would take Amiga Workbench over any day ;)
man, I love your selection of music you have on your videos, it would be great to see your playlist!
I shall add it to the video description now
I had to pause and walk away at the 9:00 minute mark. Ugggghhhhhhhh. Just the name Mehdi Ali makes my blood burn.
I like that 3d print plate that goes inside the original psu case! I would like to buy some of them.
Great video looking forward to the rest of the series. It's my understanding that PSU fan in the A4000is what cools the whole case. it draws air into the case from the from the holes on the back of the case near the expansion cards then the air travels across the case through the PSU and out the case. this is why like in my A3000 the fan has a high airflow rate (loud) adding the temp sensor and not maintaining the flow rate by slowing the fan /airflow to the case based on the temp of the PSU may casue hot spots in the case especially if you plan on adding upgrades in the zorro slots. I recommend replacing the original loud PSU fan with a quiet continuous speed fan that has the same CFM rating as the original to ensure proper cooling of the whole case.
Thank you for the high standard videos you are doing in your channel. Greetings from Greece. Keep up the good work!
I built my own PCs and kept my original A500 and Towered my A1200 (BlizzardVision PPC).
Whilst adding a spare A1200 (040 still going strong), a very yellow A500, A500+, A600 and CD32.
background music is great ..
It is! Wish I knew who made it
Greetings from Canada! Love your Amiga videos - subbed.
I would say that preserving the lifetime of the machine takes precedence, so a new PSU is my personal choice. Great video!
Being an Amiga user since 1987, I remember when the A1200 & A4000 came out in mid 1992! Sure we all dreamed of having an A4000!
A4000 was a rip off! Over $4000 in Australian dollars without a monitor!
A1200 was very affordable! In comparison!
I personally bought a CD32 with an SX1 expansion which was my first AGA Amiga!
Still have it!
Bought an A4000 Desktop & A4000T years later!
Great video yet again. I'll be watching the Deathbed Vigil in preparation for next episode. Great stuff.
Yes, I remember shopping about at the same time, and had resisted the Clones until then. The socketed CPUs were being made by many vendors, so there was competition for all the pricey up-gradable components. With our tablets, phones, SBCs, and econo-PCs with 6-layer boards ... the trend is back towards integration. May have been easier for you to use an ATX with pluggable (modular) wire leads.
While I was watching this Video. I played Tracker Songs on Milkytracker for Windows CE on my hp iPAQ H4155.
I repaired my A 4000 PS the same way except for the printed plastic piece. I bought a PAL machine and I live in Canada.
Really enjoyed - thanks for the video!
Very interesting to learn more about the Amiga...
That's my kind of update! I approve!
No way. Amiga power supplies should live in cardboard shoeboxes. I learned that from Aaron. ;-)
I got to meet Dave Haynie at VCF East a few years ago. Brilliant engineer who was singlehandedly designing many parts of the Amiga over the years.
I don't know what folks were expecting clamoring for more CPU in the A4000. The most Apple shipped was a 40Mhz 68040 in the Quadra 840AV. The lack of performance from 68k is why they went with the PowerPC.
The AGA chipset was too little too late though. Even though it could do 640x480 in 256 colors, performance was...... lackluster. An off the shelf PC local bus video chip from 1992 runs circles around it. No surprise the 3rd party Amiga video cards landed up using them.
remember to ground the posts of the psu otherwise those caps do nothing .(the ones that need doing anyway)
:)
Another tremendous video. Really well done Neil and expert Soldering skills. Really enjoying this series.
I had pretty much the same Amiga to PC experience--I looked at the price of Amigas in 1993, when my Amiga 1200 was already looking a bit wimpy, and then found I could get a 40MHz 386SX based PC with VGA graphics and a hard drive for £400, and it was a no brainer. There is no way on this Earth I could have afforded near 2 grand for a high-end Amiga.
You made the right choice, same thing happened to me.
When it comes to animation and 3D creation the pc was still an also ran compared to the 4000. I managed to do so much with my dad’s 4000 and the ton of 3D software that was available. When I looked at the PC side of things, there was 3D Studio R4 and that was pretty much it. It was a brilliant creation engine.
Very nice PSU Mod, like it, good work!
Had an A4000/EC30 with a cyberstorm mk2 060/50 with scsi add on, and a Picasso IV with a Concierto 16 bit sound card add on in excellent condition. Sold it a good number of years back but really wished I'd kept it, especially considering how hard they seem to be to find now. Same goes for the mint boxed A600 and my original A500 with 2.5mb memory expansion.
I still have a 1200 - but all the "cool" modern gadgets and cards seem to be for the other machines so far.
I always enjoy your videos, Neil, but I have to say I am extra-enjoying this series. Great content (love the history aspect you throw in) and very well, produced, as usual. Now to that A4000 I have sitting in a box somewhere.🤔
Nice! Someday I will convert my A1200 (with 2 ATA/IDE 3.5" hard-drives, Blizzard 030/82@40Mhz) into an old AT PC case with PSU... Can't remember what the original A1200 PSU had but I think it was something like 36 Watts total... and it usually worked with the old (powerhungry) IDE drives somehow... but not always and I do remember it failed more in the later years... It was done in mind of a PCMI card and one 2.5" hard-drive in mind more or less.
I remember my friend buying a AmigaOne (I think it was called that) and I though that the only thing he bought was an expensive PC AT case and PSU... with fittings to mount he's Amiga motherboard... Today I wish I bought that thing :-)
----edit
Was the Amiga 4000 a good thing (in my opinion :-)
I think so, as I wanted one :-) you could upgrade your Amiga 1200 to Amiga 4000 speeds though but there was more "place" to do more in a Amiga 4000.
AGA chipset, it was a "small" but significant upgrade. I do wish they would have added the CD32 Akiko chip (with some logic that made it faster with a chip that was like the blitter but handled chunks and interacted better with the rest of the Amiga hardware).
Even though the hardware at that time was good (absolutely not superior in anyway at the time) the AmigaOS/Workbench was superior to anything. And it would (I think) would easily make it "multiuser" and MMU friendly and still compatible to older software and to the new times of computing circa 1992 and onwards. I still miss AmigaOS...
Excellent episode, thanks!
Looking forward to part 3!
I think you made the right call replacing the internals of the PSU 🙂
Nice modern stable power! Protecting the rare internals
Great video yet again mate. I think it was a smart choice to use a modern PSU and keep the old shell. Great job! I should probably research how to do some maintenance on my old IBM PS\2. Doubt I can replace the insides of the PSU there since it's using a slot based connection for power to the motherboard.
Wow, TFX - I remember going to a computer show at the NEC with a friend who's dad had just bought a 486 - the purpose was to buy a sound card, CD Drive and joystick for an upgrade - they also came away with TFX which blew my mind when they spanked however many £££ on that lot - there was me still mithering for an A600 which at £299 was still a bit steep for my parents :/
Always enjoyable to watch, waiting for the next one! Love seeing these refurbished and given new life
I still have my 4000 desktop and my early 4000T ... +plus my 3000.... I've just taken themout of storage and am looking at having to do this stuff so "timely". thanks.