Het (Home)Computermuseum

Al een tijd loop ik diverse beurzen en bijeenkomsten af welke over oude computers gaat, oftewel Retro Computing. Ikzelf ben rond mijn 10e levensjaar begonnen met het verzamelen van oude computers, begonnen bij een Tandy TRS80 Colour Computer 2 en een Philips P2000-C. Op mijn 16e had ik rond de 35 computers staan en heb kort hierna een besluit genomen om alle oude computers van de hand te doen (spijt van).

Tot grofweg 2010 had ik geen oude(re) computers meer in huis. Tot het moment dat ik bij een vriend kwam wie oude consoles verzamelt. Ik was onder de indruk en merkte op dat er geen Amiga CDTV en CD32 bij stond. Hij claimde deze niet te kunnen vinden. Het bleef een beetje vreten aan mij en ik besloot dat ik weer een Amiga wilde. Via een oproep op Twitter verkreeg ik ineens 3 Amiga’s en via verkopen en hiermee aankopen zit ik op het moment van schrijven op ruim 40 computers van allerlei soort.

Mensen die mij kennen weten ook dat ik altijd een ondernemend persoon ben. Eerst via weirdalforum.com, daarna drumforum.nl en daarop in diverse bands. Altijd een commerciële instelling gehad.

In het afgelopen jaar merkte ik op dat retrocomputing in een opmars bezig is en is mijn brein gaan werken tot het concept van een HomeComputerMuseum.

Het concept is om een interactief museum te maken, waarbij zoveel mogelijk computers aan staan en klaar voor gebruik. Mensen komen binnen en gaan een tijdreis maken met computers, inclusief bijbehorende sfeer zoals kamers ingericht tot bijvoorbeeld slaapkamer uit de jaren 80, inclusief oude TV, meubels, posters en uiteraard een computer op de grond, aangesloten en speelklaar.

Aangezien ik met iets meer dan 40 computers dit niet voor elkaar kan krijgen, ga ik gebruik maken van mijn netwerk van retro-computer verzamelaars. Ik heb hun het aanbod gedaan om hun verzameling uit te lenen aan het museum, waarbij er uiteraard contracten en foto’s worden getekend en gemaakt zodat de machine weer terug komt in de staat waarbij deze aan het museum is uitgeleend. Dit in ruil in het begin voor gratis onbeperkt toegang tot het museum, later wellicht ook tegen een bijdrage.

Naast deze zaken heb ik mij in de afgelopen periode enorm laten informeren door mensen met ervaring op zowel zakelijk vlak, als persoonlijk. Hieruit zijn ook weer een aantal zaken naar voren gekomen waarmee ik aan de gang ben gegaan.

Halverwege oktober 2016 had ik het plan op papier staan en heb een afspraak gepland met een ambtenaar van de gemeente Helmond. Telefonisch mijn plan doorgegeven en er werd enthousiast op gereageerd, helemaal omdat Helmond ook de plek en gelegenheid heeft om een museum neer te zetten.

Begin november 2016 heb ik 2 ambtenaren over de vloer gehad welke beide het gesprek begonnen, wij hebben niks met computers. Ondanks dit, hebben ze na het uitgebreid horen van mijn plan en een aantal voorbeelden in mijn huidige ‘museum’ erg enthousiast gereageerd en zaten vol met ideeen om het concept tot een werkelijkheid te laten maken.

Hierop is er begin 2017 een afspraak gepland met de eindverantwoordelijke wethouder voor cultuur en subsidies hierover.

Ondertussen zit ik natuurlijk niet stil en heb inmiddels een zeer uitgebreide lijst met vrijwilligers die computers willen uitlenen of mij op een andere manier willen helpen. Hulp blijft en is nog steeds welkom overigens, neem dus rustig contact met mij op. Één van de meestbelovende connecties welke ik gemaakt heb, is met het reeds bestaande Bonami spelcomputermuseum, ik ben namelijk meer van het samenwerken in plaats van elkaar tegenwerken, want daar wordt niemand beter van. Hierover heb ik op zeer korte termijn een afspraak en zodra er iets te melden is, zal ik dat via deze blog doen en Facebook doen.

Dank voor het lezen en ik hoor graag als je iets wilt bijdragen aan het museum, dat kan op allerlei manier! Tot snel!

June 2016 Haul of Retro Computers

Last 2 weeks, my retro computer collection has been expanded quite much. It all began with my TRS80 Model 1 where I’ve met Kees Stravers who adviced me to join the CVML-mailinglist (and where I finally got a mailaddress from Rence). Back then he asked me if I could help to clean his garage and which in exchange I could take care of his few Tandy’s.

But before we go to that, beginning of June 2016 there was a Bonami Gaming fair in Eindhoven. I figured to go take a look for once where I found a bargain in a very yellow Atari 1040ST-F. On my way home I passed a carboot-sale where I got a Philips P3105 and a Schneider PC. So, within a few hours I suddenly owned 3 new computers.

A week passed and last Friday I went to Kees his house. His garage still needed some cleaning, but most things were already done and he saw the Tandy Model 4 which I could pick up and take care of it:

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It definately needs some TLC. I haven’t turned it on just yet since I want to make sure I won’t let the white smoke come out of it.

Other than this machine, I took 2 TRS80 Model 1 (both 48K/Level-II basic), 1 expansion interface mainboard inserted into a homemade case, 1 homemade expansion interface using modules, a TRS80 Disk Drive (NOS), a Philips P2000T, an IBM CGA monitor and a Tandy Monitor. A beautiful collection including some very nice documentation I’ve never seen.

Thank you very much Kees! Thank you for everything and let me know if I ever can repay this 🙂

 

New retro computers

Last few months actually I haven’t blogged at all. Mostly because I feel I don’t have readers, but also because I didn’t have much to tell which I though would be worth writing a blog about. But since a few things have changed in the past 3 months, I reckon a new blog post should be made. It will be a short one, because somewhere later this week I’ll have even a bigger update.

To start with end of 2015 when I was busy learning to sing and I found a nice accelerator card for my Amiga 2000 on Amibay giving my A2000 a fast 68030 with coprocessor, a SCSI connection and 4MB additional RAM. I built in this card and it ran, but I didn’t have any SCSI devices (cables rather) so I ordered a SCSI2SD thing plus the necessary cable from amikit which is still not built in today. So, there will be an update on that at some point.

When I was on the bi-monthly Commodore meeting held by ‘Commodore interessegroep‘ I somehow craved to own a Tandy and put Tandy on the map in the Netherlands. I even wrote a Dutch blog about it on Tweakers.net. Especially because Tandy is one of the 3 very first homecomputers back in 1977. Since I already own a Tandy 200 laptop and used to own a Tandy TRS80 Color  Computer 2, I figured I wanted to have the latter. So, I started to search for one and actually found one in the Netherlands. After a very long time due Kiala fucking up my package, my brand ‘new’ Tandy arrived (see here). So, my first few months of 2016 is about playing with this beautiful machine and so far I’m filling my Youtube channel with videos of this.

Then, somehow.. I found an elderly person in the Netherlands owning a 1978 Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 complete including ‘Expansion Interface’ and original monitor and loads (and I mean loads) of documentation. So, a 2 hour drive to the other side of the Netherlands and picked up this machine:

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As you can see, it’s quite much and the machine isn’t working.

So, after some questioning around I joined the online community Vintage Computer Forum and, more importantly, a Dutch mailinglist with retro computing enthusiast. Up till then, I didn’t know mailing lists were still used but I guess I learn every day.

I asked why the Tandy didn’t boot on this mailing list and I learned that this screen is quite normal, but should disappear when the BREAK-key is pressed (and it doesn’t). Luckily for me, one of the people over there knows that there’s a bi-monthly meeting of TRS80 enthusiasts nearby Amsterdam and he got me in contact with one of the people doing that, also happens to be the creator of one of the many mods done on this Tandy. Upcoming Thurday I’ll attend this meeting and hopefully make a nice blog from this machine.

Thanks for reading and I’d love to read comments (via Facebook, Twitter or drop me a mail) and I hope everybody will join my Retro Computers channel on Youtube, the more subscribers I have, the more I’m gonna make videos.

MorphOS install

Since I’m a big fan of Amiga’s, the MorphOS operating system got my attention since it runs on Apple’s PPC macs (so, Powermac, Powerbook, Mini’s etc). I thought to give it a try, so I did. I got me an old 350Mhz Powermac G4 (generously donated by my friend David) and I installed MorphOS 3.4 (back then that was the latest). My first try was using the CD-drive which is kinda hard if you have a Macbook Air and no CD-burner, but I reinstalled an old PC and could actually burn it. My second try was using an USB-boot. Lucky, MorphOS made a guide for this.

I recorded my first try (using a CD) and put it on youtube. Everything looked fine, but there was no audio. My final goal is to have a system which looks the same as the old Amiga, feels the same as an old Amiga, but doesn’t require (often brittle) hardware of 20 years old. Without audio, well.. that’s a big miss on an emulator.

I started to look around and came across a nice Powerbook G4 and according to the HWC-list it was a supported one! Awesome. I went to pick it up (it even included a new battery) and installed MorphOS. Guess what? Same problem! Apparently, this PowerBook 1,0 867Mhz doesn’t support audio (doh) while the 1Ghz model does. And ofcourse I had the 867Mhz version. Another useless Mac around (which is now running Debian btw).

Around Xmas we have this nice giveaway and I decided to donate my PowerMac G4 to one of the users at AmigaScene.nl so he could play with it and I left trying MorphOS for now.

Why are you making this blog then? Well.. Another person decided to give me another PowerMac G4:

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Here it is, on the right side. Also I got this nice Apple Cinema Display with the ADC-connector. The guy who donated me the PowerMac 3,5 decided to put in another video card without ADC-connector. So my new quest was to get either a videocard with ADC or a convertor. I decided to go for the latter so I can use the Display on other computers as well.

A few days later I found one (secondhand) for a decent price so installing could begin? No, the PowerMac didn’t have a harddisk and I recently threw away all my P-ATA harddisks >_<. Thanks to the nice people at Tweakers.net I got myself a few (free) P-ATA harddisks. I received them a few days ago and yesterday I found time to get this package together to make a working system. I also created a video for this at youtube.

It seems that the MorphOS 3.2 I’m trying to install is really slow (not sure where the problem is here). Also I can’t hear audio (could be because MorphOS doesn’t support audio out from the Internal speaker). It’s shouldn’t be a problem of the hardware. This PowerMac 3,5 has an 800Mhz CPU, 1.5GB of RAM, 160GB HDD and an ATI 128Mb videocard. In the next few days I’ll try to install the latest MorphOS and I’ll keep this website updated.

A Few Hours Later:

Since I created this post, I’ve been trying to get my old PowerBook G4 booting using USB and found out that the Open Firmware doesn’t actually like booting of a 8GB USB disk. I got it booting something, but it just didn’t continue. So, I cracked open my drawer and found an empty CD-recordable. Using my Windows 8.1 machine I burned the ISO to this disk and I went installing MorphOS 3.7.

Guess what, all problems disappeared AND I have sound. Even more surprising, I added an Airport compatible card (that’s what it said) and everything is working, even sound. Oddly enough, it somehow sees if something is connected on the mini-Jack in the back. Without anything connected, it doesn’t make sound. So, I plugged in an empty miniJack plug and sound is coming from the speaker in front of the Mac.

Obviously, I made a video because I’m proud to finally get MorphOS up & running! Now I’m gonna connect it to my home wlan-network (!) and start to make a ‘modern’ Amiga a-like system.

 

Old computer collection

A long long time ago I used to own up to 38 (!) homecomputers as part of my collection. Including several Amiga’s (A500, A600HD, A1200, CDTV), Philips MSX, Apple Macintosh, Philips P2000’s and last but not least, Tandy. It started when I found a Philips P2000-C in a secondhand shop and I was intrigued by the system itself. The green-screen, the unknown. It took me a few weeks before I finally got it to boot into CP/M thanks to the HCC. I’m talking about 1995-ish..

Moved several times and needed the room for my growing drum kit(s) I basically sold everything or gave it away to museums, which I mostly regret nowadays. But I moved on and up to 4 years ago, I only had newer computers in my home (well, only a 80386 which I forgot).

2 Years ago I came across a friend who collected old game consoles and my love for old homecomputers and especially for the Amiga’s came back to life. After a small message on Twitter I managed to get a huge collection of Amiga’s. I loved it. My love for Amiga was returned completely. I cleaned the systems, played with it a lot but had to sell the latter because of financial reasons, keeping one because I wouldn’t allow myself to be without homecomputers again.

Very short after I regretted I sold again, so I got myself a next-gen Amiga and rebuilt it to a fully working, next-gen Amiga which is pretty rare nowadays. Still, my feeling of actually owning a A1200 (which I used to have) wouldn’t go away. I had to have one and when Petro was getting brand new Amiga’s I just knew I had to get one. Which I did.

Again, financial issues made me sell my beloved new A1200 because I still had my A500 and NextGen Amiga. I didn’t have much use for the A1200 anyway.. I thought..

Then I came across a complete CDTV which I just couldn’t refuse. I picked it up and did my cleaning, fixing thing with it. Got a CDTV FDD thanks to my friends at Amibay and connected it to my 42″ Plasma. What a joy when everything was working.. All in all, happy again with my 3 Amiga’s.

When cleaning my garage, I suddenly found a very very old 80386SX16 and I couldn’t resist. I tried to boot it up which didn’t work in the first place, but after some extensive cleaning and replacing a few parts, it booted! Oh the joy I felt when this machine was resurrected from the death.

Exactly 2 weeks later I found an advert on the Internet stating somebody was selling his collection of homecomputers. Despite I had my doubts if I should do it, I just bid on it and won the collection for a really low price. It almost felt like, too good to be true. Here’s a picture of what I eventually got:

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Yes, that’s:
– 3x Amiga 1200
– 2x Commodore 64
– Commodore 1541-II drive
– Toshiba MSX
– Toshiba T-1100
– Philips CDi 210
– Atari Mega ST-4
– 6 boxed Amiga games
– Hundreds of 5,25″ disks for Commodore 64
– 3 boxes full of 3,5″ disks (including several original titles) for Amiga
– AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 original on CD

 

Can you imagine how I felt? This is christmas/sinterklaas for me! Most of the systems are working, but really really yellow. The Cdi-player has a problem with it’s tray, but fixable. One of the A1200s has a broken FDD and one of the A1200 didn’t have any screws in it to hold it together (though it has a harddisk, accelerator card and the latest kickrom).

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This was just … wow..

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Last weekend I gave away the Toshiba MSX for I has no use for it. I did get myself a boxed Amiga 600 making my Amiga-collection hoarder-size ;-).

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My next project will be to clean and retr0bright everything so all systems look like brand new. I’ll keep this updated on this website for your reading pleasure.

My current collection:
Commodore 64 ‘brown’
Commodore 64 ‘white’
Commodore CD-TV incl FDD, keyboard and mouse
Commodore Amiga 500.
Commodore Amiga 600.
2x Commodore Amiga 1200 (standard)
Commodore Amiga 1200 (with 68030 CPU, Harddisk and Kickrom 3.1)
micro AmigaOne (A1-C) (with 800Mhz G3 CPU, 512MB RAM running AmigaOS 4.1)
Toshiba T-1100 Personal Computer
Philips CDi-210 (incl 10 CDi) (not working at the moment)
Atari Mega ST-4 incl screen
Intel 80386SX16, 3MB memory, 512Kb Trident videocard and Seagate 44Mb HDD

Also, check out my Youtube-channel where I’ll put videos of my projects!

Amiga NextGen.

In my previous post, I still owned a beautiful Amiga 4000T. For several practical reasons, I decided to sell this beauty to another Amiga-fan and got myself a “Next Gen” Amiga, an AmigaOne.

AmigaOne is originally made by Eyetech as a project for Amiga1200 and Amiga4000 to upgrade a CPU using the original Custom Chips. Because of hardware issues, they’ve cancelled the project in 2001. In 2002 they restarted it as becoming a whole new machine and the AmigaOne was born. Started in 2002 with the AmigaOne SE and followed up in 2003 by AmigaOne XE.

The one I got is an AmigaOne Micro-A1 – C. It consists of a 800MHz G4 CPU connected to a Mini-ITX mainboard where the videochip (ATI Radeon 7000 AGP) is integrated on the mainboard. Where the first 2 models AmigaOne (SE and XE) had heat issues and were generally unstable, the 3rd model from 2004 fixed this issue. It’s only made as a mainboard, so no official cases. It originally came with 256MB PC133 RAM.

I found a whole system in a really small case (I believe it’s a Dell case) for a reasonable amount of money.  This was the last board made by Eyetech and the last AmigaOne until 2011 when the AmigaOne 500 (Acube systems) and AmigaOne X1000 (A-EON) were introduced in a small amount.

While AmigaOne was made, there had to be another system. AmigaOS 3.9 is made for the Motorola 68000-series CPU while AmigaOne’s had a blazing fast G3 PPC cpu. Back in 2001, Hyperion Entertainment was asked by Amiga Inc. to produce a native PPC AmigaOS. AmigaOS 4.0 was born.

Current stage of AmigaOS 4.x is AmigaOS 4.1 (released in 2008) update 5 (august 2012) which runs without any trouble on the microA1 I currently own.

After a small upgrade from 256MB to 512MB RAM I created some photo’s yesterday of my running microA1-C with AmigaOS 4.1 update 5.

This is how it looks while the machine is booting the latest AmigaOS:

 

Smart people do see a difference in screen. Yes, left picture is made when I attached a Philips 19″ to it, but the screen broke down so I had to attach an older, but better Belinea 17″.

So, then it’s booted up.. It shows the following screen:

 

Having a working Internet connection, I could even go to Youtube using Timberwolf (=Firefox for Amiga). Timberwolf is still in alpha release, so really really slow. Lucky AmigaOS has another browser called OWB which is based on the Webkit engine and is workable (shown below on the right)

Using the E-AEU emulator (which is convenient added to AmigaOS 4.1) I can even run old Amiga games (E-UAE starts up an emulating layer which starts up WorkBench 3.1 and with that WHDLoad and finally the game, all within a few seconds!)

Below left is the E-UAE emulator running. Right is Superfrog running using this emulator:

Obviously, you can run more! See DirectoryOpus 4 (PPC version) and a MOD/IT player which is an Impulse Tracker called SchismTracker (also available for Linux, Windows and Mac).

You probably wonder if there’s anything useful to do with a 2004 AmigaOne? Of course, next to running old games, listening to music modules and doing webbrowsing, there are loads of free software made for AmigaOS including things like a SSH client (below left) or nice graphic effects (while dragging for example) when showing off what a almost 10 year old machine is capable of doing.

Ofcourse, I do understand all the latest operating systems are working faster/better (though starting up AmigaOS 4.1 only takes a few seconds) and it will never be mainstream. It’s just good to have a choice and great to see a company created in 1985, died multiple times and still continue to make new and beautiful things. Amiga is not just a computer, it’s a feeling only real Amiga-fans will understand.

Amiga made usable

It’s been a while since I’ve made a post here on blog.bartvandenakker.nl. It doesn’t made nothing happened in my life. Actually, a lot happened so the next few days I’ll post a few more stories. This post will be again about Amiga, like the last one .

A lot of happened with my Amiga’s. First of all, I cleaned a lot and sold the GVP A530 Turbo Card for I won’t use it. With the money got from that, I rebuild my Amiga 4000T to a ‘usable’ workstation.

First of all, a bit of cleaning was necessary, so the entire  Amiga needed to get “naked”.

look! A naked A4000TWith this, I could clean the front so it was as white as can be without using chemical stuff:

A4000T Front

As you probably already seen, there’s a TFT screen. I managed to get an old 19″ TFT screen (Philips) which was working pretty nice with the Amiga. The Amiga 4000T is capable of sending out the native resolution (1280×1024) but it’s limited in colours then. So, I put it on 1024×768 with 16 bit colour which is enough for me 🙂

When everything was clean I put the Amiga back together and it was able to boot from the old SCSI harddisk. Notice the difference between the Amiga and it’s external CD-drive/SyQyest device:

Amiga 4000T Booting

So, the Amiga was clean and able to boot, but still not very usable. So, I decided to buy a CF-to-IDE device, a 2GB CF card and a network interface card for the hardware and AmigaOS 3.9 as operating system. Installing AmigaOS 3.9 on the CF was a piece of cake, it almost worked immediately. You may ask now, why not upgrade the AmigaOS 3.1 installation on the SCSI HD? Well, the harddisk sounds like it will die pretty soon and I’d like to have some of the original information on that harddisk. Who knows what it may contain and not visible. It took me an evening to figure out that a 68060 CPU won’t be able to boot AmigaOS 3.9 as it is. First I had to create a bootdisk using AmigaOS 3.1 and with that bootdisk (Rescue disk) I can boot up AmigaOS 3.9 and install it on the CF. In the end, I managed to get it working. Here’s a link to Youtube, made with an iPhone 4 so bare with me in quality: AmigaOS 3.9 booting

At that moment I had a booting Amiga with AmigaOS 3.9, but still no network. I bought one on Amibay and it took me a week to figure out, the guy sent another card. So, I spend a whole week getting a driver from a completely different network card to work with the one I received. My life became easier the moment I found out which network card I actually got (thanks to AmigaScene again 😉 ).

Amiga can go on the Internet now (using a 10Mbit ethernet card!) and apart from a decent browser, it’s kinda usable (IRC, Mail, FTP work flaweless). I’m going to try for the Samba client so I can actually use my network at home (and play millions of MOD-files 😉 ).

Because I was on AmigaScene a lot, I found out that in USA people are making a movie (Viva Amiga) about Amiga. Also the main filmmaker (Zach Weddington) was coming to the Netherlands (and Germany) to see how Amiga still exists here. I didn’t think too long and went there with my revived Amiga 4000T. It was truly an awesome party to be. Lot of Amiga fans and famous Dutch people who used to work with Amiga’s. For me the best part was, Mr. R.J. Mical was there as well. RJ Mical (website) is one of the original Amiga creators and basically invented the GUI of Amiga. Besides that, RJ is just an awesome guy. He had the time of his life and enjoyed the whole day (like everybody else did!)

Picture below is taken behind my Amiga4000T. You can see a part of the AmigaOS 3.9 screen my Amiga4000T is showing!

 

At the end of the day, I even got my Amiga 4000T autographed by one of the original Amiga creators. For the record, almost all Amiga’s ever made were at that day and my Amiga 4000T was the only 4000T which was around. Special moment for me!

RJ Mical SigningHe wrote: “Thank you for taking care of my baby” .

So, this is the current status of the Amiga. At June 16th this Amiga will be in Maarssen at the “Commodore GG dag” where it will be in the lineup of all Amiga’s ever made (and still working). For Amiga or Commodore fans, a place to be!

Commodore Amiga’s saved

A while ago I visited a friend who was collecting old game consoles. We started to talk about the awesome machines he has and we came across Commodore Amiga. For most people this is a system which was active between, oh let’s say, 1985 and somewhere mid 90s. The machines were absolutely great in both audio and video. Started with an Amiga 1000 which was the first system with the next one, an Amiga 500; the most known one. Due bad marketing caused by Commodore, this was the called the successor of the evenly famous Commodore 64. This is in no way the case, they were (and are) completely different systems.

As some of my reader may know (or not), I’ve been collecting old home computers when I was approx 15 years younger than I am today. It also included an Amiga 600 (successor of the A500 and the cheaper version of an A2000). Around that period I fell in love with the whole Amiga concept. I loved everything about it. Good graphics, even better audio. Soon I received an A1200 and extended it up to a level where it had an external harddisk and a 68030 CPU running at 40Mhz (standard A1200 is a 680EC20 @ 14Mhz). This machine was actually connected to the Internet and was able to play MP3 music and everything. Soon after this one, I found a CDTV, one of the real game consoles coming from the Amiga factory (CDTV is basically an A500 with CD-drive). It all ended when I started to move out of my fathers house and the A1200 died. Everything is sold or given away to other collectors. Big regret now 🙁

Going back to a few weeks ago when I talked to this friend of mine. I really felt I needed to have an Amiga again. So, I started to search for them and also put a question on twitter. Soon I’ve received an answer to my question that somebody had some Amigas on their attic. Allright, let me know when I can pick them up. After some mail exchange we picked out a date to get all machines. He told me he found an Amiga 4000T(ower) and 2x an Amiga 500. The A4000 was broken as far as he told me (which is a shame, the A4000T is the last real Amiga ever came out). So, last tuesday I went over there with my car, thinking I would receive 2x A500 and 1x 4000T. This is what I received..


Amiga M1764 monitor
Amiga 500 Computer (incl box)
Amiga 500 Computer with 512KB memory extension (incl box)
A530 Turbo for use with A500
A4000T incl box
External SCSI device with a Philips CDD3600 brander and a “SyQuest” drive.
10 SyQuest disks 270MB each
8 boxes fully loaded with Amiga software/games

One Amiga 500 didn’t boot up, the other one did. The A4000T did work, but couldn’t boot it’s Workbench nor did it seems to address the external SCSI. Given the time at that moment, I decided to call it a day (it was 1.30 am …)

The next day I decided to put it on AmigaScene, a dutch Amiga forum. People were amazed by what I found the other day. The A530 Turbo is apparently something special and the 4000T was also high-rated. In the end of the day, after work, I went home to open the case to see what’s inside it. Again, a (positive shock). The machine was clean inside. With clean, I mean really clean. It’s always been in a smoke-free environment. All condensators look fine and so did the batterij. At that moment I realised I’ve something special. Inside I found an unknown card which, because of the chips, I found is a Cyberstorm MK-II 060/SCSI-II (50Mhz/32MB RAM). Also I found a Cybervision 64/3D. These are really some special cards. On makes the A4000 suitable for heavy duty audio/video work and the CyberVision card is a 3D enabled, 64bit graphics card. I was jumping of happiness.

But the joy went away when I found out there was a SCSI harddisk inside which seemed to be utterly broken. It just didn’t spin up. At that moment I realised I did several dead harddisk repairments in the old days. I got the harddisk out and started to give it a good shake, put it back to power and the miracle was complete, it was spinning up again. Put everything together again and voila:

A fully booted Amiga 4000T running Workbench 3.1. Next I’ll upgrade this machine to AmigaOS 3.9 and hopefully get it connected to the Internet again. Next challenge, the A500/A530 !