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 !

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