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!