Alent

Greets,

So, I came into the wonderful world of Amiga at age 2 when my family bought the original Amiga 1000 at launch, By the time I was old enough to understand it, we had traded up to an A2000 and it wasn't long before I had my own A500. Advance three decades and a misspent life spent as an IT guy working on Windows systems, the entire house is covered in PCs, Smart TVs, RasPis, and other assorted digital appliances... and I want to get the Amigas working again so they aren't just collecting dust. (Also, it'll be much easier to part with the old pirate's cache of microcenter floppies if I know I actually still have all of them as image files on my home NAS or the new Amiga CF drive I have.)

That brings me to my collection.

1) Our Original A2000
Works, has a completely full 20mb SCSI HD. Mouse port is fine, but the Joystick port is shot, no matter what you do everything turns left. This was actually repaired not once but twice during the 90's, so I'm not sure what was up. I know that this is a common problem, but couldn't find much modern material on it. I assume I need to bodge-wire around some corroded traces ruined by that battery that likes to asplode, but I haven't been inside it and my soldering skills are less than passable. Is there a good guide on how to diagnose and troubleshoot this?

2) A friend's A2000
I still haven't fired this one up yet because we remember our friend telling us it had the same busted joystick port problem when he gave it to us years back.

3) The A4000/40 Video Toaster
My dad did IT work at a school district where the Highschool AV class had a Video Toaster that the kids used to produce their own in-school TV programs. Well, at some point, the Mac-nazis that ran the school district managed to out-voice the AV teacher and declared they were throwing it out to replace it with a brand new mac. A few days later it found its way to my basement, where I had it set up and used it as a Dpaint V workstation for a while but eventually put it on the shelf for safe keeping. I'm pretty sure it still works, but for some reason my XRGB-mini Framemeister doesn't like the video signal the toaster's RGB port is pumping out. I'm also a little afraid to experiment with it before I get fully reacquainted with the Amiga way of doing things.

4) My old A500
So, my old A500 has some kind of expansion module in it, but I don't know what and it doesn't seem to work anymore since I can't seem to get it to launch Dungeon Master. I need to give this another look-see, but I'd put it back on the shelf well before I found a WB 1.3 floppy in the Floppy box that still booted. It had an external HD, but it looks like either the HD died or childhood me never installed WB on it.

5) My A1200
This is the one I've been focusing my efforts on. It's a pretty plain unit, the original harddrive seems to have failed, and it has no expansions. (I suspect it was stripped of some expansions before I came by it- it's missing all of the case screws and has no expansion hatch cover.) I've purchased a 4gb CF card for it, had a royal misadventure getting it to work because the IDE pins on the mobo didn't seem to want to talk to it until I'd reseated the connector half a dozen times. (I ended up repartitioning it to PFS w/ 100 buffers in WinUAE somewhere along the way, which seems to have been a poor decision in retrospect on account of only having the stock 2mb of ram) I also installed Kickstart 3.1 chips and got a Wifi PCMCIA NIC, although I seem to be lacking the RAM to do anything but boot Workbench Classic. The eznet software that came with it won't even launch because of ram shortages. I'm currently copying WHDload games over to it to get it setup, but I have a suspicion that it has insufficient ram to actually run once I finish extracting all these.

Is there a reasonable way to solve this A1200's RAM problem? Blizzard cards seem to exceed what I'm willing to pay at this point in time. The ACA1233 seems to be missing an FPU and out of stock both, and the ACA1221ec on Amikit is setting off my IT guy paranoia sensor for reasons I can't explain. I've seen on the hardware mod subforum here that Kipper2k is building an expansion module, but being effectively fresh to the Amiga scene, I'm not sure if that's something I should wait for? I'm not sure what my best course of action is here.

6) My Old Trinitron
I've got my childhood Amiga monitor still- an old Sony KV-1311CR NTSC monitor that I think has dying caps. Powering it on requires hitting the on button repeatedly until it finally comes on. Once on it works nice, but getting it to power up is an exercise in frustration. Can anyone recommend a good US side CRT maintenance shop?

After I get my A1200 situation sorted out, I want to add in some old Amiga games into my weekend retrogaming sessions on Twitch. I have some friends that I've told about some of the old classics like Hybris, Starglider 2, Carrier Command, and others, and want to show them off for a change. (Well, I also need a replacement controller, all the old Atari one buttons are dryrotted, but I'm trying to buy one of the KTRL CD32s elsewhere on the forums, can grab Sega controllers locally barring that, and at least one of my controllers can be taken apart and the decaying rubber replaced with a Ninjaflex print.)

So, with that said, Greets everybody, I hope I didn't ramble too much, and thanks to any advice/other thread links you can provide.