Trying to dust off and restore my old Amigas

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.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Alent

Is there a reasonable way to solve this A1200's RAM problem?

Yes, get an ACA1221EC.

the ACA1221ec on Amikit is setting off my IT guy paranoia sensor for reasons I can't explain.

Huh? Why? Get it.

[emufan]

Originally Posted by Alent

it's missing all of the case screws and has no expansion hatch cover.

you can print one on your own. there are differnt designs.

if the coin bank allows, while there is no price set, you may look into a Vampire 1200.

Originally Posted by Alent

4) My old A500
So, my old A500 has some kind of expansion module in it

In case of an A500+ open the device, look for batteries. same for the expansion.
they may already caused damage, they tend to leak after those years.
same goes for the other amigas. A2000 got a battery aswell?

Originally Posted by Akira

Yes, get an ACA1221EC.

That alleviates my concerns, somewhat, I'll move it up to the top of my list.

Any other trapdoor modules I should consider before I move ahead with the purchase?

Edit:

Originally Posted by emufan

you can print one on your own. there are differnt designs.

Well, I know what's coming out of the printer when these brackets for the toolrack finish printing.

Originally Posted by emufan

if the coin bank allows, while there is no price set, you may look into a Vampire 1200.

I remember seeing the original Vampire 600 on Youtube last year, that looks like a really nice option when/if it ships.

Originally Posted by emufan

In case of an A500+ open the device, look for batteries. same for the expansion.
they may already caused damage, they tend to leak after those years.
same goes for the other amigas. A2000 got a battery aswell?

I'll pop the cases and take a look. I'd bet they do. If the batteries have leaked, what are my options?

[ajk]

If the batteries have leaked, what are my options?

Depending on the severity of the leak and how long it has been sitting, the repair may range anywhere from just removing the battery and cleaning up the surrounding area, to major rework of the traces, vias and components (or even replacing the board entirely). Have a peek inside to see what the situation is. But if it is a regular A500 (not a plus) then it doesn't have a battery on the motherboard, at most one in the trapdoor expansion, so the system itself should be fine. The A2000 you'll definitely need to inspect.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Alent

That alleviates my concerns, somewhat, I'll move it up to the top of my list.

Any other trapdoor modules I should consider before I move ahead with the purchase?

Not in that price range, no. For the cost, the ACA1221EC is excellent - 20-year-old RAM-only expansions occasionally fetched similar money on eBay, so instead you're also getting a modest but respectable CPU boost as well as things like a 1MB MapROM feature and a warranty. It's a no-brainer really, unless you're looking to spend significantly more on faster CPUs.

Well, ACA1221EC got here today, after a few attempts at cleaning the oxidation off the pins for the trapdoor card, I'm up and running.

Seems like now I need to shift the CF back over to the emulator to get AmiTCP going. My copy arrived on CD and I copied the disc over while I had it in WinUAE, and installed from that, but apparently now that it has enough RAM to launch, it wants the disc again. The misadventure continues, but now I can at least run stuff. ^_^

I haven't had a good chance to rip the cases off the 2000's yet, and I apparently need to unsolder the A500's trapdoor card RF shields just to see what's inside it, but I'll post some pictures over in hardware help when I do.

Thanks for the feedback, all!