back from my holidays, so back to regular uploads👍 ... for which don't forget to hit that bell🔔 icon to be notified when my next video drops and if you enjoyed this one, please don't forget to like, share, drop a comment💬 and if not already, subscribe as it really helps the channel ... thanks for watching -Kari🥰
@@steveaustin4118and you still can’t find any system more fun to code in pure assembly. Also tons of utilities for wake up user’s creativity like dpaint, sound/pro/melon tracker or midi stuff like octamed, also real raytracing in imagine/real3d/maxon cinema or with proper hw the lightwave (waited DAYS for a single image to be rendered in imagine but back then it was like a scifi movie.). Nothing came even close to the feeling getting an Amiga back then. Also, compared to the competitors of that time I can’t even imagine (even as a game dev) what a new computer should be capable of to make such a huge leap in computing now to be so significant as the Amiga was in its time. Good old miggy, it was hell of a good time to grow up on the scene demos and all the stuff. And still, if there is anything about the computers in the tv, it is all about the others. Nobody (except the amigans) even know the name of Jay Miner which is a shame. Because compared to the Amiga in the 80s all other systems was only lunchboxes while the Amiga ws full of life and creativity.
They were amazing for sure. Started with the Batman pack Xmas 1989. Happy days seeing my dad interested in a computer when we flew that F-18 under the Golden Gate Bridge on Xmas morning. The first and last time he was ever interested in a computer. I migrated to an A1200 in 1993 or so. That was, and is as I still have it, the best computer I ever owned. 😊😊😊
I do miss the Amiga 500, in a way, I regret selling it years ago. Paradroid North Vs South Balderdash There was a great space ship shooter game where you gained a code whenever you finished a level so you could go back to the game and continue. This video bought back some good memories, I kind of regret selling my system years ago now. I had the 500, 2000HD and CD32 with a pile of games. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Same vintage here. Went from Commodore 64C/ 128 to Amiga 500 and ended up with DOS. But the change from C64 to A500 was the craziest tech revolution I have ever experienced...
Oh! Especially when you need to solder multiple rows of headers. For example, I recently used a breadboard when adding headers to a Pico W. Not only does it ensure the individual pins are aligned, it also ensures that both rows of headers are perpendicular to the PCB.
One (extremely!) tiny criticism about this video is using a desoldering gun to clear the vias. Seeing as you needed to heat the iron up anyway, why not just use that with a solder sucker or solder wick? It seems a bit silly to wait for a second tool to heat up.
@@pseudotasuki Easier, Less damage, Safety, Cleaniness, Enviroment, Health .. sevral benefits of using one .. and if u have to desolder/resolder alot the investment pay off pretty fast...
I love how youtube randomly feeds me great new content to watch. I am excited to share this with my daughter who is just starting to get interested in computers.
So amazing to see such a young person who even knows what an Amiga is - let alone be an expert on its inner workings!!! , the Amiga was an amazing computer - such fun to use. My family got the first Amiga - the Amiga 1000 - in 1986. It was the same as the A500, just in a different casing. Bravo, in any case! Great work!!!
Good Lord, I absolutely loved my Amiga back in the day. Had pretty much every Commodore machine from the Vic-20 on. We had Commodore PETs in high school before they replaced them with C-64s. They were pretty much ground zero for home computing in the 80s and then they were gone.
oh man she had to take the easy fix the one that looks fine on the outside why couldn't she take the one that looks like it came out of the garbage dump?
Interesting to see someone of your age breathing new life into the kind of tech I grew up on. Went from a Speccy to an ST, then the Amiga, before finally getting into PCs. While the latter ultimately paved the way for my career, the Amiga probably has the fondest place in my heart as it's the system that really started me down the path. Great that they live on in the retro scene. I gave mine to my younger cousin and it just ended up getting thrown away 😭 Decent taste in t-shirts as well!
Amazing to see how some effort can revive an old and presumably broken Amiga! ❤ It truly was one of the best computers at that time ... Light-years ahead of all those ugly slow MS-DOS PCs. I went from Commodore 64 to Amiga 2000 and then 4000, which I later reconverted to a tower with upgraded graphics. Used it for all my work (and games) as long as it was able to keep up with technical progress. Hard drives... The Internet... 😊 I loved it.
I used to have the Amiga A1200. I spent countless hours playing Flashback but it was such a versatile machine you could animate with Deluxe Paint IV or listen to and create sampled music with OctaMED. Great to see them getting a new lease of life and I'm sure that mod must speed things up, especially for multi-disk games.
The enclosure is perfect the way you did it Kari. It would have been unsightly with visible wires. I remember my old Amiga. Nobody could beat me at Kick Off 2. About a year ago, while I was feeling nostalgic, I bought a little Amiga 500 so I could play KO2 once again. However, the gameplay isn't the same. I think I'll go full retro, buy an Amiga 500, and find an original copy of the game. Your mod video will be handy if I put a couple of usb ports in😀
If you like Kick Off 2 I would suggest searching for Kick Off Online. It's basically KO2 ported to PC, using Unity. If you have a usb adapter you can even use your old Amiga modified to play it.
Still heavily involved with Amiga’s. Currently have 2xA500 OCS, 2xA600, an A1200 and a 500+. The prices are increasing though but bargains can still be had. The job you did on that 500 was excellent and it’s great to see a young lady getting her hands dirty so to speak. Great job 👏👏
The GoTek is an AWESOME piece of kit. I've got two of them, pondering a 3rd. I have them in my 486 and P3-1ghz machine. I also picked up a 2-in, 1-out USB switch (Not HUB) that allows me to plug a USB drive into the switch, and a button will allow me to hook to my main PC and the 486/P3 and easily get disk images to it. No cable swapping needed anymore, which is BEAUTIFUL.
I remember the days of adding a MFM/RLL interface to the A500 using a sidecar to get a whopping 2x 30MB of 5.25" full height hard disk connected. I was the envy of the town ;) Glad to see one saved from the trash bin and booted!
Yay for cute Kari preserving an Amiga from the rubbish bin and giving it an overhaul in the process! SotB (Shadow of the Beast) is a classic game for that platform, though very difficult. F/A-18 Interceptor I remember thinking was pretty impressive when it was new. A friend played me the intro to Blood Money over the telephone after he got his Amiga 2000 and its audio samples seemed mind blowing for a personal computer at the time. Others doubtlessly will mention Turrican, but while there are plenty of games, the demo scene (e.g. Kefrens' Desert Dreams) on the Amiga was where it really began to shine as an art form. Of course, there are many great programs as well, from pioneering graphical editing software such as NewTek's DigiPaint, which predated Photoshop, to DiskMaster 2, which was similar to something like Midnight Commander, but much more powerful, facilitating extensions for file handlers, similar to early/rudimentary web browsers using MIME extensions.
Should have slapped someone for even thinking about tossing out ANYTHING Amiga related. Hell even if the unit were busted up and didnt even power on it would still be worth a few bills just for the parts on the motherboard, that custom silicon is getting harder and harder to source replacement parts for.
The Amiga 500 was my first computer way back when. Good to see that the younger generation also enjoys those retro machines and keep them alive. I still have mine sitting next door, also with a Gotek and a boot switch. Nostalgic as floppy disks make me feel, they are an absolute royal pain in the neck. Especially if you want to be somewhat mobile with your rig. I built a dedicated flight case and desk riser to go with mine. Any I still absolutely love playing the old games on the old hardware. ❤
Crazy to think these computers are almost 30 years old, the equivalent to watching BTTF back then and thinking the 50s were so long ago. Thank you for investing your time and love into maintaining them for future generations to experience. I could only afford the Atari STE after saving all my paper round money 😂 but before jealousy had time to set in, i was already saving up for a PC. Look forward to your next project!
Nice to see the Amiga still is loved and being discovered. I Still have my Amiga 500 from my childhood, and a 1200 that I picked up later, both still working. If you havent already and your keeping it, look at the many accelerator cards for it, or at the very least if you dont have one already a memory upgrade, many games require at least 1mb. Beyond that, you can get USB adaptors for the joystick ports to use pretty much any USB gamepad, and depending on if its been recapped, look it up, as they can leak (Some models/revisions I think were worse than others). And if your amiga has any kind of battery for remembering time (usually on an expansion board if I Recall) get it swapped, as again they can leak. I also have the CD expansion (A570) for mine, opened up a whole new world back in the day, bet they go for a small fortune now, but its something to behold slapped onto the side of the A500 if you can get one. Basically turns your Amiga 500 into a CDTV.
Lovely work, Kari. I like that the mod looks almost like it could have been made when that Amiga was young, it fits the style and colour of the case so well.
Back in 1990 I saw an Amiga 500 for the first time while visiting a classmate. I was stunned by the visuals and the very FIRST game I saw on that machine was "North & South". I went home, I was only 15 years old back then, and said to my parents, "I also want an Amiga 500". But yes, that was in 1990 and the machine costed fl. 900,- (Dutch Guilders), corrected for inflation € 883,- today. So, directly starting scraping, getting extra side jobs, a little bit of begging with my grandparents 😆 and roughly 3 months later, including my birthday I finally got it. The machine had only 512KB of memory and I was puzzled at first how to copy some floppy disks with games that I 'loaned' from that classmate. I had one drive (df0), loaded XCopy, and the machine said, ~350KB of ram available. So I tried copying a disk, but I knew the disk was 880KB in size, so it took some time to realize that you had to copy in multiple stages. 3 times to be exact. First copying 350KB into ram, then writing it to a blank disk, then resuming with the next 350KB reading into ram, then writing that to disk and the final 188KB was done in a third pass. The box full of squares was all green and I was happy. This computer made me so happy back then, I was in love with those cute floppy disks, back then so new, because I was used to the 5.25" floppy disks on the Commodore 64. Then after some time I upgraded the ram, got an extra drive, ahh the fun....I got a program (forget it's name) that could rip modules out of memory. So you started a game, then some music would play, you did a soft reset, insert that disk, and that program would search memory for mod files. Ah man that was so great...And then later I got my first hard drive. The whopping 20MEGAbytes (lol) A590. Did not seem much, but I could put Workbench 1.3 on it, with several favorite games, a few modules, it was great. I miss that. I miss also the social gatherings I had, taking my benches of floppies with me and have a nice evening doing some copying stuff....increasing the collection. Even my parents were amazed by the musical output, even though it was 4 channels only. It's a pity we did not had any full hd camera's so little video footage or photo's of those days remained. But the memory will live.
How did you get RAM? You bought it in boxes? Today, I know that it comes in a thin plastic shell when we buy any DDR type and previous to that, it was SDRAM and previous to that, it was EDO RAM and SIMM style fast page RAM.
@@louistournas120 To upgrade the Amiga 500 RAM you had two choices - a RAM card (PCB with RAM chip on it) that went in the 'trapdoor' expansion slot beneath the Amiga, or else a 'sidecar' box on the side of the Amiga (a plastic casing within which there would be a PCB with RAM chips on it, though I am not sure if there were any such pure RAM sidecars, by which I mean usually such expansions would also have an accelerator or hard disk as well, or even both). The trapdoor expansion was the most common, taking the 512K A500 to 1mb. In either case, the product would be packaged in a cardboard box with a glossy finish, much like typical computer hardware today, with a picture of the device and information on its specification. It was possible to buy various RAM chips to insert in sockets for the Amiga too, but I have no idea how they were packaged, and it probably wasn't relevant for worldgate because his half megabyte expansion would have been the trapdoor expansion I spoke of, and I think the RAM chip on there was soldered to the board, you didn't buy them (as far as I am aware) unpopulated.
Top machine in its day. I still love Amiga music to this day. You really want to load from an Amiga drive though , the sound of it loading is so beautiful.
It seems to me like you went to a lot of work to "save" (update) your Amiga 500 with a lot of modern add-ons. I just brought back to life a Ti-99/4 computer using all original components to get it working and it wasn't easy. Keep up the good work. I love what you're doing and I'm learning a lot! Thanks for the info. It helps.
This is so cool! I actually had an Amiga A500 back when it originally came out and eventually upgraded to an Amiga A1200. In both cases I added the memory upgrade which makes quite a big difference. I would recommend Syndicate and Populous 2. Both very addictive isometric games that I couldn't put down. Oh so many regrets about taking my Amigas to the recycling centre many years ago but I had a baby, no storage space and was under pressure to declutter 😞
Great video. Boy I would of never thought about stuff like this back in the late 80'd when I got rid of my Amiga computer. Love to see people still playing with these and other Vintage stuff.
Remember before adding the solder, heat up the general area where the connection will be made. If you follow this you'd make a great connection and not possible cold joints there.
It's amazing to think these old Amiga 500s were the very unit used to render the 3D graphics in the TV show Babylon 5, they were truly ahead of their time in technology. I have a Commodore 64, 128, and Amiga 500 here in my archive, but I have yet to get the A500 fully restored, at least I think the FDD is still functional but I lack a good Workbench disk presently.
my high school friend's dad had first gen IBM PC gear - really heavy, bulky stuff - but we did save some of it and it's old enough now that you could have a museum for it - the keyboards alone are amazing - big, rock solid heavy duty things - you could knock a baseball out of a park with one ..
I had an Amiga 500. My parents bought me one on Christmas of 1988. Some games I can recommend.. Joan Of Arc, Monty Python, Land Of The Rising Sun, Space Quest 3,Future Wars,Darkseed,Super Hang On,Lemmings,Miniature Golf. I'm sure there's lots more but it's been years. My friend had one too so we played a lot of games. I sold mine to my brother in 1992. He would go on to teach himself graphic design and would eventually work for Sierra Games in the late nineties. Have fun !
Ciao, i buyed my first Amiga 500 in late 1989, great Times, i've made my first steps with Desktop Wallpaper Creating and Tracker Music, in 1993 i've owned my Amiga 1200, many greetings from brunswick in germany and please stay safe 🙃
Good repair ! One small piece of perhaps advice - consider building a new PSU to replace the old one of you have not already - when they start to go they have a habit of taking out key chips, and the Gotek itself is surprisingly sensitive to a bad PSU. I used a generic SFF PC PSU that has a laptop style 18V primary with a small switched mode board to get all the voltages, and got the Amiga connector online. I now also have a bunch of cables for all my other retro things attached to the same setup and it is great way to avoid damaging old chips that are hard to replace !
I have to say that I love seeing a young girl being into tech and retro computers/consoles, and also does your own mods, including soldering. Not many of you around, so nice to see
I absolutely love that you are showing how to take a cheap stock Gotek from AliExpress, re-flash the firmware, upgrade and prepare it for the Amiga. Since I have been doing this for years now, thereby saving quite a sum of money. Goteks bought from retro web-shops, can often cost from 2 to 4 times as much, and they are just buying them in bulk from China and doing exactly what you show there. Tons and tons of 👍points to you for showing just how easy this is. ❤ - Also love the almost spot-on filament colour. - However, an Amiga 500 with only a broken floppy drive, is a bit of a rare and lucky find these days. There can easily be a lot more wrong with these old "girlfriends" (Amiga in Spanish). Many have just been chucked into lofts or cellars with several decades of poor conditions for storing electronics. Moisture can cause all kinds of nasty corrosion to both the motherboard and the traces, and fluctuating summer/winter temperatures can cause electrolytic capacitors to dry out and/or start leaking everywhere. It can especially be critically bad, if the owner didn't think of first removing the memory-expansion or even better cut out the VARTA battery all together (in an A500 those are usually located inside the memory-expansion module, while on an A500+ the battery can sit on the motherboard itself, which is even worse). Since the electrolyte from both capacitors and that battery can over the years reek havoc eating away at the Amiga's wonderful custom chipsets (which are obviously no longer in production), the traces, or even the motherboard itself. Yeah, taking an Amiga out of improper storage can often turn out to be quite the horror story. Not that long ago, the worse scenario would probably have been a damaged motherboard. But we can even get reverse-engineered replacements for those now (a hell of a job to solder those up with new fresh components and moving the rare ones over.). yeah, damage to the custom co-processors is properly the worse scenario today. So, definitely gratz on the fully working Revision 6 "B52 Rock Lobster" Amiga 500 - which is capable of handling up to 1 MB shared Chip-memory and 1.5MB Slow-memory (with a "BooBip" memory-expansion module), and an additional 8 MB Fast-mem (via an accelerator-board)... So, 10.5 MB RAM in total. - Next up: I think you should give the old gal a "PiStorm" and maybe a "RGB2HDMI" upgrade - She definitely deserves it, just from sheer beating the odds. Those 3 (incl. the BooBip) are properly some of the more cheaper upgrades... With the "Wicher", "Terrible Fire", and "Vampire" accelerators being some of the most expensive. There is not much point in fiddling around with the also very-soon-to-be vintage CompactFlash cards for these more expensive accelerators. As it is quite possible to use both SATA hard drives or SSDs via IDE/PATA-to-SATA adaptors (either made by StarTech or just some of the tiny cheaper ones from AliExpress). Although, there wouldn't be much point in going higher than 120GB or 160GB for an Amiga. The hard drives we had back then for the A500s were 20MB or 40MB tops (nope, not a typo... MB as in mega-bytes), and those were crazy expensive, noisier than a sawmill, and slower than a turtle on a conveyor belt going in the opposite direction. Of course with a Raspberry Pi 3A+ driven PiStorm accelerator, you instantly get all that and more, only much faster, a lot cheaper, easier, and without all the old hassle and head-to-wall butting headaches. - You'll probably still need the BooBip, since an Amiga-owner can never get enough of that wonderful chip-memory (which is accessible by the CPU and the co-processors simultaneously).
I had an Apple 2GS at the time when the 500 came out. Upgrading to that full meg of memory was so sweet! I've no interest in going back, but so glad you're having fun!
The Amiga 500 was my granddad's computer and it's what got me into technology when I was young. Little known fact: Sennheiser made a radio mic control software (for their big radio receiver racks used in west end musicals etc) which ran exclusively on the Amiga. It was a while before they had a version of it for Windows so there was a time in the early 2000s when there were more Amigas in the west end running shows than there were in people's homes ! Citation: my parents worked in the west end in sound engineering and I saw it first hand when going into work with them.
I love how you know how to do all this. I wouldn't have a clue. I had an Amiga in the early nineties and I use make music with it. It's a really good sampler. Happy memories.
Very neat mod and well done 😊, I'm even more happy with (finally) finding out which is the 'correct color' for the 'vintage plastics look' 🤣. We've been using several Esun filaments for over a year now (with great success), and will now definitely also order the Bone White, so thanks for that tip😊👍
I did this to my Amiga 1200 back when the Gotek first came out, but instead of reflashing the chip in the Gotek, I bought an adapter cable of eBay that allows a standard PC floppy to work with the Amiga interface, if I remember correctly the cable had a 7 series logic chip and a couple of resistors in it to adapt the two differing comms standards, worked pretty well but I ended up missing the floppy noises, so I stuck a PC floppy in there instead and used a USB Superdisk drive to write images to floppies from an emulator on a PC, all good fun, things are so much more streamlined now!
Recently moved home and my old Amiga 1200 with psu and everything I had for it back in the day, was found in my old atic. Planning on doing this mod !!
i think you did a perfect job. i would always prefer it this way vs. threading the cables visibly out of the case and back in to the remote as you suggested at the end.
Giving you extra kudos for the Robocop t-shirt. The Amiga 500 doesn't feel right unless it has aa huge RF modulator balance out of the back of the machine and having the computer connected to an old crt. Rich people might have a sony trinitron, however most would have an old portable Busch or Akai portable ctr with the coat hanger aerial in the back
I've used that filament as well. I think it actually matches closer than the Printed Solid Jesse "Beige 500" filament which is supposed to be an actual match for the Amiga 500 colour. Maybe it is something to do with the degree of yellowing the Amiga happens to suffer over time and the Jesse is perhaps close to a factory brand new Amiga. Hard to say, but that Bone White filament is definitely a good choice for any retro 3d printer projects regardless.
I never had an Amiga, but a friend did. The graphics were years ahead of its time! On another note, I recently picked up an Atari 800xl with all the attachments and a TI-99/4a. The Atari works but I'm having keyboard issues with the TI. A project for the colder months.
I share your pain of DuPont connectors, I have no idea how many I went through before I got a good crimp, did end up getting a bit better though. Your thoughts on pulling the wires out through the slot and looping back into the controller box is what I did, it makes opening the case way easier! Though I have to admit, your controller box is way better than the one I designed, but I was limited by the rotary encoder dimensions, so I mounted it to the side.
That's fantastic. Back in the 80's / 90's when I had an Amiga (many ---- 8 or more A500's , 2 x 600's, 1 x 1200, 2 x 2000's) I never would have dreamed this was possible. The main drama with the Amiga was having a dead drive.
Ah the good old Amiga 500 brings back some memories seeing this ( Game in question Shadow of the Beast ) my fave game on the a500 😁 and yes it is awesome to see someone taking the time to do something like this. 👍
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back from my holidays, so back to regular uploads👍 ... for which don't forget to hit that bell🔔 icon to be notified when my next video drops and if you enjoyed this one, please don't forget to like, share, drop a comment💬 and if not already, subscribe as it really helps the channel ... thanks for watching -Kari🥰
Cool video, cool mod. How was the game? It looked pretty hard.
@@karilawler if I move my gotek to internal I'll use your printing files, just trying to keep original disks going as long as I can.
One word only..... Amigalive
Now please feel free to Google for it and you can thank me later
I recommend giving "Frontier: Elite II" a whirl. I used to play it on my A600 and loved it to bits.
@@intrepidis1 that game was one of the best
It is so nice to see young people playing with machines we used to play with and love 30 years ago! Just brilliant
it's nearly 40 years ago now how time flies
Agreed. I do want to see an Altair 8800 build though!
@@steveaustin4118and you still can’t find any system more fun to code in pure assembly. Also tons of utilities for wake up user’s creativity like dpaint, sound/pro/melon tracker or midi stuff like octamed, also real raytracing in imagine/real3d/maxon cinema or with proper hw the lightwave (waited DAYS for a single image to be rendered in imagine but back then it was like a scifi movie.). Nothing came even close to the feeling getting an Amiga back then. Also, compared to the competitors of that time I can’t even imagine (even as a game dev) what a new computer should be capable of to make such a huge leap in computing now to be so significant as the Amiga was in its time. Good old miggy, it was hell of a good time to grow up on the scene demos and all the stuff. And still, if there is anything about the computers in the tv, it is all about the others. Nobody (except the amigans) even know the name of Jay Miner which is a shame. Because compared to the Amiga in the 80s all other systems was only lunchboxes while the Amiga ws full of life and creativity.
The Amiga 500 was the computer I grew up with, it's still the best computer I have ever owned
They were amazing for sure. Started with the Batman pack Xmas 1989. Happy days seeing my dad interested in a computer when we flew that F-18 under the Golden Gate Bridge on Xmas morning. The first and last time he was ever interested in a computer. I migrated to an A1200 in 1993 or so. That was, and is as I still have it, the best computer I ever owned. 😊😊😊
@@lawrencemanningf18s under bridges what are you smoking?
Yup, F/A-18 Interceptor.
35 years ago I saw War In Middle Earth running on an Amiga 500 and was astonished at the graphics. I still have that original 500, among others.
@@garyhart6421 a game?
I feel so old, I remember when the Amiga was cutting edge and no other computer could top it.
I know what you mean. As a speccy 48k owner, we used to look at you Amiga owners with such jealousy 😂😂
I jumped from a 48k Atari 800 to an Amiga 500.
It still is for its specs.
Same
Still is on top 👍
I do miss the Amiga 500, in a way, I regret selling it years ago.
Paradroid
North Vs South
Balderdash
There was a great space ship shooter game where you gained a code whenever you finished a level so you could go back to the game and continue.
This video bought back some good memories, I kind of regret selling my system years ago now. I had the 500, 2000HD and CD32 with a pile of games.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
its nice seeing the younger ones taking interest in keeping my childhood alive
I am 47 and I had one of those. As well as a Spectrum 128 +2. Thanks for the memories.
Same vintage here. Went from Commodore 64C/ 128 to Amiga 500 and ended up with DOS. But the change from C64 to A500 was the craziest tech revolution I have ever experienced...
It makes me so heartened to see younger people using our amazing computers of the past 😊
I miss my amiga. So much creativity in those machines with music making software.
Using a breadboard as a soldering jig is one of my favorite tips. It comes in handy far more often than you would expect.
Oh! Especially when you need to solder multiple rows of headers. For example, I recently used a breadboard when adding headers to a Pico W. Not only does it ensure the individual pins are aligned, it also ensures that both rows of headers are perpendicular to the PCB.
One (extremely!) tiny criticism about this video is using a desoldering gun to clear the vias. Seeing as you needed to heat the iron up anyway, why not just use that with a solder sucker or solder wick? It seems a bit silly to wait for a second tool to heat up.
Yeah! I think I'll try that as well
@@pseudotasuki Easier, Less damage, Safety, Cleaniness, Enviroment, Health .. sevral benefits of using one .. and if u have to desolder/resolder alot the investment pay off pretty fast...
@@pseudotasuki Smoke em if you got em.
Very interesting content (I spent so many hours running Photon Paint on an A500), and really great production.
Hey, it's that guy with the Mr Scissors!
I love how youtube randomly feeds me great new content to watch. I am excited to share this with my daughter who is just starting to get interested in computers.
So amazing to see such a young person who even knows what an Amiga is - let alone be an expert on its inner workings!!! , the Amiga was an amazing computer - such fun to use. My family got the first Amiga - the Amiga 1000 - in 1986. It was the same as the A500, just in a different casing.
Bravo, in any case! Great work!!!
Your knowledge of retro devices and also vast knowledge of the 3D software as well as coding astounds me. Thanks again for the content
internet is a great source of information, you just gotta know where to look
@@DecibelAlex Agreed! Also helps with the accelerated learning!
"Vast knowledge of coding" 😂
Thanks for keeping old tech alive. Love your Work.
Good Lord, I absolutely loved my Amiga back in the day. Had pretty much every Commodore machine from the Vic-20 on. We had Commodore PETs in high school before they replaced them with C-64s. They were pretty much ground zero for home computing in the 80s and then they were gone.
oh man she had to take the easy fix the one that looks fine on the outside why couldn't she take the one that looks like it came out of the garbage dump?
It's so amazing to see young people like Kari still interested by those computers I grew up with. Love that. :)
Interesting to see someone of your age breathing new life into the kind of tech I grew up on. Went from a Speccy to an ST, then the Amiga, before finally getting into PCs. While the latter ultimately paved the way for my career, the Amiga probably has the fondest place in my heart as it's the system that really started me down the path. Great that they live on in the retro scene. I gave mine to my younger cousin and it just ended up getting thrown away 😭
Decent taste in t-shirts as well!
The A500 case is a piece of art, still holds up.. really beautiful design
Amazing to see how some effort can revive an old and presumably broken Amiga! ❤ It truly was one of the best computers at that time ... Light-years ahead of all those ugly slow MS-DOS PCs. I went from Commodore 64 to Amiga 2000 and then 4000, which I later reconverted to a tower with upgraded graphics. Used it for all my work (and games) as long as it was able to keep up with technical progress. Hard drives... The Internet... 😊 I loved it.
Robocop t-shirt. Love it.
That was a beast of a machine and totally ahead of its time.
Agreed, but the RAM sucked and I also don't miss the Guru Meditation errors 😄
I used to have the Amiga A1200. I spent countless hours playing Flashback but it was such a versatile machine you could animate with Deluxe Paint IV or listen to and create sampled music with OctaMED. Great to see them getting a new lease of life and I'm sure that mod must speed things up, especially for multi-disk games.
I must say I was also impressed with how close the 3D printer thread was a color match for the Amiga 500…still my favorite “wedge” computer.
Never forgiven my mother for giving away the Amiga 500! That enclosure you made was fantastic too!
The enclosure is perfect the way you did it Kari. It would have been unsightly with visible wires. I remember my old Amiga. Nobody could beat me at Kick Off 2. About a year ago, while I was feeling nostalgic, I bought a little Amiga 500 so I could play KO2 once again. However, the gameplay isn't the same. I think I'll go full retro, buy an Amiga 500, and find an original copy of the game. Your mod video will be handy if I put a couple of usb ports in😀
If you like Kick Off 2 I would suggest searching for Kick Off Online. It's basically KO2 ported to PC, using Unity. If you have a usb adapter you can even use your old Amiga modified to play it.
Still heavily involved with Amiga’s. Currently have 2xA500 OCS, 2xA600, an A1200 and a 500+. The prices are increasing though but bargains can still be had. The job you did on that 500 was excellent and it’s great to see a young lady getting her hands dirty so to speak. Great job 👏👏
The GoTek is an AWESOME piece of kit. I've got two of them, pondering a 3rd. I have them in my 486 and P3-1ghz machine. I also picked up a 2-in, 1-out USB switch (Not HUB) that allows me to plug a USB drive into the switch, and a button will allow me to hook to my main PC and the 486/P3 and easily get disk images to it. No cable swapping needed anymore, which is BEAUTIFUL.
I remember the days of adding a MFM/RLL interface to the A500 using a sidecar to get a whopping 2x 30MB of 5.25" full height hard disk connected. I was the envy of the town ;) Glad to see one saved from the trash bin and booted!
I in awe with your equipment. And your presentation. Subscribed!
Mind-blowing modifications, Kari! Very impressive! So amazing that Amiga can read them!
Yay for cute Kari preserving an Amiga from the rubbish bin and giving it an overhaul in the process! SotB (Shadow of the Beast) is a classic game for that platform, though very difficult. F/A-18 Interceptor I remember thinking was pretty impressive when it was new. A friend played me the intro to Blood Money over the telephone after he got his Amiga 2000 and its audio samples seemed mind blowing for a personal computer at the time. Others doubtlessly will mention Turrican, but while there are plenty of games, the demo scene (e.g. Kefrens' Desert Dreams) on the Amiga was where it really began to shine as an art form. Of course, there are many great programs as well, from pioneering graphical editing software such as NewTek's DigiPaint, which predated Photoshop, to DiskMaster 2, which was similar to something like Midnight Commander, but much more powerful, facilitating extensions for file handlers, similar to early/rudimentary web browsers using MIME extensions.
Just found your channel. Love people who fix and save things from being trashed ❤
Should have slapped someone for even thinking about tossing out ANYTHING Amiga related. Hell even if the unit were busted up and didnt even power on it would still be worth a few bills just for the parts on the motherboard, that custom silicon is getting harder and harder to source replacement parts for.
Still got mine from 1988 with a Commodore monitor. Works like new.
Who else would love to see a collab between Kari and the 8-bit guy? I think both can learn a lot from each other
And the 8 bit guy can learn what from this chick? I think he is all set, she doesn’t even have 100k subs. Come back at a later date.
@@user-tk2hl4fz2l Maybe learn that he doesnt need to retrobrite everything, breaking things in the process, the guys a nonce
Incredible work on old tech. Fantastic you can get them to work again.
The Amiga 500 was my first computer way back when. Good to see that the younger generation also enjoys those retro machines and keep them alive. I still have mine sitting next door, also with a Gotek and a boot switch. Nostalgic as floppy disks make me feel, they are an absolute royal pain in the neck. Especially if you want to be somewhat mobile with your rig. I built a dedicated flight case and desk riser to go with mine. Any I still absolutely love playing the old games on the old hardware. ❤
Crazy to think these computers are almost 30 years old, the equivalent to watching BTTF back then and thinking the 50s were so long ago. Thank you for investing your time and love into maintaining them for future generations to experience. I could only afford the Atari STE after saving all my paper round money 😂 but before jealousy had time to set in, i was already saving up for a PC. Look forward to your next project!
Nice to see the Amiga still is loved and being discovered. I Still have my Amiga 500 from my childhood, and a 1200 that I picked up later, both still working. If you havent already and your keeping it, look at the many accelerator cards for it, or at the very least if you dont have one already a memory upgrade, many games require at least 1mb. Beyond that, you can get USB adaptors for the joystick ports to use pretty much any USB gamepad, and depending on if its been recapped, look it up, as they can leak (Some models/revisions I think were worse than others). And if your amiga has any kind of battery for remembering time (usually on an expansion board if I Recall) get it swapped, as again they can leak. I also have the CD expansion (A570) for mine, opened up a whole new world back in the day, bet they go for a small fortune now, but its something to behold slapped onto the side of the A500 if you can get one. Basically turns your Amiga 500 into a CDTV.
Lovely work, Kari. I like that the mod looks almost like it could have been made when that Amiga was young, it fits the style and colour of the case so well.
Back in 1990 I saw an Amiga 500 for the first time while visiting a classmate. I was stunned by the visuals and the very FIRST game I saw on that machine was "North & South". I went home, I was only 15 years old back then, and said to my parents, "I also want an Amiga 500". But yes, that was in 1990 and the machine costed fl. 900,- (Dutch Guilders), corrected for inflation € 883,- today. So, directly starting scraping, getting extra side jobs, a little bit of begging with my grandparents 😆 and roughly 3 months later, including my birthday I finally got it. The machine had only 512KB of memory and I was puzzled at first how to copy some floppy disks with games that I 'loaned' from that classmate. I had one drive (df0), loaded XCopy, and the machine said, ~350KB of ram available. So I tried copying a disk, but I knew the disk was 880KB in size, so it took some time to realize that you had to copy in multiple stages. 3 times to be exact. First copying 350KB into ram, then writing it to a blank disk, then resuming with the next 350KB reading into ram, then writing that to disk and the final 188KB was done in a third pass. The box full of squares was all green and I was happy. This computer made me so happy back then, I was in love with those cute floppy disks, back then so new, because I was used to the 5.25" floppy disks on the Commodore 64. Then after some time I upgraded the ram, got an extra drive, ahh the fun....I got a program (forget it's name) that could rip modules out of memory. So you started a game, then some music would play, you did a soft reset, insert that disk, and that program would search memory for mod files. Ah man that was so great...And then later I got my first hard drive. The whopping 20MEGAbytes (lol) A590. Did not seem much, but I could put Workbench 1.3 on it, with several favorite games, a few modules, it was great. I miss that. I miss also the social gatherings I had, taking my benches of floppies with me and have a nice evening doing some copying stuff....increasing the collection. Even my parents were amazed by the musical output, even though it was 4 channels only. It's a pity we did not had any full hd camera's so little video footage or photo's of those days remained. But the memory will live.
How did you get RAM? You bought it in boxes?
Today, I know that it comes in a thin plastic shell when we buy any DDR type and previous to that, it was SDRAM and previous to that, it was EDO RAM and SIMM style fast page RAM.
@@louistournas120 To upgrade the Amiga 500 RAM you had two choices - a RAM card (PCB with RAM chip on it) that went in the 'trapdoor' expansion slot beneath the Amiga, or else a 'sidecar' box on the side of the Amiga (a plastic casing within which there would be a PCB with RAM chips on it, though I am not sure if there were any such pure RAM sidecars, by which I mean usually such expansions would also have an accelerator or hard disk as well, or even both). The trapdoor expansion was the most common, taking the 512K A500 to 1mb. In either case, the product would be packaged in a cardboard box with a glossy finish, much like typical computer hardware today, with a picture of the device and information on its specification. It was possible to buy various RAM chips to insert in sockets for the Amiga too, but I have no idea how they were packaged, and it probably wasn't relevant for worldgate because his half megabyte expansion would have been the trapdoor expansion I spoke of, and I think the RAM chip on there was soldered to the board, you didn't buy them (as far as I am aware) unpopulated.
Fantastic video, I love the Amiga and I'm impressed that there seems to be nothing you can't do! Keep up the good work
From someone that used to work on a bench in 1980, you are amazing and your set-up is positively "science fiction".
Great video! I went from C64 to Amiga 500. I absolutely loved the A500 and still consider it leading edge tech for the time.
That is a Stellar job there Kari and hats off to you for that 100% perfect Amiga colour match 🕹⌨💻🏆✨
Thanks to save this lovely Amiga 500 ! Amiga for ever.
Top machine in its day. I still love Amiga music to this day. You really want to load from an Amiga drive though , the sound of it loading is so beautiful.
It seems to me like you went to a lot of work to "save" (update) your Amiga 500 with a lot of modern add-ons. I just brought back to life a Ti-99/4 computer using all original components to get it working and it wasn't easy. Keep up the good work. I love what you're doing and I'm learning a lot! Thanks for the info. It helps.
Awesome work! You’re very talented! I love what you do! Thanks for all that helpful tips.
This is so cool! I actually had an Amiga A500 back when it originally came out and eventually upgraded to an Amiga A1200. In both cases I added the memory upgrade which makes quite a big difference. I would recommend Syndicate and Populous 2. Both very addictive isometric games that I couldn't put down. Oh so many regrets about taking my Amigas to the recycling centre many years ago but I had a baby, no storage space and was under pressure to declutter 😞
Great video. Boy I would of never thought about stuff like this back in the late 80'd when I got rid of my Amiga computer. Love to see people still playing with these and other Vintage stuff.
Nice video! I don't remember the Amigas, but I've heard a lot about them. And I always enjoy watching a good technician work.
It doesn't matter how powerful my PC is, I still miss my Amiga A500 & A1200..
still have a 1200 030 and never sell it
Awesome work! Great watching you work on this fine retro machine. 😁👍
You're a nerd Kari.
Love it.
Welcome back! Thanks for sharing your content.
Thank you to the sane person who saved this gem from going to the trash, and thanks to you for doing something about it 💪 C=
Remember before adding the solder, heat up the general area where the connection will be made. If you follow this you'd make a great connection and not possible cold joints there.
The Amiga 500 was our first computer in 1988. We used it until 1996.
Amega had some great games! Congratulations on surpassing 50k subscribers.
nice Idea - might have to see about upgrading my A500 (bought brand new in 1988/89)...Can't believe that it's now considered retro. I feel so old.
It's amazing to think these old Amiga 500s were the very unit used to render the 3D graphics in the TV show Babylon 5, they were truly ahead of their time in technology. I have a Commodore 64, 128, and Amiga 500 here in my archive, but I have yet to get the A500 fully restored, at least I think the FDD is still functional but I lack a good Workbench disk presently.
I love it! “Lemme just thrown together this enclosure for this part to rescue this retro computer. “
It was second computer (after Commodore 64), ah memories...
I loved my Amiga 500. 😋 Lemmings on Amiga was awesome! I didnt know any of these things were available. Very interesting, thanks.
That USB drive with selector is a cool update for this A500.
What a cool way to revive an Amiga!
my high school friend's dad had first gen IBM PC gear - really heavy, bulky stuff - but we did save some of it and it's old enough now that you could have a museum for it - the keyboards alone are amazing - big, rock solid heavy duty things - you could knock a baseball out of a park with one ..
I had an Amiga 500. My parents bought me one on Christmas of 1988.
Some games I can recommend..
Joan Of Arc, Monty Python, Land Of The Rising Sun, Space Quest 3,Future Wars,Darkseed,Super Hang On,Lemmings,Miniature Golf.
I'm sure there's lots more but it's been years. My friend had one too so we played a lot of games. I sold mine to my brother in 1992. He would go on to teach himself graphic design and would eventually work for Sierra Games in the late nineties. Have fun !
Great stuff as usual. You could also print your own rotary knob, if you have a multi coloured printer you could print a mini red/white bouncing ball 🙂
Ciao, i buyed my first Amiga 500 in late 1989, great Times, i've made my first steps with Desktop Wallpaper Creating and Tracker Music, in 1993 i've owned my Amiga 1200, many greetings from brunswick in germany and please stay safe 🙃
The amiga is one of my favorite computer ever. It's the one I had as a kid, The 500 tends to be pretty bomb proof.
Good to see a non-destructive rotary encoder/screen Gotek mod.
Good repair ! One small piece of perhaps advice - consider building a new PSU to replace the old one of you have not already - when they start to go they have a habit of taking out key chips, and the Gotek itself is surprisingly sensitive to a bad PSU. I used a generic SFF PC PSU that has a laptop style 18V primary with a small switched mode board to get all the voltages, and got the Amiga connector online. I now also have a bunch of cables for all my other retro things attached to the same setup and it is great way to avoid damaging old chips that are hard to replace !
Thanks for the filament tip. I sometimes need to make retro props so that's a really handy time saver
I have to say that I love seeing a young girl being into tech and retro computers/consoles, and also does your own mods, including soldering. Not many of you around, so nice to see
Love the whilst that bit is printing let’s design the next bit from scratch !
I absolutely love that you are showing how to take a cheap stock Gotek from AliExpress, re-flash the firmware, upgrade and prepare it for the Amiga. Since I have been doing this for years now, thereby saving quite a sum of money. Goteks bought from retro web-shops, can often cost from 2 to 4 times as much, and they are just buying them in bulk from China and doing exactly what you show there. Tons and tons of 👍points to you for showing just how easy this is. ❤ - Also love the almost spot-on filament colour.
- However, an Amiga 500 with only a broken floppy drive, is a bit of a rare and lucky find these days. There can easily be a lot more wrong with these old "girlfriends" (Amiga in Spanish). Many have just been chucked into lofts or cellars with several decades of poor conditions for storing electronics.
Moisture can cause all kinds of nasty corrosion to both the motherboard and the traces, and fluctuating summer/winter temperatures can cause electrolytic capacitors to dry out and/or start leaking everywhere. It can especially be critically bad, if the owner didn't think of first removing the memory-expansion or even better cut out the VARTA battery all together (in an A500 those are usually located inside the memory-expansion module, while on an A500+ the battery can sit on the motherboard itself, which is even worse). Since the electrolyte from both capacitors and that battery can over the years reek havoc eating away at the Amiga's wonderful custom chipsets (which are obviously no longer in production), the traces, or even the motherboard itself.
Yeah, taking an Amiga out of improper storage can often turn out to be quite the horror story. Not that long ago, the worse scenario would probably have been a damaged motherboard. But we can even get reverse-engineered replacements for those now (a hell of a job to solder those up with new fresh components and moving the rare ones over.). yeah, damage to the custom co-processors is properly the worse scenario today.
So, definitely gratz on the fully working Revision 6 "B52 Rock Lobster" Amiga 500 - which is capable of handling up to 1 MB shared Chip-memory and 1.5MB Slow-memory (with a "BooBip" memory-expansion module), and an additional 8 MB Fast-mem (via an accelerator-board)... So, 10.5 MB RAM in total.
- Next up: I think you should give the old gal a "PiStorm" and maybe a "RGB2HDMI" upgrade - She definitely deserves it, just from sheer beating the odds. Those 3 (incl. the BooBip) are properly some of the more cheaper upgrades... With the "Wicher", "Terrible Fire", and "Vampire" accelerators being some of the most expensive. There is not much point in fiddling around with the also very-soon-to-be vintage CompactFlash cards for these more expensive accelerators. As it is quite possible to use both SATA hard drives or SSDs via IDE/PATA-to-SATA adaptors (either made by StarTech or just some of the tiny cheaper ones from AliExpress). Although, there wouldn't be much point in going higher than 120GB or 160GB for an Amiga. The hard drives we had back then for the A500s were 20MB or 40MB tops (nope, not a typo... MB as in mega-bytes), and those were crazy expensive, noisier than a sawmill, and slower than a turtle on a conveyor belt going in the opposite direction.
Of course with a Raspberry Pi 3A+ driven PiStorm accelerator, you instantly get all that and more, only much faster, a lot cheaper, easier, and without all the old hassle and head-to-wall butting headaches.
- You'll probably still need the BooBip, since an Amiga-owner can never get enough of that wonderful chip-memory (which is accessible by the CPU and the co-processors simultaneously).
I had an Apple 2GS at the time when the 500 came out. Upgrading to that full meg of memory was so sweet! I've no interest in going back, but so glad you're having fun!
The Amiga 500 was my granddad's computer and it's what got me into technology when I was young.
Little known fact: Sennheiser made a radio mic control software (for their big radio receiver racks used in west end musicals etc) which ran exclusively on the Amiga. It was a while before they had a version of it for Windows so there was a time in the early 2000s when there were more Amigas in the west end running shows than there were in people's homes !
Citation: my parents worked in the west end in sound engineering and I saw it first hand when going into work with them.
That's a really cool mod, much more useful than floppy disks.
Also: those are some awesome looking pants!
I love how you know how to do all this. I wouldn't have a clue. I had an Amiga in the early nineties and I use make music with it. It's a really good sampler. Happy memories.
Oh! So cool!
I have heard about Amiga computers from books I read about VIM, but never seen one before .
Very neat mod and well done 😊, I'm even more happy with (finally) finding out which is the 'correct color' for the 'vintage plastics look' 🤣. We've been using several Esun filaments for over a year now (with great success), and will now definitely also order the Bone White, so thanks for that tip😊👍
Would be cool to get a tour of your shop and some organization tips!
I did this to my Amiga 1200 back when the Gotek first came out, but instead of reflashing the chip in the Gotek, I bought an adapter cable of eBay that allows a standard PC floppy to work with the Amiga interface, if I remember correctly the cable had a 7 series logic chip and a couple of resistors in it to adapt the two differing comms standards, worked pretty well but I ended up missing the floppy noises, so I stuck a PC floppy in there instead and used a USB Superdisk drive to write images to floppies from an emulator on a PC, all good fun, things are so much more streamlined now!
Recently moved home and my old Amiga 1200 with psu and everything I had for it back in the day, was found in my old atic. Planning on doing this mod !!
Fantastic Saturday morning content while enjoying my tea
What a coincidence, I've just put an external gotek on my 500+ today with a boot df0 df1 switch, great bit of kit, love your videos.
i think you did a perfect job. i would always prefer it this way vs. threading the cables visibly out of the case and back in to the remote as you suggested at the end.
Giving you extra kudos for the Robocop t-shirt.
The Amiga 500 doesn't feel right unless it has aa huge RF modulator balance out of the back of the machine and having the computer connected to an old crt. Rich people might have a sony trinitron, however most would have an old portable Busch or Akai portable ctr with the coat hanger aerial in the back
Great Video. Although i have an External Gotek Drive, i still like to Read/Write and load games from Floppy Discs. Nostalgia.
I've used that filament as well. I think it actually matches closer than the Printed Solid Jesse "Beige 500" filament which is supposed to be an actual match for the Amiga 500 colour. Maybe it is something to do with the degree of yellowing the Amiga happens to suffer over time and the Jesse is perhaps close to a factory brand new Amiga. Hard to say, but that Bone White filament is definitely a good choice for any retro 3d printer projects regardless.
I never had an Amiga, but a friend did. The graphics were years ahead of its time! On another note, I recently picked up an Atari 800xl with all the attachments and a TI-99/4a. The Atari works but I'm having keyboard issues with the TI. A project for the colder months.
I share your pain of DuPont connectors, I have no idea how many I went through before I got a good crimp, did end up getting a bit better though. Your thoughts on pulling the wires out through the slot and looping back into the controller box is what I did, it makes opening the case way easier! Though I have to admit, your controller box is way better than the one I designed, but I was limited by the rotary encoder dimensions, so I mounted it to the side.
That's a neat mod! Nice work! That install is really clean.
That's fantastic. Back in the 80's / 90's when I had an Amiga (many ---- 8 or more A500's , 2 x 600's, 1 x 1200, 2 x 2000's) I never would have dreamed this was possible. The main drama with the Amiga was having a dead drive.
Ah the good old Amiga 500 brings back some memories seeing this ( Game in question Shadow of the Beast ) my fave game on the a500 😁 and yes it is awesome to see someone taking the time to do something like this. 👍
I had the 600 with extra disk drive and monitor. Was such a cool little machine
It's pretty cool seeing people using new tech to keep old tech viable. I wouldn't have minded seeing a bit more of the process.
Wow, a most interesting Amiga A500 upgrade video. ✨ Thank you.