Commodore Amiga 4000 Trash to Treasure (Pt1) - Meet the A4000
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 มิ.ย. 2020
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● Description
It's time to give some TLC to another old Micro in a Trash to Treasure series and this time I'm lucky enough to have an Amiga 4000. It doesn't look to be in too bad condition but we can still make it a whole lot better and use the opportunity to learn all about it along the way, so join me in a new T2T series. This is the Commodore Amiga 4000.
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● Series Links
Episode 1 - Meet the A4000 - • Commodore Amiga 4000 T...
Episode 2 - PSU & "Damn you Mehdi Ali" • Amiga 4000 - "Damn you...
Episode 3 - Recapping, cleaning, testing & Dave Haynie interview - • Amiga 4000 Restoration...
Amiga 3000 poster art: Vasilis Psomiadis - amigaposters.github.io
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@RetroManCave An extra "inch"? Come on now, it is 2020, use standard units of measurement. Other than that, really like your videos, keep up the good work.
Good luck on the keyboard - they're rarer than Dreamcast keyboards :\ although note that replacement caps for the keyboards are available at reasonable prices - so don't be too afraid of a battered example - it may be the only example you'll see for a while
8:06 skynet confirmed. The real reason Commodore went bust, the resistance travelled back to 1994 to stop Skynet and therefore judgement day in 1997.
Thank you, I've just fixed that. Much appreciated
Really nice. I have an A3000 with a similar fate....I can't get it to boot properly and I don't have a second Amiga with SCSI....
Now it sounds wrong if you say CD-ROM instead of CD-ROM-ROM.
Interesting how the 'Non Serviceable PSU' has a cool hinged lid for accessing it.
And is made by Skynet. 21:24
Nobody wanted the A600, but I still liked mine. 😂 Poor A600.
The original idea - the A300 - was a good one tho.
Yeah, it's a cute little thing! And probably cheap for parents that Christmas all those years ago.
Nothing wrong with the A600 :)
Me too --- I've prob... spent 3 times what I paid for it in Upgrades :-)
The store I worked for sold a lot of A600s and A1200s. I miss those days.
I bought an Amiga 1000 as soon as it came out. It was so early in the launch that it came with kickstart and workbench 1.0. There's a wonderful easter egg inside the A1000's cover. Be on the lookout and enjoy. Then I moved to an A2000 and finally an A4000. My heart was torn from my chest when Commodore went belly up. Thanks for literally restoring these wonderful and terrible memories.
I miss my A1000. The A4000 was something I could never afford, but I got a lot of use out of a 2nd hand A1000.
Amigas need all the love they can get.
One of the biggest changes AGA had, which I feel you overlooked, is the expanded colour palette. The OCS/ECS chipset only had a 4-bit palette for each of the Red, Green and Blue channels. So all those 4096 colours that could be displayed in HAM mode were the total limit of the colours that were available - and between black and red there were only 15 steps of colour available. AGA expands this to a 8-bit palette, so the full range of 16.8 million colours that was also available on competing platforms. So now there were 254 shades of Red between black and the brightest Red. Commodore advertised AGA as being able to display 262,144 colours at once, but really, the limit could be higher than that in HAM8.
There were other improvements that AGA had, but yes, it was still not the revolutional leap over the competition that maybe could have saved Commodore, but it was largely compatible with older software, and larger changes may have broken more already existing software. As it was, some people found out the hard way that not everything was compatible - sometimes using the early startup menu could help with this, but sometimes you were just out of luck.
Turn it into a video toaster. Got a whole kit in my tv studios backroom. You want it sent your way. Brand new
Oh wow, would you please drop an email to retromancave@gmail.com and we can have a chat, thank you
@@RMCRetro on it
If I may be the first to say it, you rock sir!
@@performa9523 you may. Glad to assist. Shame i wont be able to smell fresh air packed in 1990.
Toaster/Flyer combo would be great, served me well until late 1996.
Used an A4000/40 back in the day as a 3D modelling/animation system shortly before LightWave3D was unbundled from the video toaster. Immediately moved over to LightWave once it was unbundled. Cracking system. Took a long time before the Amiga could be beat from a multitasking POV. Had a 030 too, but noticeably slower (and an A1200 souped up with a 060 board & 32MB of RAM - that had to run with the cover off in the summer!) Forgotten how difficult it was to cram upgrades in the A4000. Always wanted a A4000T, but they were seemingly very rare! Seeing the early AVID systems made me realise there was no way the Amiga was going to keep up in the video editing stakes.
love how the psu says "skynet electronics"
I loved my Amiga 600. It came along just at the right time for me. Built-in modulator, extra chip ram, 2.0 Workbench, hard-disk. It let me do more than my 500 and since I couldn't afford the 1200, it slotted in perfectly. It gets way more shade than it deserves.
The holy grail. If only they weren't so expensive. But then if they had sold enough to be relatively cheap, Commodore might still be around. For me the newer range A1200, A4000, CD32 were too little, too late and (especially in the case of the A4000) too expensive.
I'm part of a number of Amiga groups - Vampire, Minimig stuff - new expansion cards etc etc - it is common knowledge how super rare amiga keyboards are. There's maybe one person a year who posts a picture of them acquiring one and they are seen with awe by thousands of others
Commodore had many failings as a company. Jack Tramiel’s hard-nosed management style often offended both suppliers and resellers, but he at least had a vision for what the company was supposed to be. When he was removed, the new management kept his offensive style but lost any and all strategic outlook. The real problems began when Irving Gould managed to get Jack Tramiel to suddenly resign from the company he founded, which created not just a power vacuum but an instant rival. Jack swore revenge, took over Atari, and released the ST, which very nearly killed the Amiga before it had a chance to take off.
After a series of bad CEOs like Marshall Smith with little or no experience in the personal computing industry, Gould eventually hired and promoted Mehdi Ali, who bled Commodore dry while lining his own pockets. Mehdi Ali would end up hiring people like Bill Sydnes, who had been the product manager for IBM’s PC Junior (the biggest failure in that company’s history) and was responsible for canceling the innovative Amiga A3000+.
Mehdi missed several key opportunities during this time. One of the most egregious was killing a deal with Sun Microsystems, which wanted to license both Amiga Unix (AMIX) and Amiga hardware for their low-end workstations. Ali sabotaged the deal twice by demanding increasingly outrageous licensing fees. Ali also sat back and watched as new companies grew faster and faster by filling in the gaps in Amiga hardware that Commodore refused to provide, such as hard drives and CPU upgrades. The largest of these, GVP, ended up being worth over half the value of Commodore itself, which was unheard of for a peripheral company.
Mehdi was also responsible for producing the worst Amiga ever created-the Amiga 600. Intended to be a cost-reduced 500, it was released with fewer features than its cousin for a higher price. Ali doubled down on this failure by making sure that stores were flooded with A600s that nobody wanted while failing to manufacture enough A500s and A1200s that people actually _did_ want. But the greatest harm that Ali inflicted on Commodore was selling its future. Over the years, he continued to gut R&D funding until there was almost nothing left.
After Commodore liquidated, Ali formed an extremely sketchy management consulting company. Mehdi described himself as having “accomplished a major operational turnaround” during his time serving as president of Commodore. That could be considered true, in a sense. He joined Commodore when it was a billion dollar company and turned it around until it was a bankrupt one.
TL;DR: Making the Amiga cheaper would not have saved Commodore. Gould and Mehdi fucked it up too much for it to survive.
I finally got my very first Amiga a couple of months ago, a 500. Channels like this one as well as others finally pushed me over the edge to get one. I was going to wait for a THEA500 Maxi to come out, but who wants to wait! I have always wanted an Amiga 4000 in the tower case. I imagine they're pretty rare, and that dream may not ever be realized, but damn... these machines are just incredible!
I remember drooling over this computer as I walked out of the store with my Amiga 500
the Amiga 4000 nearly cause my parents to divorce. Back when it came out my dad spent a fortune on one but he set it up on the dining room table and scratched the table. She went ballistic and they had a huge argument about it. Luckily they both got over it and are still together....... although she did find out a few months later how much he had bought i for and another argument happened but not as bad this time
@Dr ROLFCOPTER! my mum has never been a computer person, only time I have ever witnessed her playing a computer game is bowling on the WII. Maybe if she was she might not have gotten so angry (thought not likely as it was a nice dining room table lol)
Technology has always been a male pursuit. Going all the way back to first caveman that sharpened a stone.
An 040 Amiga 4000 in late 1992 was $3699 USD before taxes, which would translate to $5997 USD adjusted for inflation.
She had every reason to be choked.
@@earlspencer7863 Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper would disagree.
If you owned a A4000 way back then you were a computer god.
Nice to see a sponsor clip I didn't want to skip over! I've used PCBWay before. Decent prices and I was impressed with the quality of both their PCBs and solder paste stencils. For simple one- or two-layer boards I've mostly switched to JLCPCB because they're cheaper, and the free SMT assembly service (with super cheap parts sourced from LCSC) is impossible to turn down, but with reduced price comes reduced precision and the quality control suffers a fair bit. Anything 4 layers or more goes to PCBWay, no question. A few quid more but worth it to save the hassle of an inner layer short if you're pushing close to tolerances.
I was watching this thinking, "But Amiga 4000's came with 68040 processors. I am sure of it." Then you explained that later ones came with 68030 processors whihc happened AFTER I left the Amiga scene. I learned something new today!
If the Ramsey chip was the chef it would scream about the expansion bus being RAW
Nice to see you here Dad
Amiga 4000, brings back so many memories. And every one of them good.
An a4000 is treasure to treasure no matter the state it's in!
What a beautiful beast! Even though they're way before my time, the Amiga is a machine that holds a special place in my heart with how influential it was
Watching this and thinking, "I know exactly what's in there!"
Then being surprised as I don't recall replacing the 80MB drive with a 255MB one, I'm now wondering if maybe I had it replaced as part of my purchase, all those years ago...
As for the GB drive, I bought that at computer fair up in London, seem to recall it was at the old Wembley Stadium complex. Have vague memories of paying about £100 for it, 10MB per £ was great value at the time!
The power button with the long shaft always cracks me up. Its just so... Whatever works
Can’t wait for this series Neil. But please leave the little 600 alone, it was the perfect form factor for this kids bedroom in the early 90’s. Take Care.
So many A4000 videos lately, doesnt make it easier that I sold my perfectly working one around 17 years ago. What an idiot.
Used it everyday from 1993 to 1999 when I bought a B&W Powermac G3.
That machine was amazingly clean and dust-free inside when you opened it.
I wonder if Rick can find me a universe where Commodore won the PC wars?
Marvelous video! I still miss my amiga 3000T, wish I didn't sell it back in 1996.
I used to work with a guy called Tim who worked for Core Design. When his Amiga500 got dirty he used to bath with it and give it a good scrub. It was also spray painted bright pink.
My A1200 has been recapped! :D
Love the Trash to Treasure series videos they such a trip down memory lane. I had an A500, A500+ A600, and the A1200 before moving on to PCs. One game I remember playing was frontier ( Elite 2 ) even on the Amiga 1200 it was slow so I love to see how the Amiga 4000 with its more powerful 030 chip copes with all that Amiga graphics glory. Thanks for sharing Neil already looking forward to part two.
I think there is a video on Neil's channel of it running on the vampire.
I started with a used A1000 which I sold and later upgraded to an A2000. I sold that one and ended up getting an A3000T which I miss the most and was a fantastic beast of a machine. Oh the wonderful days of being single and having a good paying job. :)
I used to do linear editing on the Video Toaster 4000 on an Amiga 4000, and it was really impressive... as an avid PC user, I was always impressed with Amiga graphics of the time.
I remember I needed to load a Toaster 4000 upgrade from a CD, but the Amiga didn't have a CD drive.. so I installed an IDE CD-ROM from a PC, and had to learn how to load a driver of some sort for ATAPI support... it was a fun learning experience.
so you were an avid PC user, but not a PC user of Avid? ;)
Those lock switches usually only lock the keyboard. They are a pretty standard switch though and you can probably pick one up off flea-bay for a dollar, with a key :)
I am looking forward to this series of restore and upgrades. Thanks for keeping this alive :)
RMC manages to stand out from most other popular channels by having sponsor messages that are actually interesting and relevant. Love it!
Thanks Matt!
Big box Amigas are really interesting, I guess because I never saw one back then. I obviously wasn't a pro user, the Amiga 1200 was the last machine people had at home and after that it just seemed like everyone switched to PC.
I had a 2000 in the early 90's and loved it.
Yessssss. I love a T2T series. Perfect lockdown watching. Thank you.
I think you would be surprise how much people actually LIKE the A600, especially with current expansion turbo cards making this little machine a top dog racer. :-)
Absolutely love these *TtT* series.
Great stuff. Hope you and the family are well Neil. Stay safe, keep the videos coming.
I had an A600...
Loved it.
I miss my old Amigas.
I started with A500, A1200, CD32, then an A4000.
I still have an old GVP I/O expansion card, in original box somewhere.
Just finished refurbishing (Some rework and recapping) an A4000/030 for a friend of mine, even with the current technology I still love these machines
Great video once again and nice to see a 4000 getting back to its former glory, but the poor A600, some of us still love you
ECS chipset was actually conceived after the AAA chip set. The fear was that AAA would hit the market too late to save CBM so ECS was conceived as a stopgap measure. The revised ECS graphics chips were renamed to Alice and Lisa (formerly Agnus and Denise). My God that was a long time ago. Thanks for the memories.
"Nobody would have complained about it".
I would have! If my full length expansion cards no longer have fitted within the guard rails to hold them in place, I would have been MAD!
Thanks for this video! I love Commodore and I love Amiga, so.. thumbs up for this video/series👍😁
If you you only knew how happy I was to see a new resto video pop up! Definitely my favourite content.
Can't wait to see the next episode! Thank you so much for doing these videos!
Thank you. Thank you very much, for another great video. I can't wait for the next one in this series. Your original A500 "Trash to Treasure", introduced me to your Channel. It brought back so many good memories!
I love everything Commodore / Amiga related, but. I enjoy all of your content. Really professionaly made, with knowledge and passion. Also, you seem to be really down to earth and kind person. Lovely!
Anyway, greetings from Berlin.
Love your vids and especially the ones about the Amiga!
80 megabyte drive. Wow, that is huge. Something I would have said years ago. lol
I remember when we got the first one gigabyte hard drives in the 90's in the store where I worked. They sold for $1000 dollars each and we could not keep them in stock. Amazing.
Looking forward to part 2!!!
I loved my Amiga 4000, but sadly my battery leaked all over the board and under the ram sockets :( and killed it. So glad to see you saved yours just in time.
Don’t worry 600 I love you! It was the desk friendly Amiga.
Lovely and relaxing show. Those A4000 keyboards are pricey...good luck!
Nice - that really tugs at the heartstrings 👍
And, new sponsor - good for you! 🥳
Superb video Neil - I do love a good trash to treasure! Looking forward to the rest of the series 😀
Very nice episode, and looking forward to the rest of the series! I went through tear-down and rebuild/upgrade with both my A4000 and A3000 over the last year and a half or so. I think I can hear your A4000 quietly whispering "Warp 4060" in your ears at night while you sleep. :) I trust you'll be able to locate a good quality A4000 keyboard as well!
This was indeed top of the line for the Amiga range, but the tip top, and the one I dreamed about owning in the 90's after finding out they where used for the CGI on Babylon 5 was the Amiga A4000T, but at least here in the US, I've never not seen them go for mind boggling amounts of money when they do pop up for sale.
I absolutely love your trash to treasure series - great to follow!
LG made some short optical drives that fit the A4000 much better than the normal length ones. Makes cable management much easier!
Always love these model history and restoration videos.
Neil is so retro, he disassembles this Amiga wearing a suit jacket in summer!
The manufacturer of the power supply is named Skynet 😆
i am interested in the series, at that time the 4000 was unaffordable for me as a student.
Everybody who is interested in Amigas should have take a look at Jan Beta channel.
BR Thomas
"nobody wanted you, Amiga 600"
Guess I was the one I did wanted one :)
Same here - it saw me through my teen years after much whining to my parents :D Had I known that the A1200 would be on the horizon, I may never have owned an Amiga due to the cost...
Not at alllll jealous, honest! Looking forward to seeing it back up and running. :)
Always an enjoyable watch, can't wait for the follow up!
I was lucky enough to briefly own one back in the day. Between a 500 and 1200. They are still some of the best computers I ever owned and nothing has really grabbed me since. I mean a Hugh Jass display and all the Hz is nice? But the Amigas stole my heart. I miss them.
10:10 2 MB of CHIP RAM, not FAST RAM. Up to 16 MB of FAST RAM (expandable with RAM on the CPU card and RAM on Zorro bus). My A4000 has 2 MB chip, 16 MB (on board) + 128 MB (on the 060 CPU card) fast.
So you have a formula 1 amiga? :P
@@HoboVibingToMusic Not yet. It's only 60 MHz because of rev1 060. I plan to overclock it to 100 MHz as soon as I get another rev6 060 (already have a rev6 on Apollo 1260 running at 80 MHz). Rev6 is great, it's running cool and fast.
060 rev6 is here, hapilly running at 80 MHz. Waiting for 100 MHz oscillators, hopefully it will work stable. Even if it won't, 80 MHz is fast enough.
This is the rig I grew up with and will forever love. However mine was the tower version (A4000T).
Great stuff - looking forward to this one :D
The start of another interesting series of videos. Thanks Neil.
Such a nice and chill watch with some great information to go along with it 😀
Thanks Jonathan
Awesome, looking forward to the next instalments. One of my many regrets, I saved an A4000 and A1500 from a dumpster outside my office about 18 years ago. Neither worked and needed lots of TLC. I kept them both beside my desk as I’d no car to collect them. The company I was in went bust and I never went back in to collect them. Sometimes, when I’m about to fall asleep at night, I jolt upright with a pang of remorse and regret for not collecting those machines,.
Great Trash to Treasure as always, THE Amiga to own! I cannot believe the prices these go for now, one day I'll find one.
Not on this, but on modern pcs, if the power switch is one that can be swapped out, you can get a momentary key switch. My case uses standard switches like that or you can replace the switch plate out with a blank. I did so, then drilled some holes in the blank 5.25" plate, and put a key switch in parallel with my power switch to disable it for s/g's.
*angry yells at the poor yellowed A1000*
JK man, another great TtT unfolds, i love it!
Love your vids. Always fascinating.
I regret throwing my perfectly working A4000 away in the late nineties. Originally started out with a A2000. While I could use an emulator to write some Motorola 68k assembler which is what i'm mainly longing for, it just wouldn't be quite the same. I remember how much fun i had optimizing assembler to make a subroutine just another few CPU cycles faster on each new iteration without changing the algorithm but by changing addressing modes, execution order, pipeline optimizations like avoiding pipeline stalls and flushes etc. Taught me a lot about the inner workings of CPU's.
The Amiga 4000 is a beast of a machine I wish I had back in the day. You could literally run Mac OS on it, Atari TOS, and even have a 486 card to run Windows 95, and it could run them all FAST! The one thing I could never understand why didn't they put better sound chips in it?
What a brilliant video, great with the history lesson 😀
congratulations with your Amiga4000, im sure it will give you hours of entertainment.
At recap, please make sure 2 caps at sound area is installed in right direction 😀👍🏻
With love from Denmark 🇩🇰
I'm so glad I found your channel. Only had the C64 but I am fascinated with the Amiga Computers. I can blame watching Computer Chronicles on PBS as a kid for that. Now THIS is Edutainment!!!!
Great a new trash to treasure, love them, and a nice if not ground breaking Amiga after the glorious A3000.
Great Video. Looking forward to the upcoming videos.
14:25 "a massive heat-sink" LOL
Always a pleasure to see you give some much needed love to an old machine, all the while listening to a well picked DnB track. Thanks Neil!
EDIT: BTW my vote goes to servicing the PSU, as usual better to keep as much original hardware in here as is practical and feasible :-)
The utter breakdown of Commodore R&D and their inability to deliver a meaningful update to original Amiga chipset in time is one of the great tragedies of computer history. Had the AGA showed up in 1989 or 1990, it would have been a brilliant upgrade. By 1992, it just couldn't compete with VGA or the relatively fast framebuffers available on the Macs of the time.
This is something we dive into in Ep2 - really interesting story
Nice and it looks like the costed down model, love my Amiga 4000 030
Oh Neil! I *love* my Amiga 600. Amiga 600 fan here bud. Nice video by the way, look forward to other parts.
What a great show. I was fortunately enough to get a 4000 with keyboard, mouse, and 1942 monitor for $500.00 Canadian.
Smashing episode mate!
china
Haha, that power button... finger.... is ghastly! ;-)
Great video, can’t wait for episode 2!
Cool, i have been trying to obtain a 4000 without remortgaging the Budgie.
@20:22 thanks to your video, I finally opened by my A3000 to find not one, but TWO leaky Varta batteries. One on the A3000 that was a little worse than this and one on the A2386SX bridgeboard that was also leaking. They are removed and the damage cleaned up but I need to do more testing before I fire it up again... and the last time was probably 2 decades ago now!
As an A1200 owner I really, really wanted an A4000 but there was no way I could have afforded one. Today the A3000 looks a lot nicer, especially as a graphics card upgrade is far superior to AGA.
So I was about to say that Neil is a tech TH-camr dressed classy AF, and then I noticed space invaders on his shirt. Damn, now that's CLASSY AF
Also @Gary, nice chip :)
ohh now i miss my old amiga 600 :)
it had an extra md of ram and a 250 mb hdd
Me too, I loved that thing!
These videos bring me so much joy. I much needed respite from the current state of the world.