Update: A couple of people mentioned that the PSU PCB does not appear to be grounded to the case, and in this edit it isn't! A huge number of hours get chopped up when editing these episodes so things can be missed but I think it's important to highlight this if anyone is attempting the same mod. Please ground your board to the PSU case and perform a continuity check to make sure it is. Here's a pic of mine for reference: drive.google.com/file/d/1WMnLxt_819zh2OPhjRntfqRq0VWsr_dL/view?usp=sharing Thank you for watching! I'm exited to share that Dave Haynie will be making an appearance in part 3 of this series which I'm working on now. All videos are released to the Patrons who support The Cave first, 1 week early with no ads. If you'd like to help support the videos I make and get perks like early access then I'd love to welcome you over at patreon.com/retromancave - Thank you for your support! Neil - RMC
@@Caddy666 what has that got to do with anything? You do realise when people buy computers they do so to have a computer, not because it may be valuable some day? Stupidest comment I've seen in a while.
Neil, you mentioned the need for a flicker-fixer to reduce eye strain when running higher resolutions than 640x480, however I have a stock A1200 (+ 4MB FAST RAM) with a 1438S monitor, and on that combo i can comfortably use 800x600 (up to 913x626 with overscan) and the picture is just completely rock-steady. :D
Hi. I went thru the same choice in 1993, when I sold my Amiga 2000 for which the parts were really expensive, for a 486DX33 PC, soon upgraded with a 486DX2-66, a VLB graphics card, and a hard drive I couldn't afford the only controller for the A2000. Too bad Commodore, maybe you should have sourced your chipset to chinese compatible makers, and also demand Microsoft to port Excel...
"Genuine Sanwa arcade parts" is now an expression I use and I've yet to find anyone that understands the reference. "That thing is really neat but does it have genuine Sanwa arcade parts?"
Mehdi Ali put on his resume that he had overseen a turnaround at Commodore. This is certainly true: He took a $6 billion a year industry leading company and drove it into bankruptcy.
I personally blame Irving Gould, he was the one who who fired Jack and hired all the CEOs afterwards. From what I've read Gould got rich from a lucky encounter by the inventor of the shipping crate. He got his wealth through luck and he used to fly out of the US every x number of days to avoid paying tax. That's why the Pet Jet existed. But Ali was hired obviously due to his experience (because selling sugar water means you can run a tech company lol) and the fact he sounded like Jack. He was also as rotund.
@@CantankerousDave When he was at Commodore, he was paid nearly $2 million a year. That's $12-$14 million before taxes. Some of that money is probably what allowed him and his son to start Stone Ridge Partners, which is a private equity firm that buys struggling companies, in 2013. He also sits on the board of another private equity firm. In-between Commodore's bankruptcy in 1994 and the founding of Stone Ridge Partners in 2013, if I remember correctly, he tried to open a management consultancy business, which is where he bragged about overseeing a turnaround at Commodore. However, given that the website for his consultancy business disappeared just a few years later, I'd imagine that everybody took a look and said "turnaround at Commodore? Oh, he's _that_ guy. No thank you!" Or maybe he managed all his clients into bankruptcy too. So my guess is, he didn't start to "fail upwards" until the early 2010s. He struggled a bit (if you can call being a multi-millionaire "struggling") for a few years first.
THis is such a depressing memory. I was a commodore owner from the 1983 onward. I LOVED my Amigas when they first came out. It the late 80s, it was the best gaming machine you could own, and it still did everything else. Even ran MSDos if needed. But from 1990 onward, it was mistake after mistake after mistake. It became very hard to support the Amiga
In 1987 Bobby Kotick, currently of Activision Blizzard, tried to buy out Commodore but was turned down. I often wonder how that timeline would've played out. Might as well be like swapping the plague for cholera, but we'll never know for sure.
Yeah. I also found out that one Steve Jobs talked Kotick into pursuing a career in computer software. Before that he was supposedly studying for an art degree.
@Dr ROLFCOPTER! It looks like they are trained to stick with their magical "sugar water" recipe and fear to make changes. Which obviously do not apply to a fast paced, innovative industry.
the engineers gave Ali the best mousetrap the world had ever seen up to that date. Unfortunately Ali didn't have the slightest clue what a mousetrap was...
Read Alis bloomberg profile, he writes he turned Commodore around. He threatens people with legal action if they say otherwise. He was hired as he looked and acted like Tramiel.
this video is not to be watched by Medhi Ali therby you must confirm that you are not Medhi Ali or not Associated with Medhi Ali. just like Anish Kapoor, Fuck you Medhi Ali!
You and me both. It's an instant blood pressure spike to read or hear his name. Fuck Irving Gould too for driving Jack Tramiel out of his own creation and allowing all the disasterous CEOs including Ali to be hired.
You desoldered the remnants of the old power supply cables which means you didn't really need to cut the cables in the first place. Thanks for the video. These Amiga related videos keep making me want to drag my A2000 with its 68030 CPU card out of its box and get it running again.
The best thing Commodore could have done with the AAA chipset would be to stick it on a Zorro 2 card. They could theoretically have also done a version on PCI to get in with the PC crowd but in the end that was not to be.
I read an interview with one of the engineers that worked on the chipset and he basically said it was pretty underpowered compared to the then upcoming playstation 1 and still wasnt as good as a decent pc so probably wouldnt have helped commodore in the long run.
That PSU upgrade was a lot of work! My philosophy is that the only things like to fail in a PSU within my lifetime are the electrolytic caps, so a recap should get it through at least another 30 years. Fan bearings can go too of course but I tend to cross that bridge when I get there, i.e. replace the fan when it gets noisy.
I always thought David Pleasance and Jeremy Beadle were the same guy. I didn't know about him when I was a daily Amiga user but he's been pretty active since the retro stuff started and I kept wondering why Jeremy Beadle was in loads of videos about Amigas.
I remember when I came to upgrade from an A500 I faced a similar choice. However, at the time, there were quite a lot of people upgrading from the 1200 to PC so 1200s were available second hand for only around £200 - £250. So that's what I went for in the end and I had a couple of happy years with it.
Another excellent video. I was in the same position as you in the 90s, but I had (and still have) a 1200. I would have loved to upgrade to a big box Amiga, but I had just started a degree, and *really* needed a PC, and only enough money to upgrade my Amiga or buy a PC. I was starting a degree, and as I needed a PC to complete my studies, I had no choice really. Regarding Commodore, they always seemed like a company that consisted of a *lot* of excellent engineers backed up by ineffectual or incompetent management and bad marketing. Not, that's at an international level. Commodore UK actually had good management, and fairly effective marketing, although I felt their efforts were often hampered by a lack of support from Commodore International. I have a Ryzen 5 based PC now which is hundreds of times more powerful than my Amiga 1200, and also a Macbook. While I like both, I felt more for my Amiga than either. They are just tools. Tools that I work and (in the case of my PC) I play on, but just tools. My Amiga felt almost like a companion on an adventure.
I bought an A1200 when it came out and was quite happy with it as well. I found myself in a similar position with needing a PC for education purposes within a few short years though. Had I possessed psychic foresight I would have traded in my original A500 for a used A2000 or A3000 instead of getting the A1200 and I could have just bought a 486 bridgecard for half the price of what I ended up spending on a PC and kept the Amiga dream alive a little longer in my life. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.
Something Commodore easily could (and should have) done was upgrade the Paula chip. It was fantastic in the 1985-1990 era but was slowly beeing superseded by the competition. The Archimedes has 8 channels of PCM audio, so did the SNES and the Sega Mega CD. Why didn’t they put two Paula chips in the A1200 and CD-32? It would have complimented the AGA chipset nicely. It feels like Commodore somehow overlooked this by their management decisions.
I was an A3000 owner when the A4000 was released, and Commodore's product line was a major disappointment. The system was nothing like the rumors we had read about AAA and could not match the graphics that were already available in the IBM compatible market. The lack of a built-in flicker-fixer and SCSI on the A4000 just poured salt in the wounds, and so the computer that replaced my A3000 was a Pentium. I still miss the Amiga Workbench and boot it up in emulation regularly to mess with the software I wrote from the Amiga or to play a game of Stunt Car Racer or Pinball Fantasies. I question whether what killed Commodore was the guy who put Mehdi in charge (Irving Gould) since the company could have made it years and possibly decades longer with proper R&D funding and not killing off the projects that were pushing the platform forward.
Wow I'm absolutely loving this series. The history combined with the fixing up of old hardware is just perfect. Growing up in America as I barely heard of an Amiga at the time, and it's really interesting getting a survey of their landscape at the time.
I support you replacing the insides of the power supply, and am glad you said you'd keep the original contents safe for posterity. I replaced the electrolytic capacitors on a Timex/Sinclair 1000 with ceramics and taped the old electrolytics to the board in the old positions so that people could see what was originally in place.
As a casual consumer of retro tech videos, I don't know too much about the Commodore Amiga history. It was unfortunate I had to learn of Mehdi Ali's existence and his unfortunate impact on computing history.
Former A1200 owner here... it was a great machine and I had the zappo external CD drive for it to play CD32 games. good times back then. Walker is still one of my fondest memories.
awesome job! always wanted to do this to a gorgeous sony vaio case a relative gave me, the psu is a proprietary shape with two pegs that lock the whole case together.
I was looking for a new high-end PC at the time... the Amiga unfortunately was absolutely no competition. So I built from components a 486 machine, with a Soundblaster and Tseng Labs ET4000-W32, and used it as a Unix workstation - Linux by then supported some ethernet cards, the ET4000, the Soundblaster, and felt more nippy than the Unix workstations we had at uni. It was nerd heaven.
As a kid in the US I was the only person I knew with an Amiga. These videos make me miss my 2500 Video Toaster equipped big box. I ultimately switched to a pc compatible in the 90s when Amiga in the US was long dead. But I was so upset when my family donated my Amiga.
I nearly cried when Commodore went under, I had always been an Amiga fan. I always wondered what Commodore could of achieved if they had stayed around, but we will never know. Great vid cant wait for next one.
Living in the Midwest USA, I had not heard of Amiga until almost 2000. My first computer at home was a VIC20. My best friend had a C64 and found Elite early on. I craved the power of the C64. I was not allowed to touch the IBM pcs at school because of the things I was able to do with the Apple II and IIGS in elementry and middle school. When I got to college we were required to have a computer, specifically Mac, which I guess is unusual for an engineering school. One of the guys that was going for his master in computer science while going for comp engineering had a C64 hooked up to a surround sound system and had GEOS running. I fell for the C64 again and almost got a C128 when I went shopping for a better Mac. This was around 93. I stayed Mac and then Mac & Linux till Mac os X got to be an annual "gives us your money for update" I think it was panther. Now I am Linux exclusive, but I wish Commodore had kept going. I liked coding on them better than Pc or Mac or even Apple II.
If you were serious about computing and it's business / productivity uses in the future, the only road was PC. The serious software alone was enough, for me it was commercial sign making, accounting software and vector and pixel based design software. If you could afford both, well that would be rare.
As a power supply tester I can only recommend to replace the old power supplies if this is possible. I would have done it similar to you in the video. But I think there are better power supplies that have stronger 5V lines. From experience I can say that many high quality power supplies not only withstand much higher loads but are also so developed. The power supplies are then limited to the 100W 3,3&5V Combined Power. One reason is the 80% certification, the 12V line is more efficient so the manufacturer can also achieve higher efficiencies and certification. The problem is to see from the outside if the power supply can deliver only 100W or even 150W without problems. I'll see if I can find a link to the power supplies that are better suited for such projects . BR Thomas
@Deep Throat I haven't tested it but for smaller retro systems this industrial power supply might be interesting. It only has 12V & 5V and 54W. If more power is needed I can check the test protocols which power supplies can handle stabile higher loads at 5V. asset.conrad.com/media10/add/160267/c1/-/en/001293114DS01/datenblatt-1293114-mean-well-rd-50a-acdc-netzteilbaustein-geschlossen-54-w.pdf
Back in the 90s I modified a Supermicro server case to house my A4000/060+Toaster/Flyer/KitchenSync, and about 6 years ago I installed an SSD drive. This was a follow-up to my modifying a tower case to house an A2000/Blizzard060. The two systems are still in my home office.
My brother and I have a large Amiga tower with 68060, Picasso IV and disk drives (including 5.25") that could write disks for many systems. Eyetech said its the most work they have ever done hooked up to A1200 on its side. Cost a fortune with our expensive multi-sync monitor. Now it's sat in my brothers bedroom too worried to switch it on in case it pops!
Another great video! I was tempted by the A4000, but my A3000 was still serving me quite well. I was in wait and see mode from '93 until Commodore went belly up, trying to decide between upgrading to an AGA machine or not... Then she. They went under my decision was made for me. Now that I own an A4000 I really love it!
Honestly I was happy with my A2000 which ran my BBS until 1997 when I took it down due to lack of activity because by then everyone was using the internet. Signs of the times. Long before that I had migrated over to the PC because I got more bang for my buck then what Commodore had to offer but mostly because I needed compatibility with work and that was all PC. I was never much into games for me it was always productivity and telecommunications. The Amiga served me well back them and I can remember my PC friends would often say their computer was more powerful than my A2000 but they could never understand why I could do much more then they could until Win95 then they would call me to let me know now they could multitask and my reply was the Amiga was doing it in hardware not software but as time moved forward I was with everyone else using PC's for work. I kept my A2000 and its still alive and well and I do use it and enjoy using it. I got the retro bug and well now I own more Amiga's than PC's and MAC's. Mac's I could careless about. I need a PC for work but they are just disposable throw away computers where as my Amiga's are precious to me and no I am still not into games but when I turn on an Amiga there is always a big smile on my face something I can't say about a PC.
I know that pain leaving! I started Amigas back at the beginning, having perhaps the third (?) A1000 in the East Coast as I worked as a buyer for a major electronics retailer. Later, I worked for a Colorado-based Amiga hardware manufacturer and had a 2000 with the fastest '030 then available. I had years invested in the Amiga, what seemed like dozens of magazines over the years and a few hundred 3.5" floppies...but, that Christmas season, when Commodore's big TV push was a kid being visited by Buzz Aldren?!?...I had had enough. Watching it all dwindle away, while my work increasingly pushed me towards more powerful software on the Mac...I sold everything just before the holiday (for slightly more than I paid for the computer, evil that I was then) and jumped ship to the beige side, bought a used Quadra 800 and never looked back.
Awesome video. I remember in my younger years I was hell bent even into the late 90s that Amiga was far superior than the PC. The brand loyalty to it held on despite commodore ruining it. 3rd party upgrades and even big box conversions for the 1200 kept it up. But it was a one legged race sadly. Good memories though :) So did you make a mistake back then? Yes and no. Going for a PC mid 90s gave you superior hardware and a better computer, that was easy to upgrade due to modular design. But you didn't live the passion of the Amiga community. Hanging on to a hope and being part of a cause though Escom/Gateway buy outs etc that Amiga could come back against the PC giants. Or the thrills when someone created something that pushed more out of the hardware than what you ever thought possible. And you had to suffer Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Which I would take Amiga Workbench over any day ;)
My first Amiga was the original 500 and I upgraded it quite a lot over several years. From there I went to a 2000 with the slightly upgraded chipset and CPU upgrades. I was doing professional graphics for video production. Used several different 3D animation programs and eventually went to Lightwave for all of the 3D work. I couldn't wait for the A4000 to come out, but waited for the 68040 upgrade. I was initially very impressed with the machine. I was actually happy to have the IDE drive interface, as the drives were WAY cheaper and capacity/$ was a bigger priority for me. I seem to recall there were better tape backup options too (I had a DAT backup drive). Anyway, as you pointed out, PC's were rapidly becoming faster and cheaper. When Lightwave was released for PC I bought a 486 box mostly for rendering, but it slowly became the primary design machine too. For rendering in particular, the 486 was significantly faster. Somewhere around '93-94 I ended up selling my A4000 and demand was so high that I got back pretty much all the money I had put into it! It was a sad day when I retired my last Amiga.
8:17 Ha! Thunder Board! That was my very first sound card. I remember putting it into my Amstrad PC1512 and firing up "Prince of Persia" and having my 5th grade mind blown when the intro music started playing LOL.
I really lusted after an A4000 back when I had my A1200. A bit ironic because my A1200 had an '030 accelerator, fast RAM and a hard drive. So for general use and gaming, it was essentially identical to a big box Amiga, as long as you didn't need to use any of the expansion ports.
I saw that the old PSU case is grounded, but in the design, the original PSU PCB would also have been grounded through the stand-offs and possibly another lug connection. You really do need to ground a switch mode PSU as leakage currents are normally present, leading to the possibility of a shock off of metal parts of the Amiga. The new PSU will have a ground point on it and also the holes for the stand-offs will also be connected to that ground. I'd do this sooner rather than later....
I don't regret buying my A1200 in 1993. Glorious - and a machine that maybe never full-filled its promise. But now I am glad about GOG because I can go back and see what I missed.. ah, being a retro gamer is sooooo comforting.
Nice video. I think the biggest mistake Commodore and Atari made with their business machines was keeping a consumer styled motherboard for the 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000, and the MEGA / Mega STE and TT range. Instead I think they should have had a motherboard with separate slots for CPU, Graphics, Sound, and HDD interface. This would have allowed much more expansion and upgradability from both companies and third party, and also kept them competitive with IBM. Then for the consumer line, they could have periodically took the best hardware combination and implemented that in an all in one motherboard for the Amiga 2400 or whatever.
I so so SO shared your pain, brother. By 1991 my precious Amiga 500, expanded by an insanely noisy 20mb HDD (Not even in a sidecart but kept in a seperate box outside the sidecart that held the boot-ROMs) just didn't cut the mustard any longer. That 7Mhz CPU was worthless when trying to run games ported from the PC used to not utilizing the Amiga's custom chips but just the brute force of the CPU made a mockery of the A500 by running grapical gems like King's Quest V or Wing Commander in 16 colour mode at 1/4 the speed of the average 286/386 of the day. An A1200 or A4000 would have been a short term upgrade, but I knew it wouldn't be enough. And my HDD was so loud it could give one headaches just running. When accessing data you could hear it 2 rooms away, and 20mb was just not big enough when Ultima VI could eat up 1/4 of the entire HDD. I had to give in and sell it to combine with my savings enough money for my first PC, rocking an AMD 386DX-40 Mhz CPU, 4mb of RAM, a 105mb internal HDD and an SVGA card capable of 1024x768 resolution at 256 colours as well as supporting a VESA 2.0 framebuffer in himem (gave a good 10% performance increase in games like Wolf3D and eventually Doom) and I cursed Medhi Ali regularly for gutting Commodore's R&D, especially as the proposed AAA chipset would have sent the Amiga's 3D graphics capability into Sega Saturn territory by 1995 with a 68060 or PPC CPU. (sigh)
nice job done dude...👍 love these trash to treasure series. I had literally just watched the first part and sat there saying just stick a SFF PC PSU inside it..glad to see you did. Word to the wise for people on a restricted budget the HP/Delta SFF PSU's can be had for under £20 for units a couple of years old and for less than £6 on fleabay if you don't mind one 5-6 years old.... you just have to desolder the modern sata and pcie connectors just like you did. I used one to repair an old philips industrial vision system last week...I had to make the mounting from polycarbonate sheet....I wish my workplace would buy a 3d printer ..but tbh using flat polycarbonate was probably quicker anyway.
Yes, I remember shopping about at the same time, and had resisted the Clones until then. The socketed CPUs were being made by many vendors, so there was competition for all the pricey up-gradable components. With our tablets, phones, SBCs, and econo-PCs with 6-layer boards ... the trend is back towards integration. May have been easier for you to use an ATX with pluggable (modular) wire leads.
When i read first of the A600 (and A4000) in a Magazine it was "April" so i thought, it has to be a bad joke. I had already changed to PC with a 386DX33 and DX40 from my A2000, because the A3000 was so expansive and one year later at that time owned the 486DX2-66 with 16MB Ram in 1994, when i was 18 years old. The 8MB Ram Expansion cost me 800 DM, i remember well. I paid all that stuff from selling about 3000 pcs of 3,5" discs in Posso-Media-Boxes from the Amiga. There was no chance for coming back to the Amiga. Later i bought A600 for 50 Euro in 2002, just for some fun. I was surprised about the small thing by the way.
I always enjoy your videos, Neil, but I have to say I am extra-enjoying this series. Great content (love the history aspect you throw in) and very well, produced, as usual. Now to that A4000 I have sitting in a box somewhere.🤔
I got an Amiga4000 and it was my main machine well in to the new millennium and was quite heavily expanded. I even got a complete new mother board so now have two, one in the original case and my expanded one in a full tower case. I would have loved it to have had AAA that was a great loss. So yes Damn you Mehdi Ali.
I had pretty much the same Amiga to PC experience--I looked at the price of Amigas in 1993, when my Amiga 1200 was already looking a bit wimpy, and then found I could get a 40MHz 386SX based PC with VGA graphics and a hard drive for £400, and it was a no brainer. There is no way on this Earth I could have afforded near 2 grand for a high-end Amiga.
I made the step up from A500 to A1200. Later I upgraded the A1200 with Bizzard PPC 060/603e board in the horrific plastic infinitiv 1200 tower and added a Catweasel and a Picasso IV. I loved that computer and only sold it to raise funds to move. I ended up with a PC next after commodore imploded. Amiga could have been even greater 😫it was legendary in the A500/A1200 era.
Great video Neil and highlights what could have been. I also would have done the same as you with the PSU, an OEM look but with reliable and modern parts to guarantee trouble free power to a rare Amiga. Looking forward to the next instalment!
ah, your videos are what youtube was made for. seriously, they are calming in the opening, examinatig and repairing part (for me this works better than asmr, btw... :D) and at the same time very educational. i'm very glad that i found your channel via lgr.
Speaking of David I have him booked in for a chat in a few weeks, looking forward to it. C= UK has a reputation for being one of the better arms of the company when it came to marketing and organisation, but they weren't calling the hardware shots
To be fair, AAA was way too expensive to manufacture even in 32-bit mode, especially when coupled with all the extra bus chips needed for the high-end system. It was a kitchen sink strategy, and rightfully got canned because it was an unfocused monstrosity, and production cost was too high. A more sensible decision would have been to forgo the horrible (and lazy) hack that was ECS and start working on a 2 micron CMOS version of AA, which would have brought AGA capabilities, FPM memory, 8-channel sound, and built-in SCSI in 1990. Commodore instead invested their 2 micron design efforts into the C65, which wasn't even fully C64 compatible, and we all know how that turned out. Management was responsible for the financial fiascos surrounding the CDTV and A600, but the engineers didn't do themselves any favors with AAA, either. There's plenty of blame to go around.
Great video looking forward to the rest of the series. It's my understanding that PSU fan in the A4000is what cools the whole case. it draws air into the case from the from the holes on the back of the case near the expansion cards then the air travels across the case through the PSU and out the case. this is why like in my A3000 the fan has a high airflow rate (loud) adding the temp sensor and not maintaining the flow rate by slowing the fan /airflow to the case based on the temp of the PSU may casue hot spots in the case especially if you plan on adding upgrades in the zorro slots. I recommend replacing the original loud PSU fan with a quiet continuous speed fan that has the same CFM rating as the original to ensure proper cooling of the whole case.
+1 for replacing the PSU. Old power supplies are increasingly dubious and simply not very interesting, and modern ones are better in every way --- cooler, cheaper, simpler, smaller, provide better power... to me, replacing the PSU is a no-brainer, as it helps preserve the actually _interesting_ part of the computer. I really like the way it's done here, too.
I got to meet Dave Haynie at VCF East a few years ago. Brilliant engineer who was singlehandedly designing many parts of the Amiga over the years. I don't know what folks were expecting clamoring for more CPU in the A4000. The most Apple shipped was a 40Mhz 68040 in the Quadra 840AV. The lack of performance from 68k is why they went with the PowerPC. The AGA chipset was too little too late though. Even though it could do 640x480 in 256 colors, performance was...... lackluster. An off the shelf PC local bus video chip from 1992 runs circles around it. No surprise the 3rd party Amiga video cards landed up using them.
For the consumer range of Amigas, it was certainly a good thing - I have an A1200 myself, and the ability to just pop in a 2½" harddisk was something i appreciated a lot.
I may be alone in this but the one 3D print finish that I think is sexy as hell is carbon black filament with hexagon infill. The little distortions that remain on top of the infill look really nice on external panels to me. Of course it has to be the top face of the print facing outward.
10:50 Neil, if the plan is to keep the original casing and replace the guts, you are very much forgiven in my book - it should make no external difference whatsoever, while likely providing a more stable power source that will keep the components happy for longer. Also, the peace of mind from knowing these big juicy caps inside the PSU won't pop or leak. The original PSU components deserve a final rest. :-) EDIT: 12:10 : Agreed Neil, that's just not something us cave dwellers can be happy with now, can we? EDIT2: And you did a fantastic job on it! Congratulations Neil!
Great video yet again mate. I think it was a smart choice to use a modern PSU and keep the old shell. Great job! I should probably research how to do some maintenance on my old IBM PS\2. Doubt I can replace the insides of the PSU there since it's using a slot based connection for power to the motherboard.
I built my own PCs and kept my original A500 and Towered my A1200 (BlizzardVision PPC). Whilst adding a spare A1200 (040 still going strong), a very yellow A500, A500+, A600 and CD32.
It's not uncommon to see, but at 3:30, there's a Mac in Amiga's lab. A Mac IIci, IIcx or Quadra 700. Apple was known for having a CRAY MPX to design case flow models for injection molding. Also used SGIs for some hardware designs, until their own machines where able to lift up the load.
Heh... I remember reading a story about how Steve Jobs told Seymour Cray about that, and Cray's response was something like "Oh really? I designed my Cray computer on an Apple Macintosh."
@@mglmouser I can't remember where _I_ read it, but it was certainly not in the publication you mentioned... probably somewhere on the internet, i guess. :)
Good point, how could the JoaT Commodore have stood against the diverse industry power in the PC? Only Apple somehow, barely emerged from these times by hibernating for a few years. Their computer business is now a software/OS company and their hardware designs are expensive and plagued with problems.
You weren't a fool at all! It's not like anyone knew back then that Amigas would suddenly become valuable again in the late future. It made sense that people sold their Amigas at the time.
At first I thought this video would be cursing ElectroBoom over a shock obtained through working on the PSU. Then I learned there is more than one person named, "Mehdi."
I don't think Medhi Ali was the problem, but that the Amiga was neither the cheapest computer (an IBM compatible PC was) not the most powerful (an Apple machine would be). And for gaming? Well, the SNES and Genesis overshadowed the latter day Amiga. The A500 was ahead of its time and so were its bigger brothers. Come the nineties the playing field changed *immensely* .
I don't know about that. The A500 debuted in '87 at about $600 and only got cheaper, and that was at a time where you couldn't buy a new PC for less than $2000. Heck, my first PC bought new in '93 for ~$1500USD (with monitor, keyboard, and mouse) still didn't even come with a sound card included. Had to spend another $100 a few months down the road to add in a cheap SB2.0 when the SB16 was the current model and out of my price range.
@@JeremyLevi You might be right. I bought my first PC second hand for what would have been S100 (in US money) in ca. '96. It was a 386 that could not play games better than Commander Keen. An Amiga would have been out of the question because I also needed that computer to write reports and my resume. And I had to be able to exchange those with companies and such on floppy disk. Unfortunately no companies worked with Amiga's. In hind sight an Amiga 1200 should have gotten more attention from "office" users and software developers. It was a great machine.
Being an Amiga user since 1987, I remember when the A1200 & A4000 came out in mid 1992! Sure we all dreamed of having an A4000! A4000 was a rip off! Over $4000 in Australian dollars without a monitor! A1200 was very affordable! In comparison! I personally bought a CD32 with an SX1 expansion which was my first AGA Amiga! Still have it! Bought an A4000 Desktop & A4000T years later!
19:10 - as the older PSU had a physical power switch and pushrod from the front to the back, would you consider wiring up a separate switch to bring PS-ON to ground, instead of using the jumper?
The early Amigas were way way way ahead of the competition in terms of both hardward and software. The Amiga had a decent, colourful, fast multi-tasking OS when the PC was still stuck on mostly text-based MS DOS. In my opinion they never really realised their full potential under Commodore who marketed them mostly as a gaming machine. It is true they were a great gaming machine, but they were so much more. The problem was Commodore as you rightly show. They didn't progress fast enough, they squandered innovation and let the PC improve and eventually overtake the Amiga. If they had of invested more in R&D and marketed the machines business capabilities more (as well as it's gaming potential) they really could have had a PC killer. Instead they wasted money on a confusing and pointless array of products, like the A600 as you point out, they lost the market share and they could never recover. It is sad to see how close they were to releasing a new Amiga that could have been so much better than the machine they did deliver.
Update: A couple of people mentioned that the PSU PCB does not appear to be grounded to the case, and in this edit it isn't! A huge number of hours get chopped up when editing these episodes so things can be missed but I think it's important to highlight this if anyone is attempting the same mod. Please ground your board to the PSU case and perform a continuity check to make sure it is. Here's a pic of mine for reference: drive.google.com/file/d/1WMnLxt_819zh2OPhjRntfqRq0VWsr_dL/view?usp=sharing
Thank you for watching! I'm exited to share that Dave Haynie will be making an appearance in part 3 of this series which I'm working on now. All videos are released to the Patrons who support The Cave first, 1 week early with no ads. If you'd like to help support the videos I make and get perks like early access then I'd love to welcome you over at patreon.com/retromancave - Thank you for your support!
Neil - RMC
I cant find the link to the psu 24 pin adapter, its not in the description :)
on your choice of 486 upgrade - how much value does that hold now? i bet its not as much as the 4000.....
@@Caddy666 what has that got to do with anything? You do realise when people buy computers they do so to have a computer, not because it may be valuable some day? Stupidest comment I've seen in a while.
Neil, you mentioned the need for a flicker-fixer to reduce eye strain when running higher resolutions than 640x480, however I have a stock A1200 (+ 4MB FAST RAM) with a 1438S monitor, and on that combo i can comfortably use 800x600 (up to 913x626 with overscan) and the picture is just completely rock-steady. :D
Hi. I went thru the same choice in 1993, when I sold my Amiga 2000 for which the parts were really expensive, for a 486DX33 PC, soon upgraded with a 486DX2-66, a VLB graphics card, and a hard drive I couldn't afford the only controller for the A2000. Too bad Commodore, maybe you should have sourced your chipset to chinese compatible makers, and also demand Microsoft to port Excel...
"Genuine Sanwa arcade parts" is now an expression I use and I've yet to find anyone that understands the reference. "That thing is really neat but does it have genuine Sanwa arcade parts?"
It's first question you should ask any perspective lover!
You have to pronounce it “Sanwahr”. Try that.
Mehdi Ali put on his resume that he had overseen a turnaround at Commodore. This is certainly true: He took a $6 billion a year industry leading company and drove it into bankruptcy.
I personally blame Irving Gould, he was the one who who fired Jack and hired all the CEOs afterwards. From what I've read Gould got rich from a lucky encounter by the inventor of the shipping crate. He got his wealth through luck and he used to fly out of the US every x number of days to avoid paying tax. That's why the Pet Jet existed.
But Ali was hired obviously due to his experience (because selling sugar water means you can run a tech company lol) and the fact he sounded like Jack. He was also as rotund.
And I bet he still worked a series of increasingly lucrative CEO jobs for the rest of his career. Failing upwards is definitely a thing.
@@CantankerousDave When he was at Commodore, he was paid nearly $2 million a year. That's $12-$14 million before taxes. Some of that money is probably what allowed him and his son to start Stone Ridge Partners, which is a private equity firm that buys struggling companies, in 2013. He also sits on the board of another private equity firm.
In-between Commodore's bankruptcy in 1994 and the founding of Stone Ridge Partners in 2013, if I remember correctly, he tried to open a management consultancy business, which is where he bragged about overseeing a turnaround at Commodore. However, given that the website for his consultancy business disappeared just a few years later, I'd imagine that everybody took a look and said "turnaround at Commodore? Oh, he's _that_ guy. No thank you!" Or maybe he managed all his clients into bankruptcy too. So my guess is, he didn't start to "fail upwards" until the early 2010s. He struggled a bit (if you can call being a multi-millionaire "struggling") for a few years first.
@@SpearM3064 they were getting more $$$$$ than IBM & Apple CEO’s at the time!
@@6581punk Irving Gould and Medhi Ali both sucked Commodore dry and they both need to burn in hell for it.
THis is such a depressing memory. I was a commodore owner from the 1983 onward. I LOVED my Amigas when they first came out. It the late 80s, it was the best gaming machine you could own, and it still did everything else. Even ran MSDos if needed. But from 1990 onward, it was mistake after mistake after mistake. It became very hard to support the Amiga
In 1987 Bobby Kotick, currently of Activision Blizzard, tried to buy out Commodore but was turned down. I often wonder how that timeline would've played out.
Might as well be like swapping the plague for cholera, but we'll never know for sure.
Yeah. I also found out that one Steve Jobs talked Kotick into pursuing a career in computer software. Before that he was supposedly studying for an art degree.
It seems like Ex-Pepsi people were a menace to the computer industry.
@Dr ROLFCOPTER! It looks like they are trained to stick with their magical "sugar water" recipe and fear to make changes. Which obviously do not apply to a fast paced, innovative industry.
the engineers gave Ali the best mousetrap the world had ever seen up to that date. Unfortunately Ali didn't have the slightest clue what a mousetrap was...
Read Alis bloomberg profile, he writes he turned Commodore around. He threatens people with legal action if they say otherwise. He was hired as he looked and acted like Tramiel.
when out of the can they loose all the "fizzing" , not good anymore.
@@6581punk Well, I suppose he kind of did. He turned it from a company with a history and a future into one that was simply history.
"Thanks for watching, unless your name is Mehdi Ali."
I came for the computer restoration, stayed for the roast!
this video is not to be watched by Medhi Ali therby you must confirm that you are not Medhi Ali or not Associated with Medhi Ali. just like Anish Kapoor, Fuck you Medhi Ali!
Just hearing the name Mehdi Ali still makes me angry, 30 years later.
You and me both. It's an instant blood pressure spike to read or hear his name.
Fuck Irving Gould too for driving Jack Tramiel out of his own creation and allowing all the disasterous CEOs including Ali to be hired.
Mini van, amigo is just slow as hell as a "mini VAN"
You desoldered the remnants of the old power supply cables which means you didn't really need to cut the cables in the first place. Thanks for the video. These Amiga related videos keep making me want to drag my A2000 with its 68030 CPU card out of its box and get it running again.
The AAA chipset had 8 channel sound, chunky mode, and faster blitter. What a shame we never got it! :(
Would the sound still have been 8-bit, or would they have upped it to 16-bit?
@@BertGrink 16 bit up to 100Khz for each channel.
Someone should finish it off ;)
The best thing Commodore could have done with the AAA chipset would be to stick it on a Zorro 2 card. They could theoretically have also done a version on PCI to get in with the PC crowd but in the end that was not to be.
I read an interview with one of the engineers that worked on the chipset and he basically said it was pretty underpowered compared to the then upcoming playstation 1 and still wasnt as good as a decent pc so probably wouldnt have helped commodore in the long run.
That PSU upgrade was a lot of work!
My philosophy is that the only things like to fail in a PSU within my lifetime are the electrolytic caps, so a recap should get it through at least another 30 years. Fan bearings can go too of course but I tend to cross that bridge when I get there, i.e. replace the fan when it gets noisy.
I always thought David Pleasance and Jeremy Beadle were the same guy. I didn't know about him when I was a daily Amiga user but he's been pretty active since the retro stuff started and I kept wondering why Jeremy Beadle was in loads of videos about Amigas.
Now there's an image, David Pleasance pushing your transit van off a dock.
@@vix_in_japan Lol! As long as the van is full of Atari ST's
Watch out, Pleasance's About?
@@Kumimono You better watch out, because Pleasance is about...
Well David has 2 well proportioned hands for a start......
I remember when I came to upgrade from an A500 I faced a similar choice. However, at the time, there were quite a lot of people upgrading from the 1200 to PC so 1200s were available second hand for only around £200 - £250. So that's what I went for in the end and I had a couple of happy years with it.
RMC "Please don't hate me for doing that"
ME "I hate him for doing that"
Another excellent video. I was in the same position as you in the 90s, but I had (and still have) a 1200. I would have loved to upgrade to a big box Amiga, but I had just started a degree, and *really* needed a PC, and only enough money to upgrade my Amiga or buy a PC. I was starting a degree, and as I needed a PC to complete my studies, I had no choice really.
Regarding Commodore, they always seemed like a company that consisted of a *lot* of excellent engineers backed up by ineffectual or incompetent management and bad marketing. Not, that's at an international level. Commodore UK actually had good management, and fairly effective marketing, although I felt their efforts were often hampered by a lack of support from Commodore International.
I have a Ryzen 5 based PC now which is hundreds of times more powerful than my Amiga 1200, and also a Macbook. While I like both, I felt more for my Amiga than either. They are just tools. Tools that I work and (in the case of my PC) I play on, but just tools. My Amiga felt almost like a companion on an adventure.
Is the Amiga the Alfa Romeo of computers I wonder 😄
I bought an A1200 when it came out and was quite happy with it as well. I found myself in a similar position with needing a PC for education purposes within a few short years though. Had I possessed psychic foresight I would have traded in my original A500 for a used A2000 or A3000 instead of getting the A1200 and I could have just bought a 486 bridgecard for half the price of what I ended up spending on a PC and kept the Amiga dream alive a little longer in my life. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.
@@RMCRetro I think it is..
Got my old A4000 out of storage. Thanks for this video to motiavte me to repair it!
Something Commodore easily could (and should have) done was upgrade the Paula chip. It was fantastic in the 1985-1990 era but was slowly beeing superseded by the competition. The Archimedes has 8 channels of PCM audio, so did the SNES and the Sega Mega CD. Why didn’t they put two Paula chips in the A1200 and CD-32? It would have complimented the AGA chipset nicely. It feels like Commodore somehow overlooked this by their management decisions.
I was an A3000 owner when the A4000 was released, and Commodore's product line was a major disappointment. The system was nothing like the rumors we had read about AAA and could not match the graphics that were already available in the IBM compatible market. The lack of a built-in flicker-fixer and SCSI on the A4000 just poured salt in the wounds, and so the computer that replaced my A3000 was a Pentium. I still miss the Amiga Workbench and boot it up in emulation regularly to mess with the software I wrote from the Amiga or to play a game of Stunt Car Racer or Pinball Fantasies.
I question whether what killed Commodore was the guy who put Mehdi in charge (Irving Gould) since the company could have made it years and possibly decades longer with proper R&D funding and not killing off the projects that were pushing the platform forward.
Wow I'm absolutely loving this series. The history combined with the fixing up of old hardware is just perfect. Growing up in America as I barely heard of an Amiga at the time, and it's really interesting getting a survey of their landscape at the time.
Great mod with the PSU! I was originally in the "repair and keep the original" camp but I loved the way you did it, super clean and clever.
I support you replacing the insides of the power supply, and am glad you said you'd keep the original contents safe for posterity.
I replaced the electrolytic capacitors on a Timex/Sinclair 1000 with ceramics and taped the old electrolytics to the board in the old positions so that people could see what was originally in place.
As a casual consumer of retro tech videos, I don't know too much about the Commodore Amiga history. It was unfortunate I had to learn of Mehdi Ali's existence and his unfortunate impact on computing history.
Former A1200 owner here... it was a great machine and I had the zappo external CD drive for it to play CD32 games. good times back then. Walker is still one of my fondest memories.
This is an amazing series! I can't wait for the next parts!
awesome job! always wanted to do this to a gorgeous sony vaio case a relative gave me, the psu is a proprietary shape with two pegs that lock the whole case together.
I was looking for a new high-end PC at the time... the Amiga unfortunately was absolutely no competition. So I built from components a 486 machine, with a Soundblaster and Tseng Labs ET4000-W32, and used it as a Unix workstation - Linux by then supported some ethernet cards, the ET4000, the Soundblaster, and felt more nippy than the Unix workstations we had at uni. It was nerd heaven.
As a kid in the US I was the only person I knew with an Amiga. These videos make me miss my 2500 Video Toaster equipped big box. I ultimately switched to a pc compatible in the 90s when Amiga in the US was long dead. But I was so upset when my family donated my Amiga.
I nearly cried when Commodore went under, I had always been an Amiga fan. I always wondered what Commodore could of achieved if they had stayed around, but we will never know. Great vid cant wait for next one.
Living in the Midwest USA, I had not heard of Amiga until almost 2000. My first computer at home was a VIC20. My best friend had a C64 and found Elite early on. I craved the power of the C64. I was not allowed to touch the IBM pcs at school because of the things I was able to do with the Apple II and IIGS in elementry and middle school.
When I got to college we were required to have a computer, specifically Mac, which I guess is unusual for an engineering school. One of the guys that was going for his master in computer science while going for comp engineering had a C64 hooked up to a surround sound system and had GEOS running. I fell for the C64 again and almost got a C128 when I went shopping for a better Mac. This was around 93. I stayed Mac and then Mac & Linux till Mac os X got to be an annual "gives us your money for update" I think it was panther. Now I am Linux exclusive, but I wish Commodore had kept going. I liked coding on them better than Pc or Mac or even Apple II.
If you were serious about computing and it's business / productivity uses in the future, the only road was PC. The serious software alone was enough, for me it was commercial sign making, accounting software and vector and pixel based design software. If you could afford both, well that would be rare.
As a power supply tester I can only recommend to replace the old power supplies if this is possible. I would have done it similar to you in the video. But I think there are better power supplies that have stronger 5V lines. From experience I can say that many high quality power supplies not only withstand much higher loads but are also so developed. The power supplies are then limited to the 100W 3,3&5V Combined Power. One reason is the 80% certification, the 12V line is more efficient so the manufacturer can also achieve higher efficiencies and certification. The problem is to see from the outside if the power supply can deliver only 100W or even 150W without problems.
I'll see if I can find a link to the power supplies that are better suited for such projects
.
BR Thomas
@Deep Throat I haven't tested it but for smaller retro systems this industrial power supply might be interesting. It only has 12V & 5V and 54W.
If more power is needed I can check the test protocols which power supplies can handle stabile higher loads at 5V.
asset.conrad.com/media10/add/160267/c1/-/en/001293114DS01/datenblatt-1293114-mean-well-rd-50a-acdc-netzteilbaustein-geschlossen-54-w.pdf
Back in the 90s I modified a Supermicro server case to house my A4000/060+Toaster/Flyer/KitchenSync, and about 6 years ago I installed an SSD drive. This was a follow-up to my modifying a tower case to house an A2000/Blizzard060. The two systems are still in my home office.
My brother and I have a large Amiga tower with 68060, Picasso IV and disk drives (including 5.25") that could write disks for many systems. Eyetech said its the most work they have ever done hooked up to A1200 on its side. Cost a fortune with our expensive multi-sync monitor. Now it's sat in my brothers bedroom too worried to switch it on in case it pops!
Another great video! I was tempted by the A4000, but my A3000 was still serving me quite well. I was in wait and see mode from '93 until Commodore went belly up, trying to decide between upgrading to an AGA machine or not... Then she. They went under my decision was made for me.
Now that I own an A4000 I really love it!
Fantastic re-purposing of the original PSU shell using a modern PSU.
Honestly I was happy with my A2000 which ran my BBS until 1997 when I took it down due to lack of activity because by then everyone was using the internet. Signs of the times. Long before that I had migrated over to the PC because I got more bang for my buck then what Commodore had to offer but mostly because I needed compatibility with work and that was all PC. I was never much into games for me it was always productivity and telecommunications. The Amiga served me well back them and I can remember my PC friends would often say their computer was more powerful than my A2000 but they could never understand why I could do much more then they could until Win95 then they would call me to let me know now they could multitask and my reply was the Amiga was doing it in hardware not software but as time moved forward I was with everyone else using PC's for work. I kept my A2000 and its still alive and well and I do use it and enjoy using it. I got the retro bug and well now I own more Amiga's than PC's and MAC's. Mac's I could careless about. I need a PC for work but they are just disposable throw away computers where as my Amiga's are precious to me and no I am still not into games but when I turn on an Amiga there is always a big smile on my face something I can't say about a PC.
I know that pain leaving! I started Amigas back at the beginning, having perhaps the third (?) A1000 in the East Coast as I worked as a buyer for a major electronics retailer. Later, I worked for a Colorado-based Amiga hardware manufacturer and had a 2000 with the fastest '030 then available. I had years invested in the Amiga, what seemed like dozens of magazines over the years and a few hundred 3.5" floppies...but, that Christmas season, when Commodore's big TV push was a kid being visited by Buzz Aldren?!?...I had had enough. Watching it all dwindle away, while my work increasingly pushed me towards more powerful software on the Mac...I sold everything just before the holiday (for slightly more than I paid for the computer, evil that I was then) and jumped ship to the beige side, bought a used Quadra 800 and never looked back.
Awesome video. I remember in my younger years I was hell bent even into the late 90s that Amiga was far superior than the PC. The brand loyalty to it held on despite commodore ruining it. 3rd party upgrades and even big box conversions for the 1200 kept it up. But it was a one legged race sadly. Good memories though :)
So did you make a mistake back then? Yes and no. Going for a PC mid 90s gave you superior hardware and a better computer, that was easy to upgrade due to modular design. But you didn't live the passion of the Amiga community. Hanging on to a hope and being part of a cause though Escom/Gateway buy outs etc that Amiga could come back against the PC giants. Or the thrills when someone created something that pushed more out of the hardware than what you ever thought possible. And you had to suffer Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Which I would take Amiga Workbench over any day ;)
My first Amiga was the original 500 and I upgraded it quite a lot over several years. From there I went to a 2000 with the slightly upgraded chipset and CPU upgrades. I was doing professional graphics for video production. Used several different 3D animation programs and eventually went to Lightwave for all of the 3D work. I couldn't wait for the A4000 to come out, but waited for the 68040 upgrade. I was initially very impressed with the machine. I was actually happy to have the IDE drive interface, as the drives were WAY cheaper and capacity/$ was a bigger priority for me. I seem to recall there were better tape backup options too (I had a DAT backup drive). Anyway, as you pointed out, PC's were rapidly becoming faster and cheaper. When Lightwave was released for PC I bought a 486 box mostly for rendering, but it slowly became the primary design machine too. For rendering in particular, the 486 was significantly faster. Somewhere around '93-94 I ended up selling my A4000 and demand was so high that I got back pretty much all the money I had put into it! It was a sad day when I retired my last Amiga.
Thank you for the high standard videos you are doing in your channel. Greetings from Greece. Keep up the good work!
Commodore never failed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory
8:17 Ha! Thunder Board! That was my very first sound card. I remember putting it into my Amstrad PC1512 and firing up "Prince of Persia" and having my 5th grade mind blown when the intro music started playing LOL.
I really lusted after an A4000 back when I had my A1200. A bit ironic because my A1200 had an '030 accelerator, fast RAM and a hard drive. So for general use and gaming, it was essentially identical to a big box Amiga, as long as you didn't need to use any of the expansion ports.
ditto :-)
man, I love your selection of music you have on your videos, it would be great to see your playlist!
I shall add it to the video description now
I saw that the old PSU case is grounded, but in the design, the original PSU PCB would also have been grounded through the stand-offs and possibly another lug connection. You really do need to ground a switch mode PSU as leakage currents are normally present, leading to the possibility of a shock off of metal parts of the Amiga. The new PSU will have a ground point on it and also the holes for the stand-offs will also be connected to that ground. I'd do this sooner rather than later....
I'll certainly go and triple check that thank you
What a nice exquisite job on that psu. I have my atx using the 3d printed bracket that you showed but may revisit this. thanks
I don't regret buying my A1200 in 1993. Glorious - and a machine that maybe never full-filled its promise. But now I am glad about GOG because I can go back and see what I missed.. ah, being a retro gamer is sooooo comforting.
Nice video. I think the biggest mistake Commodore and Atari made with their business machines was keeping a consumer styled motherboard for the 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000, and the MEGA / Mega STE and TT range. Instead I think they should have had a motherboard with separate slots for CPU, Graphics, Sound, and HDD interface. This would have allowed much more expansion and upgradability from both companies and third party, and also kept them competitive with IBM. Then for the consumer line, they could have periodically took the best hardware combination and implemented that in an all in one motherboard for the Amiga 2400 or whatever.
I so so SO shared your pain, brother. By 1991 my precious Amiga 500, expanded by an insanely noisy 20mb HDD (Not even in a sidecart but kept in a seperate box outside the sidecart that held the boot-ROMs) just didn't cut the mustard any longer. That 7Mhz CPU was worthless when trying to run games ported from the PC used to not utilizing the Amiga's custom chips but just the brute force of the CPU made a mockery of the A500 by running grapical gems like King's Quest V or Wing Commander in 16 colour mode at 1/4 the speed of the average 286/386 of the day. An A1200 or A4000 would have been a short term upgrade, but I knew it wouldn't be enough. And my HDD was so loud it could give one headaches just running. When accessing data you could hear it 2 rooms away, and 20mb was just not big enough when Ultima VI could eat up 1/4 of the entire HDD. I had to give in and sell it to combine with my savings enough money for my first PC, rocking an AMD 386DX-40 Mhz CPU, 4mb of RAM, a 105mb internal HDD and an SVGA card capable of 1024x768 resolution at 256 colours as well as supporting a VESA 2.0 framebuffer in himem (gave a good 10% performance increase in games like Wolf3D and eventually Doom) and I cursed Medhi Ali regularly for gutting Commodore's R&D, especially as the proposed AAA chipset would have sent the Amiga's 3D graphics capability into Sega Saturn territory by 1995 with a 68060 or PPC CPU. (sigh)
Just seen a new release on amiga recently so it still lives
nice job done dude...👍
love these trash to treasure series.
I had literally just watched the first part and sat there saying just stick a SFF PC PSU inside it..glad to see you did.
Word to the wise for people on a restricted budget the HP/Delta SFF PSU's can be had for under £20 for units a couple of years old and for less than £6 on fleabay if you don't mind one 5-6 years old.... you just have to desolder the modern sata and pcie connectors just like you did.
I used one to repair an old philips industrial vision system last week...I had to make the mounting from polycarbonate sheet....I wish my workplace would buy a 3d printer ..but tbh using flat polycarbonate was probably quicker anyway.
remember to ground the posts of the psu otherwise those caps do nothing .(the ones that need doing anyway)
:)
I am always stuck between original and longevity/usefulness. I like your rationale for this video with the PSU. Thank you for the good video.
Always enjoyable to watch, waiting for the next one! Love seeing these refurbished and given new life
Very nice PSU surgery, sleeper components (especially when modded into original cases) can be a fantastic upgrade for vintage stuff.
With a series this good I just had to watch it again. No doubt I'll be back soon, looking forward to the next episode.
Another tremendous video. Really well done Neil and expert Soldering skills. Really enjoying this series.
Yes, I remember shopping about at the same time, and had resisted the Clones until then. The socketed CPUs were being made by many vendors, so there was competition for all the pricey up-gradable components. With our tablets, phones, SBCs, and econo-PCs with 6-layer boards ... the trend is back towards integration. May have been easier for you to use an ATX with pluggable (modular) wire leads.
Priced to Fly - priceless advert in a hilarious way XD
When i read first of the A600 (and A4000) in a Magazine it was "April" so i thought, it has to be a bad joke. I had already changed to PC with a 386DX33 and DX40 from my A2000, because the A3000 was so expansive and one year later at that time owned the 486DX2-66 with 16MB Ram in 1994, when i was 18 years old. The 8MB Ram Expansion cost me 800 DM, i remember well.
I paid all that stuff from selling about 3000 pcs of 3,5" discs in Posso-Media-Boxes from the Amiga. There was no chance for coming back to the Amiga. Later i bought A600 for 50 Euro in 2002, just for some fun. I was surprised about the small thing by the way.
I always enjoy your videos, Neil, but I have to say I am extra-enjoying this series. Great content (love the history aspect you throw in) and very well, produced, as usual. Now to that A4000 I have sitting in a box somewhere.🤔
Why chop the extra wires off when you ended up de-soldering them. As the whole length of cable would have come in usefull for other projects later on.
While I was watching this Video. I played Tracker Songs on Milkytracker for Windows CE on my hp iPAQ H4155.
220V making it's way into the Amiga 4000 is 'worse still' than going into you. Now, that's love and devotion if I ever heard it. ;-)
I got an Amiga4000 and it was my main machine well in to the new millennium and was quite heavily expanded. I even got a complete new mother board so now have two, one in the original case and my expanded one in a full tower case. I would have loved it to have had AAA that was a great loss. So yes Damn you Mehdi Ali.
I had pretty much the same Amiga to PC experience--I looked at the price of Amigas in 1993, when my Amiga 1200 was already looking a bit wimpy, and then found I could get a 40MHz 386SX based PC with VGA graphics and a hard drive for £400, and it was a no brainer. There is no way on this Earth I could have afforded near 2 grand for a high-end Amiga.
these videos are the closest I'll ever get to one of these beauties (basic salary sucks:p)
@Phil Low a few thousands if you can find one
I made the step up from A500 to A1200. Later I upgraded the A1200 with Bizzard PPC 060/603e board in the horrific plastic infinitiv 1200 tower and added a Catweasel and a Picasso IV. I loved that computer and only sold it to raise funds to move. I ended up with a PC next after commodore imploded. Amiga could have been even greater 😫it was legendary in the A500/A1200 era.
Great video Neil and highlights what could have been. I also would have done the same as you with the PSU, an OEM look but with reliable and modern parts to guarantee trouble free power to a rare Amiga. Looking forward to the next instalment!
ah, your videos are what youtube was made for. seriously, they are calming in the opening, examinatig and repairing part (for me this works better than asmr, btw... :D) and at the same time very educational.
i'm very glad that i found your channel via lgr.
I was an Amiga fan forever. The thing that turned me was a video of Alone in the dark (Featuring Peter Molyneux). I saved really hard for that 486.
@referral madness Ha, yes that does sound Ironic. I do miss those playground arguments though.
Another classy video! I am a big fan of the presentation style!
Greetings from Canada! Love your Amiga videos - subbed.
Yet again Neil providing a fab history lesson now I know what happen to commodore and here is me thinking after all these years it was David Pleasance
Speaking of David I have him booked in for a chat in a few weeks, looking forward to it. C= UK has a reputation for being one of the better arms of the company when it came to marketing and organisation, but they weren't calling the hardware shots
@@RMCRetro I will look forward to that Neil
To be fair, AAA was way too expensive to manufacture even in 32-bit mode, especially when coupled with all the extra bus chips needed for the high-end system. It was a kitchen sink strategy, and rightfully got canned because it was an unfocused monstrosity, and production cost was too high. A more sensible decision would have been to forgo the horrible (and lazy) hack that was ECS and start working on a 2 micron CMOS version of AA, which would have brought AGA capabilities, FPM memory, 8-channel sound, and built-in SCSI in 1990. Commodore instead invested their 2 micron design efforts into the C65, which wasn't even fully C64 compatible, and we all know how that turned out.
Management was responsible for the financial fiascos surrounding the CDTV and A600, but the engineers didn't do themselves any favors with AAA, either. There's plenty of blame to go around.
Great video looking forward to the rest of the series. It's my understanding that PSU fan in the A4000is what cools the whole case. it draws air into the case from the from the holes on the back of the case near the expansion cards then the air travels across the case through the PSU and out the case. this is why like in my A3000 the fan has a high airflow rate (loud) adding the temp sensor and not maintaining the flow rate by slowing the fan /airflow to the case based on the temp of the PSU may casue hot spots in the case especially if you plan on adding upgrades in the zorro slots. I recommend replacing the original loud PSU fan with a quiet continuous speed fan that has the same CFM rating as the original to ensure proper cooling of the whole case.
I would say that preserving the lifetime of the machine takes precedence, so a new PSU is my personal choice. Great video!
+1 for replacing the PSU. Old power supplies are increasingly dubious and simply not very interesting, and modern ones are better in every way --- cooler, cheaper, simpler, smaller, provide better power... to me, replacing the PSU is a no-brainer, as it helps preserve the actually _interesting_ part of the computer. I really like the way it's done here, too.
I got to meet Dave Haynie at VCF East a few years ago. Brilliant engineer who was singlehandedly designing many parts of the Amiga over the years.
I don't know what folks were expecting clamoring for more CPU in the A4000. The most Apple shipped was a 40Mhz 68040 in the Quadra 840AV. The lack of performance from 68k is why they went with the PowerPC.
The AGA chipset was too little too late though. Even though it could do 640x480 in 256 colors, performance was...... lackluster. An off the shelf PC local bus video chip from 1992 runs circles around it. No surprise the 3rd party Amiga video cards landed up using them.
Great video yet again. I'll be watching the Deathbed Vigil in preparation for next episode. Great stuff.
I think you made the right call replacing the internals of the PSU 🙂
Nice modern stable power! Protecting the rare internals
Im so happy Commodore added IDE instead of SCSI drives
For the consumer range of Amigas, it was certainly a good thing - I have an A1200 myself, and the ability to just pop in a 2½" harddisk was something i appreciated a lot.
I may be alone in this but the one 3D print finish that I think is sexy as hell is carbon black filament with hexagon infill.
The little distortions that remain on top of the infill look really nice on external panels to me. Of course it has to be the top face of the print facing outward.
10:50 Neil, if the plan is to keep the original casing and replace the guts, you are very much forgiven in my book - it should make no external difference whatsoever, while likely providing a more stable power source that will keep the components happy for longer. Also, the peace of mind from knowing these big juicy caps inside the PSU won't pop or leak. The original PSU components deserve a final rest. :-)
EDIT: 12:10 : Agreed Neil, that's just not something us cave dwellers can be happy with now, can we?
EDIT2: And you did a fantastic job on it! Congratulations Neil!
Great video yet again mate. I think it was a smart choice to use a modern PSU and keep the old shell. Great job! I should probably research how to do some maintenance on my old IBM PS\2. Doubt I can replace the insides of the PSU there since it's using a slot based connection for power to the motherboard.
I built my own PCs and kept my original A500 and Towered my A1200 (BlizzardVision PPC).
Whilst adding a spare A1200 (040 still going strong), a very yellow A500, A500+, A600 and CD32.
Very informative PSU video. Thank you! By chance, do you have a link to design for the 3D printed power supply platform?
It's not uncommon to see, but at 3:30, there's a Mac in Amiga's lab. A Mac IIci, IIcx or Quadra 700.
Apple was known for having a CRAY MPX to design case flow models for injection molding. Also used SGIs for some hardware designs, until their own machines where able to lift up the load.
Heh... I remember reading a story about how Steve Jobs told Seymour Cray about that, and Cray's response was something like "Oh really? I designed my Cray computer on an Apple Macintosh."
@@BertGrink I remember that too. I think I still have that MacWorld issue where that was printer, if I recall correctly.
@@mglmouser I can't remember where _I_ read it, but it was certainly not in the publication you mentioned... probably somewhere on the internet, i guess. :)
16:27 "or worse still" - hahaha Neil. Remember, even if the computer is rare and expensive, at least it can be replaced. :-)
Good point, how could the JoaT Commodore have stood against the diverse industry power in the PC? Only Apple somehow, barely emerged from these times by hibernating for a few years.
Their computer business is now a software/OS company and their hardware designs are expensive and plagued with problems.
I miss my A3000 so much. I never should have traded it. What a fool I was! LOL
You weren't a fool at all! It's not like anyone knew back then that Amigas would suddenly become valuable again in the late future. It made sense that people sold their Amigas at the time.
At first I thought this video would be cursing ElectroBoom over a shock obtained through working on the PSU.
Then I learned there is more than one person named, "Mehdi."
I don't think Medhi Ali was the problem, but that the Amiga was neither the cheapest computer (an IBM compatible PC was) not the most powerful (an Apple machine would be). And for gaming? Well, the SNES and Genesis overshadowed the latter day Amiga. The A500 was ahead of its time and so were its bigger brothers. Come the nineties the playing field changed *immensely* .
I don't know about that. The A500 debuted in '87 at about $600 and only got cheaper, and that was at a time where you couldn't buy a new PC for less than $2000. Heck, my first PC bought new in '93 for ~$1500USD (with monitor, keyboard, and mouse) still didn't even come with a sound card included. Had to spend another $100 a few months down the road to add in a cheap SB2.0 when the SB16 was the current model and out of my price range.
@@JeremyLevi You might be right. I bought my first PC second hand for what would have been S100 (in US money) in ca. '96. It was a 386 that could not play games better than Commander Keen. An Amiga would have been out of the question because I also needed that computer to write reports and my resume. And I had to be able to exchange those with companies and such on floppy disk. Unfortunately no companies worked with Amiga's. In hind sight an Amiga 1200 should have gotten more attention from "office" users and software developers. It was a great machine.
Nice work. I think it is better to place the sensor directly on the aluminum heatsink.
I thought a fly had entered the premises during the PSU part. It was the music. :D
Being an Amiga user since 1987, I remember when the A1200 & A4000 came out in mid 1992! Sure we all dreamed of having an A4000!
A4000 was a rip off! Over $4000 in Australian dollars without a monitor!
A1200 was very affordable! In comparison!
I personally bought a CD32 with an SX1 expansion which was my first AGA Amiga!
Still have it!
Bought an A4000 Desktop & A4000T years later!
I like that 3d print plate that goes inside the original psu case! I would like to buy some of them.
At that time I switched from Amiga 500 to a PlayStation. I'm a PC gamer now so did not stick to consoles.
19:10 - as the older PSU had a physical power switch and pushrod from the front to the back, would you consider wiring up a separate switch to bring PS-ON to ground, instead of using the jumper?
The early Amigas were way way way ahead of the competition in terms of both hardward and software. The Amiga had a decent, colourful, fast multi-tasking OS when the PC was still stuck on mostly text-based MS DOS. In my opinion they never really realised their full potential under Commodore who marketed them mostly as a gaming machine. It is true they were a great gaming machine, but they were so much more. The problem was Commodore as you rightly show. They didn't progress fast enough, they squandered innovation and let the PC improve and eventually overtake the Amiga. If they had of invested more in R&D and marketed the machines business capabilities more (as well as it's gaming potential) they really could have had a PC killer. Instead they wasted money on a confusing and pointless array of products, like the A600 as you point out, they lost the market share and they could never recover. It is sad to see how close they were to releasing a new Amiga that could have been so much better than the machine they did deliver.