Hi All, after a bit of a pause in retro activities I am trying to get some items checked off the old back log.
But first a bit of history. (You can skip down to Restoration Progress or Current Issues, if this sort of reminiscing bores you.)
Before I decided to move I was encouraged to downsize some of my computer collection. I have a couple of Amiga 2000's so these, a couple of Macs and an Apple IIgs setup are on the chopping block since I really have not used them much in the past year+ and they do take up considerable space.
The Story
I have 2 Amiga 2000's. One came from a neighbor of mine about 28 years ago or so, circa 1990. He was a year or so younger then me and had a really cool A2000 setup with Supra Hard Card and a Supra RAM card. I had an A500 at the time and he was a major source of getting the latest software. He was going to college and decided to get rid of it all. It went to my friends house until about 1994 when the PowerPC Macs came out. From there all of our Commodore stuff went into storage and the Amiga 2000 sat in his storage. Fast forward 20 years later and I unloaded our storage as all of it was going to be gone if I didn't. I got back All of my Commodore stuff and most of my Amiga stuff. Took two or three car loads but it was saved and I was happy to get my stuff back, well most of it anyways. Of course, ahem, some other people in the house were not too thrilled given the size of our house. (hence the moving).
Amiga 2000 Condition
Of course, as you can guess, 20 years of non-use and an original battery = a big green battery mess. Yep, battery leaked everywhere including the CPU socket. I managed to clean it and after removing the MegaChip and replacing it with an 8372a and removing the Supra turbo 28 It came to life. Well sort of. It kept crashing and eventually I got a Red screen. I picked up another 2000 and transferred all the hardware into that one and it fired up and booted from the 235MB quantum drive. I couldn't get the original to work so it sat in the garage.
Restoration Progress
Wanting to sell these units I decided to give the old original another look over. It was now going to a black screen. I decided to attempt to remove the CPU socket. 64 pins! Yikes. I thought it might be easier to cut the socket into sections and perhaps heat up and remove each pin. Now that was a mistake and just made a big mess. So I got out the desolder station and just went for it. I managed to get it all out and cleaned up. It looked good. I found a bit of corrosion that I missed as the leakage traveled to a pin on the ROM socket, nasty stuff. I replaced the two sockets, put it back together and thought to myself that I am not that lucky there is no way that it is going to work.
I powered it on with no floppies connected and got a white screen. Well I was closer. But after a few seconds it cycled and went to the 2.0 Kickstart screen. I was floored. I reconnected both internal drives, after performing some maint. on them and inserted a 2.04 install disk and it booted to the WorkBench. Unbelievable, it was working.
Current Issues
It has been 20 years since I have used this Amiga. I need to get an expansion card for it like an A2091 to at least get a SCSI or SCSI2SD going on it + 2MB RAM that it supports. The original cards are in my other Amiga now. Finding one will be a challenge since I haven't had the best of luck on eBay with Amiga stuff.
Question: When the system is booting up from the drive on the right, which is DF0: the DF1: drive LED lights up too. I don't remember it doing this before, but it was 20 years ago so is this right? Should both lights light up on when you are using one drive or the other?
How are the drives jumpers supposed to be configured? Both as the same drive number and then a twist in the cable to alter the drive number? My cable has a twist on the second connector. It is been too long. I guess I should pull out the manual I have around here someplace.
Any advice or suggestions, please feel free to enlighten me because I have forgotten a lot of this stuff.
After fixing it up I am not certain I want to sell it now. I think I am going to instead sell an Amiga 1200 and an A500. Thanks for listening to my long winded story and for any help you might have.