User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sat May 12, 2018 6:53 pm

Several weeks ago I found an Amiga 1000 on Craigslist. It interested me because right around that time is when my daily Amiga 1080 monitor bit the big one after all these years, and this A1000 came with a 1080. I was stoked! Only problem - for me - was it was a little bit of a hike from where I live. I told my bud Mattsoft about it, and he offered to go grab it. It was closer to his house.

Well, I couldn't turn that generous offer down! I contacted the owner, and we settled on a price of $250.

The owner only had the machine - I kid you not - for the monitor. He used to use the 1080's CRT for retro console gaming. He never even used the Amiga!

So all I knew, and all the owner knew, was the following:
  • Amiga 1000
  • Keyboard, Mouse
  • Amiga 1080 monitor
That's it.

I pounced, and Matt went to go pick it up from "a goth dude."

Turns out the machine is a bit yellow. The machine itself isn't too bad, but the 1080 is really yellow as is the keyboard. Kind of a bummer at first. But may be a great first experiment with Retr0bright at some stage.

It was right around this exact same time that I was experimenting with EzdineG's very cool Kickstart ROM mod for 1000s. I was having issues, and we agreed it was best that I ship him what I had. EzdineG went a step further and had me ship an A1000 to him for him to test the fixed board, so it was guaranteed to work.

I didn't even hesitate and decided to ship him the new A1000. It was all stock, I figured, and the best candidate. I did power on the machine and ensured it got to the Kickstart request screen, which it did (I thought - I didn't actually READ the damned screen).

Anyway, about a week later EzdineG pings me and asks me why I shipped him an Insider board with the 1000.

I stopped and thought, "An Insider Board?" I mean, I have one, but never put one of those in the box... Did I accidentally think it was my modded daughterboard? I didn't really understand, but said "Oops." Pretty soon he pinged me again about the KwikStart II with KS 1.3 installed already. He was super confused, and now I was, too. The whole reason I sent him the machine was to get a mod with KS 1.3 installed, and the 1000 was already booting off a 1.3 ROM!

Holy crap!

EZdineG finished his tests and shipped back some awesome new KS boards for other machines, but we agreed to keep this 1000 the way it was!

I booted it up today after attaching my beloved Microbotics StarBoard2 with StarDrive enhancement. Check it out:
amigaNUmberFour.jpg
She has a lot of hidden awesome under her little case.

IMG_5046.JPG
The DKB Insider II board provides 1.5MB RAM. The 1000 has .5MB Chip (front expansion + 256kb built in). And the Microbotics expansion adds another 2MB for a total of a whopping 4MB of retro RAM goodness. This would have cost a FORTUNE BITD.

But wait, that's not all! I have a modded WB 1.3 startup disk that has the specific command to load the date on an Amiga 1000 (it's different than what's on the A500/2000 disks). I had swapped out the battery on my Microbotics Starboard2's StarDrive - which also has a real-time clock.

And guess what? The freaking clock works! It's not set correctly, but it freaking works.
rtcclock1000.jpg
tick-tock-tick-tock!

There's only one final piece of the puzzle, and this 1000 will be 100% completely finished and bad-ass as far as I'm concerned. I need to hook up the SCSI2SD to the StarDrive's SCSI port. I will receive an external power cord for it tomorrow (it needs a molex adapter). After that? Fingers crossed I can figure out the weird setup info for the StarDrive's driver to recognize the drive. Luckily I have the exact same thing set in the Phoenix, so most of the numbers I can just copy. But who knows...
IMG_5051.jpg
It's just 4 little numbers.

I was going to just hook the StarDrive to an SCSI Iomega Zip 100, but I have no idea what settings to give it at this stage. It's not a typical HDD after all. So close!
If I could figure out the specifics for those four numbers, I think I can get a (non-autobooting) drive working on the 1000, which would be SO sick.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Mon May 14, 2018 8:28 am

Last night, after several trials and errors, I finally got the Starboard2 StarDrive to recognize a SCSI2SD card! I originally tried to get it to ping a SCSI Iomega Zip drive, but that didn't work at all.

I got the SD drive to mount by entering in very specific geometry data that I gleaned from one of my other machines running a SCSI2SD via HDInstTools.

The numbers I used:
LowCylinder: 1
HighCylinder: 1930
Surfaces: 1
Blocks per track: 256
To be clear, to setup the drive on the 1000/StarDrive I have to use really odd software by Microbotics specific to the StarDrive. I also had to buy an AC adapter for the SCSI2SD drive to power it - I needed one with a Molex adapter. Works perfectly.

I still need to try and get the drive partitioned, and after that there is a way to load a very tailored WB 1.3 that will almost work like an auto-booting drive, assuming you have the WB 1.3 disk in FDD. It's complicated.

But I think I'm getting close! Very cool stuff. I'm going to be printing a 3D case for this thing if I get it all working the way I'd like. Looks like I can simply download an enclosure on Thingverse and mod it a little - I need to cut a hole for the power adapter.

User avatar
A1-X1000
Toronto, Canada

Posted Fri May 18, 2018 7:42 pm

wow what a nice clean A1000 with Insider 2 board and Kwiskstart too <3

let us know what speed you're getting out of the scsi2sd board..I've got one if my A4000 attached to my CS-MKIII and quite happy with it compared to my very loud and very hot scsi drives

User avatar
A10001986
1986

Posted Wed May 30, 2018 12:05 am

250 bucks, what a bargain. Here you won't get the bare main unit for less than 300$ plus...





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