intric8 wrote: ↑Mon Jun 14, 2021 9:07 am
Welcome, Tim NZ! If you have any pics of your chickenlips I know we'd love to see them. Are you the same Timothy I've been chatting with on YouTube? If so your machine sounds very cool indeed.
What monitor are you using with it these days?
Hey! Yes, same Tim. Your YouTube channel is how I found amigalove.com
I still have my A520 modulator, and our TV has inputs for that. It's a bit yuck for regular use (wot with being stuck to the living room wall), so I haven't done anything besides checking some floppies (...luckily, one of the few survivors is a Workbench disk!). I'm waiting on a SCART to HDMI converter now.
Here are some photos:
Keyboard before cleaning (yuck!)
Memory expansion / leaked clock battery
RF shielding
Back together, looking decent again!
Still-in-its-box ACA500+ (haven't tried it yet!), and the new clock battery
I have mixed feelings about coating the RF shielding with zinc spray. WD-40 would've done the job without changing the look. Did have to sand off some rusty patches though, and the zinc spray hides that.
The motherboard itself was in really good condition - no hint of battery corrosion (just a tiny bit on the expansion board), no dodgy-looking capacitors, no cold solder joints. So I just gave everything a good clean. Have decided not to replace any capacitors till they misbehave. (Though, I know there are different schools of thought. So I might change my mind as I learn more about these things. E.g., recapping an old audio amplifier might be overkill, but recapping a vintage computer might be the best way to safeguard the ICs. I'm not sure yet.)
I've installed a button-cell battery (incl. diode to prevent charging) on the memory expansion board. That came from amigakit.com. As you see from the last photo above, the new battery holder didn't quite fit! Tin snips to the rescue! Bonus: battery access without having to open the thing!
Edit:
Oh! And while I was checking floppies, I found some stuff I'd completely forgotten about!
There's a hangman game, and a little demo that swoops a string of sprites around the desktop (a bit like Galaxian space-ships). They would've been written in either Modula-2 or C. With luck the source code's not lost