Over the past couple of months I've really enjoyed, nay - fallen in love, with my Amiga 1000. I really do feel like I got so lucky finding it and winning it (for only $150 complete in-box). Coupled with Paul Rickards' Wifi modem, it's a permanent part of my desk right now.
Sure it was really dirty, but after cleaning up the keyboard and the inside of the computer, it looks damned near pristine. I can't stop looking at it and using it. It has become my number one terminal for accessing BBSes, bypassing both my 2000 and C64.
It's just so great to pull my chair up to to my desk, slide out the keyboard from its little garage, and just start using it like it was 1986 again. Everything just works and so far I'm really happy with my minor upgrades.
First I got the front 256KB RAM upgrade that, frankly, Commodore should have just sold with the 1000. It's really kind of silly that they didn't (and it should have been a permanent part of the machine, not some removable bit of kit. You know?) That brought it up to a bare-bones level of awesome. My 1000 came with an expansion board of 512K of RAM on the side, too. So I actually had 1MB pretty quickly. But it wasn't a full 1MB, not really. The machine would eat up a small portion of that.
And then I lucked into a Microbotics Starboard 2MB expansion. I wasn't able to get it to work with the other 512, so I removed that and just started using the Microbotics - which had me around 2.5MB total. Not too shabby at all. The 1000 works and plays great at this level alone.
There are really only three missing pieces (for me) for my 1000 to be complete.
First, I want to somehow some way get a RTC (real-time clock). Second, I want an external hard drive. And third, I'd like the potential for a mild accelerator on the rare occasion when I might need one. In my personal opinion, playing Starflight, Wing Commander, flight sims, etc. and some other heavy-duty games that rock by default can rock just a tiny bit more with a mildly goosed CPU.
This past week I received in my possession a DKB Insider card. I have yet to install it, but upon inspection I was baffled by the lack of an obvious battery for the RTC.
After reaching out on a few different Amiga groups, I was informed that the little chip you see in the picture above that is sitting on top of another chip is where the RTC lives, and the batteries (there are actually two!) are embedded inside their little plastic coffin.
After much research, I determined that I'm not likely going to be hacking the "Dallas Smartwatch RTC DS1216" to replace the batteries. That's just a bit above my pay grade. But I have discovered that there may be pin-for-pin replacements for the clock. TBD on that.
I hope to put the board in the 1000 this week and at least enjoy the additional 1MB of internal fast RAM. At that stage, I should be hovering around 3.5MB of RAM, which for a 1000 would be like ... well, it's hard to imagine. It'll be awesome.
But my real-time clock... Ugh, what an ordeal.
Last month I stumbled across an ancient piece of kit made back in the day from C-Ltd called the Timesaver. The Timesaver is a little external board made back in 1987 that (gasp!) used a replaceable coin battery attached to a real-time clock chip.
Interestingly, it is supposed to be placed between your keyboard and the Amiga. To do this you need a phone handset cable, because the Amiga 1000 keyboard uses this strange kind of cabling. I couldn't tell if it needed RJ9 plugs or RJ10. I ordered both from Amazon, as they aren't expensive at all. But I had to wait for them to arrive from China which took weeks.
I tried the RJ10 cable with the keyboard before attaching the device and it worked perfectly. I was able to open up the Shell and type away no problem. On my device's case I can see there is an "A" for Amiga, and "K" for keyboard. I hooked up the cords to their respective ports and turned on the computer.
Not only did the Timesaver not seem to work at all, neither did my keyboard. And wow - the Timesaver was putting out some serious heat!
I tried the RJ9 cables to the same effect and fiddled with everything I could think of. It just never worked. Bummer. I do know that there were two versions made, and I wonder if mine was made for German keyboards which had a different clock rate. But I feel like even if that was so the keyboard itself should still work. And it doesn't. Not when the TImesaver is plugged in.
I also received a Dataflyer 1000, which is a very sturdy external hard drive for the 1000 that can be equipped with a boat load of RAM. I got it today and was immediately impressed with the build. But it, too, never came to life. Not at all. In fact, it would freeze the boot-up process when plugged into the expansion port. Essentially after Kickstart loads it hangs and never asks for Workbench. Even after pulling the RAM expansion from the Dataflyer, it still prevented the 1000 from booting. Bummer #2.
So, my searches continue. And after talking to Jens at Individual Computers, I will not be buying an ACA 500+ any time soon. I'll be waiting for future products (I can't explain why, but let's just say the ACA was designed for the 500 and not the 1000 but that's not the end of the story).
Sometimes things simply don't work. But that's no reason to give up. Not to mention, a friend of mine is sending me a small internal accelerator board called the AdSpeed, which I should receive this weekend. It'll give the 1000's 7Mhz the ability to double its power to 14Mhz. It hasn't been used in years, but we'll see how it goes!