Projects

Still looking at the 1.D.1 board with the bad capacitors and missing IDE connection.

I managed to clean up the IDE connector as you can see below. A little flux and the solder pump did the job. I also removed and replaced all the original capacitors and replaced with new ones. The board cleaned up very well.

I sourced the replacement IDE connector from AmigaKit. Installation was very easy on a clean board. Just slot it in and apply a little liquid flux to the solder point. Then its just a matter of making sure not to apply too much solder. Results look good to me.

When I finished cleaning up the board, I connected a 4Gb CF hard drive and boot it up. Loaded Workbench first time.

Another board fully restored. So that only leaves the one with the video color problem…..

Finally got chance to take a look at another couple of A1200 boards.

Firstly a version 1.D.4 that looked to be in good cosmetic condition. This board booted up and passed all my tests so far. No work needed. Happy days!

Next was an older 1.D.1 and it wasn’t in such good shape.
I hooked it up and couldn’t get it to boot. After hunting round the board I found it was missing a smd resistor (R591C) next to the CPU. It looked like it had been knocked off at some point. Replaced the resistor and it Boots!

That’s it for the easy part of this particular board. It was clear to see it was missing its IDE connector. I do seem to remember when I got this board (10 years) ago, that someone had soldered an IDE cable directly to the board, and I quickly removed it. After that it went to storage and I didn’t look at it again. The connector area was a mess, most of the caps in that area also look very bad. I can hardly believe it still works. C239 is even starting to split.

So I plan to replace ALL the Caps, and fully unsolder and clean the IDE area. Then replace with a new IDE header. I may have to repair some of the motherboard tracks that look heat damaged.

I’ve started work on my Amiga 600 in preparation for the arrival of my Vampire 600 accelerator board.
This little board will upgrade the modest A600 to around 100x its original speed and performance. It also adds GFX modes with HDMI and AGA game support to the A600. Can’t wait for this one!

In the meantime I’ve installed Kickstart 3.1 rom and a CF HDD to the stock A600.

If you want to know more about this card then checkout the developers site or Apollo Accelerators
Just a matter of waiting for it now.