Early A500 restoration project

ocean

ocean

Member
Joined
Jul 14, 2011
Posts
207
Country
Finland
Region
Sastamala
As I wrote to "Post here everytime you get something new" -thread, a friend of mine was moving to another apartment and he was going to trash some retro hardware. I saved them from total demolition and now my work room is full of retro stuff I don't know where to put it... :p

Well, there was three non-working A500 -machines in the pile, and one of them was surprisingly an early A500 with C= -logo on it's keyboard. (At first I found out the keyboard were swapped to another miggy, but I'm pretty sure it belongs to this one...) Sad thing the keyboard is missing some keys (and it's azerty, way off from swe/fin layout), the machine had broken floppy, it was upgraded to ks1.3 and quite dirty. It had battery leakage fluid all over it, because one of the machines had leaked it _a lot_. Good news is that when it's powered, there is that white screen with kickstart floppy in it.

Well, I never had an A500, so this is my project to restore one to full glory of 1987 :-D
 

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After one day cleaning and retr0brighting the case it starts to look quite good. Of course there are some signs of usage, but at least I don't get my fingers dirty when I touch it... :huh:

I had this A501 memory expansion from previous projects, and it's sitting there waiting other parts to join the party. New (old) keyboard and ks1.2 is on their way from Germany. This could be a long project...
 

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Maybe the keyboard is a little bit heavier than the later models? The case seems to be just as the others, only the logo is embossed, not a sticker one. :)
 
ocean said:
Maybe the keyboard is a little bit heavier than the later models? The case seems to be just as the others, only the logo is embossed, not a sticker one. :)
Click to expand...

i thought i got every cosmetic a500 revision, but apparently not. My early does have a badge logo. nice. any serial, country of origin etc that is different from the other red led versions?
 
moijk said:
i thought i got every cosmetic a500 revision, but apparently not. My early does have a badge logo. nice. any serial, country of origin etc that is different from the other red led versions?
Click to expand...

I don't actually know? I don't even know, why this azerty (France?) -version is here in Finland? Maybe it's someone's souvenir, maybe it's an early eBay purchase...? These are the facts that I know about it:

  • There's no badge, but molded plastic logo instead
  • Red led's
  • Keyboard has C= -logo instead of the left A -logo
  • Keyboard is all-soldered-PCB, there are no membrane or such
  • Motherboard is rev3, because there's no revision number ;-) (Revs 1 & 2 were prototypes)
  • Some early motherboards doesn't have a crystal oscillator, but this one does
  • It _should_ have kick 1.2
  • Serial number is quite low, just below 60 000
 
Don't forget Belgium:picard, even flemish suffer from french keyboards...
 
Really? Well, finnish and swedish share the same layout and the umlaut keys (ä, ö) are quite essential in our language. The replacement keyboard is from Germany, so it's almost like swe/fin, y and z are swapped. I wonder if I ever found that non-membrane keyboard with se/fin layout...
 
Rev 3 has it written on the back of the motherboard :)

I have one lying around, sadly not working..
 
Ok. Too bad it's so hard to remove the shielding just to look at the revision number... :p
 
Keyboard and kick 1.2 arrived!!

Sadly the *bay seller didn't mention that the keyboard is not working... :mad: It was missing one chip (U3) and Amiga didn't boot at all without it. Luckily I had my old keyboard with missing keycaps and that chip soldered in place! I just bought a new soldering station (el-cheapo one, but it's better than my previous Lidl one :p ) and started desoldering. And even with my skills I had that 8-leg chip removed in no time! Then I placed it to the new keyboard and it worked!

Now I'm only missing a floppy drive, which I could acquire in couple of weeks. I attached temporarily my HxC -floppy to test leds in the keyboard, and everything seems to be ok. The case is not properly closed because of the HxC is hanging out there, but you'll get the picture :cool:
 

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Nice, that has the rare chicken lips case. I have one too. But mine was NTSC and had a regular keyboard but did have kick 1.2
 
The only problem with 1.2 kickstart is it can't switch PAL/NTSC. But then the 8370(NTSC) & 8371(PAL) Agnus from that era can't do it, either.

Summing that to the fact the mentioned Agnii can't have more than 512kb of chip RAM and you have an A500 very near A1000.
 
It seems that the seller cleaned the keyboard and forgot to put the chip back in place... Well, at least it's working now.

I don't worry too much about the kickstart, it was sold that way and that's how I want to keep it (for the future generations... :p ). I have couple of other miggys to play with, this one is just salvaged from going to trash bin and it's fulfilling my collection.

Chicken lips... I had to google it for a while before I understood what it means... :LOL:
 
Well, finally my new floppy drive arrived and I can finish this project. I was wondering about an hour why I can't make the floppy to work until I realized I had an A600 power supply attached to it... :double Switching to the heavy one solved all problems and the floppy started clicking \o/

Now I only need Workbench 1.2 floppies to go with it... :LOL: Time to close this baby and put it on the shelf. Thanks for watching ;-)
 

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Here's a few pictures of my rev.3, as I said it's defect :(

The C= keyboard is now used with a rev.8a.1 board, but the CRTL+A+A reset doesn't work with this... But the keyboard is so nice! (y)
 

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C= chicken lips - nice 1.2 machine u got going there

keep us informed as what u get working on it as rkauer points out it really is early in the amigas life story. Dose not help that the upgrade from 1.2 to 1.3 broke a lot of software. any way all the best ribbiting ribbits
 
Sorry, I've been busy at a2000 and several c64 projects, so this Chicken Lips one didn't get much attention lately...

I had a few c64 which had some kind of "bubbling" or waving pcb tracks, is this the case of your rev3 mb TroelsDK? They used to work, but after some time they just gave me black screen. I think some of the traces are just cut away because of this bubbling effect... :-(
 
no problem & thanks for the update. Hope u get em fixed up n working
 
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