I got this A2000 for around the same price of a cheap meal because of the mess it was in.
When i got it it was in pieces, with the casing including the bezel wrapped completely with some ugly colored skin which was hell to remove.
The front bezel had most of the risers broken and had to be replaced. The case was also warped but thankfully not badly damaged.
There was NO kickstart, most of the socketed chips missing, no floppy drive, no power supply and no screws. There were wires coming out from underneath the motherboard to connect an AT power supply with plug and all.
What it did have was a very nice looking REV4.4 mobo. The original battery was still in place with absolutely no leaking at all which was another plus point, so maybe all was not lost.
I replaced the missing socketed chips (kickstart, denise and the cia's i think) and attached an A500 floppy drive and a PC power supply and decided to give it a go. Fingers crossed, say a prayer and hit the switch.
I couldn't believe my eyes. I was seeing the purple Kickstart 2.04 screen and heard the floppy drive clicking. Tried some disks and it worked great. Mouse, joystick, video, sound, everything.
I straightened out the case, replaced the damaged front panel/bezel, cleaned it up, got an almost new original A2000 power supply and removed those nasty pc psu wires that were attached to the bottom of the motherboard.
After this the machine lay in abandon for about a year or so as i was concentrating on my A1200.
Next, I changed the chipset to ECS instead of the OCS and upgraded the kickstart to 3.1. I also replaced the 512K Agnus and did the mod to address all the onboard ram to chipram giving me 1MB chipmem
It still needed a hard drive controller and some fastram. It did come with a commodore 2MB expansion and an Alf2 SCSI controller but the 2MB expansion was faulty and i could not get the Alf2 controller to work. I also needed a keyboard.
So I got myself a nice GVP HC +8 Scsi controller with 8MB Fastram and added a 1GB HD and Scsi CDROM drive. Ahhh much better now. Also got a Keyboard. Both from here of course
Still not content with the setup, I decided a big box Amiga is wasted without a RTG graphics card, so along came the Villagetronic Picasso II. A lovely card but pretty useless with a 7Mhz 68000.
So, I needed a CPU upgrade. Part exchanged a spare A600 for a Commodore A2630 for a nice 25Mhz '030 boost. Now I was able to install OS3.9 and some goodies. I also managed to install Picasso '96 and finally had a decent RTG enabled Amiga again.
I then bought a GBS-8220 Scandoubler / Flickerfixer which works really well especially with the Picasso II's autoswitch.
I wanted more though and while browsing on the other bay i found and bought a very nice GVP '040 33Mhz Scsi combo with 16MB 32Bit fast ram. Now I had an Amiga 2000 which is in many ways considerably faster than a stock '040 A4000.
What I did not have is 2MB Chipram. Well after much searching I got one from here too. A Mini Megi 2MB chipram adapter
The specs are pretty much as I want them now. And really not much left to do. I would like to add an IDE controller and maybe some more fastram and an HD floppy drive, maybe even an Indi ECS someday but thats about it.
I have no before pics but here are some for you to enjoy.
When i got it it was in pieces, with the casing including the bezel wrapped completely with some ugly colored skin which was hell to remove.
The front bezel had most of the risers broken and had to be replaced. The case was also warped but thankfully not badly damaged.
There was NO kickstart, most of the socketed chips missing, no floppy drive, no power supply and no screws. There were wires coming out from underneath the motherboard to connect an AT power supply with plug and all.
What it did have was a very nice looking REV4.4 mobo. The original battery was still in place with absolutely no leaking at all which was another plus point, so maybe all was not lost.
I replaced the missing socketed chips (kickstart, denise and the cia's i think) and attached an A500 floppy drive and a PC power supply and decided to give it a go. Fingers crossed, say a prayer and hit the switch.
I couldn't believe my eyes. I was seeing the purple Kickstart 2.04 screen and heard the floppy drive clicking. Tried some disks and it worked great. Mouse, joystick, video, sound, everything.
I straightened out the case, replaced the damaged front panel/bezel, cleaned it up, got an almost new original A2000 power supply and removed those nasty pc psu wires that were attached to the bottom of the motherboard.
After this the machine lay in abandon for about a year or so as i was concentrating on my A1200.
Next, I changed the chipset to ECS instead of the OCS and upgraded the kickstart to 3.1. I also replaced the 512K Agnus and did the mod to address all the onboard ram to chipram giving me 1MB chipmem
It still needed a hard drive controller and some fastram. It did come with a commodore 2MB expansion and an Alf2 SCSI controller but the 2MB expansion was faulty and i could not get the Alf2 controller to work. I also needed a keyboard.
So I got myself a nice GVP HC +8 Scsi controller with 8MB Fastram and added a 1GB HD and Scsi CDROM drive. Ahhh much better now. Also got a Keyboard. Both from here of course
Still not content with the setup, I decided a big box Amiga is wasted without a RTG graphics card, so along came the Villagetronic Picasso II. A lovely card but pretty useless with a 7Mhz 68000.
So, I needed a CPU upgrade. Part exchanged a spare A600 for a Commodore A2630 for a nice 25Mhz '030 boost. Now I was able to install OS3.9 and some goodies. I also managed to install Picasso '96 and finally had a decent RTG enabled Amiga again.
I then bought a GBS-8220 Scandoubler / Flickerfixer which works really well especially with the Picasso II's autoswitch.
I wanted more though and while browsing on the other bay i found and bought a very nice GVP '040 33Mhz Scsi combo with 16MB 32Bit fast ram. Now I had an Amiga 2000 which is in many ways considerably faster than a stock '040 A4000.
What I did not have is 2MB Chipram. Well after much searching I got one from here too. A Mini Megi 2MB chipram adapter
The specs are pretty much as I want them now. And really not much left to do. I would like to add an IDE controller and maybe some more fastram and an HD floppy drive, maybe even an Indi ECS someday but thats about it.
I have no before pics but here are some for you to enjoy.
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