What is your worst Amiga hardware experience?

[Jameson]

I thought this might be fun, and revealing, to throw out there.

What is your worse, hair-pulling-out-est experience you have had with Amiga hardware.

I have had more than my fair share, but the worst experience I have had of late, by far, is the notorious Furia accelerator for the Amiga 600 - what a total POS that card is. EDIT - As of 2025 the Furia is no longer the biggest POS Amiga hardware accelerator I have experienced. That crown is now taken by the Wicher 500i, truly the worse designed piece of festering monkey anus I have EVER had the misfortune of crossing paths with.

95% of CF and SD cards that USUALLY work well as classic Amiga HDD's will not work with it. It is ULTRA picky about the card you can use as a HDD.

Then the fact that until fairly recent firmware updates it would not even boot with Kickstart 3.1.4 or 3.2. It does not play nice with several other utilities and even when up and running seems about as stable as an elephant balancing on a three legged chair.... always only a single mouse click away from a system destroying crash of epic proportions.

It's memory addressing conflicts with the PCMCIA, so you have to lose half the RAM in order to access the slot. Some clever fellow released a new card.device for the PCMCIA slot that could be installed via a LoadModule command in your startup sequence to fix this..... then a newer Furia firmware revision was released which stopped this from working.... doh!

The irony is, I purchased several of these for several of my A600 as a cheap basic upgrade to make them more useable (my daily drivers have Vampire cards), but after everything I have gone through getting one up and running, and I mean that loosely, I don't think I will bother installing the others.

Okay, rant mode complete.

What are your most loathsome hardware experiences?

 

[Boing-ball]

I thought this might be fun, and revealing, to throw out there.

What is your worse, hair-pulling-out-est experience you have had with Amiga hardware.

I have had more than my fair share, but the worst experience I have had of late, by far, is the notorious Furia accelerator for the Amiga 600 - what a total POS that card is.

95% of CF and SD cards that USUALLY work well as classic Amiga HDD's will not work with it. It is ULTRA picky about the card you can use as a HDD.

Then the fact that until fairly recent firmware updates it would not even boot with Kickstart 3.1.4 or 3.2. It does not play nice with several other utilities and even when up and running seems about as stable as an elephant balancing on a three legged chair.... always only a single mouse click away from a system destroying crash of epic proportions.

It's memory addressing conflicts with the PCMCIA, so you have to lose have the RAM in order to access the slot. Some clever fellow released a new card.device for the PCMCIA slot that could be installed via a LoadModule command in your startup sequence to fix this..... then a newer Furia firmware revision was released which stopped this from working.... doh!

The irony is, I purchased several of these for several of my A600 as a cheap basic upgrade to make them more useable (my daily drivers have Vampire cards), but after everything I have gone through getting one up and running, and I mean that loosely, I don't think I will bother installing the others.

Okay, rant mode complete.

What are your most loathsome hardware experiences?

Oh I have had my fair share

Accelerators throwing up Guru errors. Finding the correct libs. Starting to find out how to get Mediators to work properly due to poor documentation. FastATA issues. Recently trying to update A CSPPC and now have lost some functionality.
Been through the Furia hell on A600’s Mostly problems with A1200 and A4000. I still try and soldier on though….

 

[cloverskull]

My worst experience ever was buying a CSPPC to have it arrive and work for a single day. After that, and much troubleshooting, I sent it to Stachu who confirmed it was completely dead. I spent $a_lot for a single day of using a CPU card

 

[Boing-ball]

My worst experience ever was buying a CSPPC to have it arrive and work for a single day. After that, and much troubleshooting, I sent it to Stachu who confirmed it was completely dead. I spent $a_lot for a single day of using a CPU card

Wow! That’s unlucky.

 

[Deleted member 9116]

Ha. Don't we have a few good stories

20+ years ago, I bought a Blizzard 2060. Tried it a zillion times, in various A2000s, and everytime it would do series of 0100 000F recoverable alerts, upon loading the workbench, starting an exe or launching WHDLoad. It wouldn't crash though, just do these series of recoverable alerts then carry on. To the point that it made me stop using my 2060 and revert to a trusty Derringer 030/25.

Seriously, I've tried everything. All the 68060 libs, OS distributions, inspected the card under the microscope, changed the SIMMs... All the mobo jumpers, etc. It never properly worked

Sent it to Hese, that tried it and reported it as perfectly functional. Plugged it back into one of my 2000s and guess what? Yeah.

 

[Jameson]

I have had a couple of miggies - just recently that bloody Furia card in an A600 - that I got working perfectly..... then the moment I have screwed the case back together, refuses to boot.

Open the case.... working again! And no, the case was not pressing against anything, squeezing anything etc, just a weird and infuriating coincidence I guess.

 

[jurassicman]

I certainly had many issues with a lot of different Amiga gears, the Furia card was really a pain to setup (I sold it after a few months and got an ACA620 instead), I had troubles with the Indivision AGA cards, CF2IDE adapters, etc, etc... but in my opinion the worst hardware I had to deal with was the plipbox.

Absolutely unreliable hardware that got me nuts. I (almost) gifted it to a guy I even didn't know just to avoid to see it anymore.

 

[CCRider]

My A4000T/CSMkIII 060/CV643D dying from night to day sometime in 2002, and no one around being able to diagnose and, let alone, fix it.

Since I needed a working computer ASAP, ended up selling it for parts shortly after, then buying my first PC ever.

That event left me bitter with Amiga things in general for almost 20 years, when I finally surpassed it and slowly made my way back to the scene.

 

[Xanxi]

Furia is not the only card picky about CF. TF cards are too except for blue 8 GB card usually sold with them. That's why i don't like CF anyway and prefer to fit msata SSD with adapters.

I am not angry about one particular hardware but i am about the general difficulty of servicing any Amiga, in particular my A2000 and A4000 (fortunately i am not into the A3000). A lot of operations need to dismount half or more of the computer, with really heavy casing, sharp metal edge spilling my blood every time, taking a lot of time and always with the risk of damaging something in the process. The less i open the computer the better. In any case, it should be done with a lot of spare time available, in plain light, and life does that i usually only can do it as quickly as possible and at night.

 

[Vampire1200]

My worst experience was exchanging data from the PC to the Amiga with a 0 modem cable. I soldered this together myself when I was 13 years old. At the time I didn't have a hard drive on my Amiga 500 and wanted to transfer disk images to the Amiga. The data transfer from a disk took over 20 minutes and the data on the Amiga was unusable because parts were missing or damaged

 

[Jameson]

Furia is not the only card picky about CF. TF cards are too except for blue 8 GB card usually sold with them. That's why i don't like CF anyway and prefer to fit msata SSD with adapters.

I am not angry about one particular hardware but i am about the general difficulty of servicing any Amiga, in particular my A2000 and A4000 (fortunately i am not into the A3000). A lot of operations need to dismount half or more of the computer, with really heavy casing, sharp metal edge spilling my blood every time, taking a lot of time and always with the risk of damaging something in the process. The less i open the computer the better. In any case, it should be done with a lot of spare time available, in plain light, and life does that i usually only can do it as quickly as possible and at night.

Weird. Maybe I have just been very lucky, but I have five TF cards - TF1260's, TF536's and a TF330 and have never experienced a single case of it not liking a certain CF card. I mainly use Sandisk 32GB CF Cards, but have used a couple of 128GB Sandisk CF cards with no problem, an 8GB and 32GB blue and white Chinese no-name cards, a Lexar 16GB and even some 4GB Micromedia cards - every card worked with the TF card I have used them on. Are you certain the problem is with the TF card?

I have only had a single issue with a TF1260 and that turned out to be the A1200 motherboard needing the timing fixes done.

Maybe I have just been (very) lucky....

In fact, the Furia is the ONLY card I can think of that had any notible issues with different cards.

 

[miggymad]

Who's put an A500 empty case into the dishwasher to clean it before retrobrite'ing? Who didn't realise that the water would be hot enough to deform and warp the case?

Guilty on both counts your honour.

 

[Jameson]

Who's put an A500 empty case into the dishwasher to clean it before retrobrite'ing? Who didn't realise that the water would be hot enough to deform and warp the case?

Guilty on both counts your honour.

I wrecked a keyboard on a rare Microbee when I used a UV lamp to retrobright on an overcast day, had the lamp way too close to the keycaps and didn't realise the UV lamp got quite hot after a few hours.... not my finest hour.

 

[miggygossip]

About 35 years ago, my friend and I decided to hook up our A1000 to his dads' office pc with a serial cable. We connected them and all went swimmingly until the A1000 went on the blink and would not turn back on. I didn't remember that the A1000 ports were non-standard. Luckily my cousin was in the tv repair game at the time and he found we had blown the df0: drive. He swapped out our external 1010 df1: floppy drive for the internal df0: and we were in business again. Horrid experience at the time though.

In the last few years I've had A1200 issues like df0: seeking with no disk in for no reason at all and my GBS 8200 scan-doubler dropping the red signal leaving a green screen.
One other unfortunate experience was accidentally wiping the custom startup-sequence on my ex UTAS University A3000 that belonged to an Astrophysicist. I had to format the original 500MB HDD and re-install a clean Workbench 3.1 - losing all the goodies that were installed from it's Uni days.

 

[fitzsteve]

I too lost a CSPPC but fortunately I bought it with a large bundle so didn't lose out financially but it was sad when I found out it was not repairable (dead CPLD from overclocking)

My worst self made mistake was putting a Subway USB on the clock port back to front and watching it glow red!

 

[Watson]

Who's put an A500 empty case into the dishwasher to clean it before retrobrite'ing? Who didn't realise that the water would be hot enough to deform and warp the case?

Guilty on both counts your honour.

I can't say I have ever done that, Miggy. I guess you didn't read the label hehe

 

[imqqmi]

Back in the day I connected my Amiga 500 to the TV while the TV was turned on, sparks on the shield ground could be seen and it toasted the DAC or Agnus I think, or something else I don't really remember. I learned to turn off everything, double check, then connect stuff, then turning it on. Worked as a paper boy to fund the repair.

Another thing with the same Amiga, I wanted 1MB chip ram and soldered in some ram ICs but it didn't work. I tried removing them with a 15W soldering iron. That didn't go well, ripped traces etc. More news papers had to be delivered to fix this mess. But in the end I had an Amiga 500 with 1MB chip ram!

I was quite a bit more careful with my Amiga 1200. But it wasn't without its issues. I bought a Microbotics(?) 28Mhz 030 accelerator with 2MB of ram I think. It never was very stable, lots of guru meditations. I swapped it out for a Blizzard 1230 33MHz with 4MB and it was rock solid. I think this was the best time I had with the Amiga1200, rendering with Lightwave 3D, scenery animator, Vista Pro etc.
Oh and I put in a 260MB 3.5" hard drive powered with an external PSU, it was quite an abomination. It overheated regularly so I put a noisy 40mm fan in the case. It was a nice upgrade from 80MB 2.5" HDD though. Flash drives are soo much better and faster! I think the 260MB HDD did 300KB/s or something.

I sold the A500 to buy an A1200 then sold that to buy a P75 PC. It was a lot faster but god I hated it with a passion.

I've bought an Amiga 500 about 9 years ago. It was a bit unstable so I recapped it, including the PSU and works well to this day. It was bought to restore my old Amiga and MSX data from floppies, around 200 of them. That didn't work as the floppies were quite mouldy and communication over the parallel port was flaky. I created the floppy cleaning kit with my 3D printer (a frame to hold the door open and a turning tool to spin the disk doughnut so that it can be cleaned with micro fibre cloth and IPA. I made hardware to capture the flux data, wrote software to process the data and in the end I managed to recover more than 99% of all data. Even floppies where the disk doughnut came loose from the metal hub. Glueing it back puts the disk tracks off center since you can't see the tracks making it unreadable for about 40 to 60%. I used micro stepping on a modded floppy drive to read between the tracks to restore all data 100%.

I'm now building a ReAmiga1200 and had a lot of issues (and a second one is planned)
- Bad CIA (U7 TOD isn't working)
- Placed 22nf caps where 22pf was required (couldn't read the silkscreen properly). Machine wouldn't boot, no signs of life. Fixed it with the correct caps and the machine sprang to life
- Workbench wouldn't start, turns out I had to put workbench.library in the libs folder as downloaded from the Cloanto website. Same issue with a fresh install of WB 3.1, had to do some hacking with power packer to squeeze workbench.library and powerpacker.library onto it.
- Workbench picture is too dark, in AMOS and Scenery Animator the picture looks good. Swapped DACs but didn't solve the issue. Still not sure what the issue is. Sysinfo crashes with plain 020 processor, but it works with the TF1230.

I learned a TON from the Amiga days, and I still do, about the system, (de)soldering skills, fault finding etc.

 

[miggymad]

I can't say I have ever done that, Miggy. I guess you didn't read the label hehe

I could have sworn it said 'Do not dry clean'.....

 

[miggygossip]

Back in the day I connected my Amiga 500 to the TV while the TV was turned on, sparks on the shield ground could be seen and it toasted the DAC or Agnus I think, or something else I don't really remember. I learned to turn off everything, double check, then connect stuff, then turning it on. Worked as a paper boy to fund the repair.

Another thing with the same Amiga, I wanted 1MB chip ram and soldered in some ram ICs but it didn't work. I tried removing them with a 15W soldering iron. That didn't go well, ripped traces etc. More news papers had to be delivered to fix this mess. But in the end I had an Amiga 500 with 1MB chip ram!

I was quite a bit more careful with my Amiga 1200. But it wasn't without its issues. I bought a Microbotics(?) 28Mhz 030 accelerator with 2MB of ram I think. It never was very stable, lots of guru meditations. I swapped it out for a Blizzard 1230 33MHz with 4MB and it was rock solid. I think this was the best time I had with the Amiga1200, rendering with Lightwave 3D, scenery animator, Vista Pro etc.
Oh and I put in a 260MB 3.5" hard drive powered with an external PSU, it was quite an abomination. It overheated regularly so I put a noisy 40mm fan in the case. It was a nice upgrade from 80MB 2.5" HDD though. Flash drives are soo much better and faster! I think the 260MB HDD did 300KB/s or something.

I sold the A500 to buy an A1200 then sold that to buy a P75 PC. It was a lot faster but god I hated it with a passion.

I've bought an Amiga 500 about 9 years ago. It was a bit unstable so I recapped it, including the PSU and works well to this day. It was bought to restore my old Amiga and MSX data from floppies, around 200 of them. That didn't work as the floppies were quite mouldy and communication over the parallel port was flaky. I created the floppy cleaning kit with my 3D printer (a frame to hold the door open and a turning tool to spin the disk doughnut so that it can be cleaned with micro fibre cloth and IPA. I made hardware to capture the flux data, wrote software to process the data and in the end I managed to recover more than 99% of all data. Even floppies where the disk doughnut came loose from the metal hub. Glueing it back puts the disk tracks off center since you can't see the tracks making it unreadable for about 40 to 60%. I used micro stepping on a modded floppy drive to read between the tracks to restore all data 100%.

I'm now building a ReAmiga1200 and had a lot of issues (and a second one is planned)
- Bad CIA (U7 TOD isn't working)
- Placed 22nf caps where 22pf was required (couldn't read the silkscreen properly). Machine wouldn't boot, no signs of life. Fixed it with the correct caps and the machine sprang to life
- Workbench wouldn't start, turns out I had to put workbench.library in the libs folder as downloaded from the Cloanto website. Same issue with a fresh install of WB 3.1, had to do some hacking with power packer to squeeze workbench.library and powerpacker.library onto it.
- Workbench picture is too dark, in AMOS and Scenery Animator the picture looks good. Swapped DACs but didn't solve the issue. Still not sure what the issue is. Sysinfo crashes with plain 020 processor, but it works with the TF1230.

I learned a TON from the Amiga days, and I still do, about the system, (de)soldering skills, fault finding etc.

Some sound learning experience there. I have a Coanto 3.X rom 3.X Workbench A1200 which the Workbench was transferred from the Amiga Forever system install.
workbench.library was moved from rom to SYS:Libs in Cloanto's OS 3.X installation. Is that what roms you're running? Squeezing workbench.library into SYS:Libs with powerpacker? are you running a floppy only system? Were you able to download 3.X OS from Cloanto independently? TIA

 

[mousehouse]

This is a fun thread!

Compared to modern day hardware it is all so much bit or miss with all of the variances in the machines, especially after 30+ years I guess.

So many issues with a stupid A4000 that will not load certain WHDload games, weird drive errors on anything connected to an accelerator. Only a clean 3.1 workbench will boot, all else fails. Stupid stupid and frustrating machine.

Oh and I really hate my Gotek. Bought it, needed a USBA to USBA cable to flash it. Did that, gave it a USB stick connected to the Amiga and voila, smoke! No ideas. Afraid to connect it again now it just lies there and I have to find a working floppy drive in my drive graveyard (6 dead drives or so) to get anything going. I’d love a version of FloppyEmu (classic Mac) that works on my miggies.