My First Amiga 1200

I recently managed to acquire my first Amiga 1200 from a user on the Norwich Amiga Group. It came with just the unit and power supply. It has yellowed a bit, especially the keyboard but was functional. It was known that the floppy drive was faulty. I’ve spent an hour with it so far so I’m going to document the work done so far.

Internally the Amiga is a revision 2B which as far as I am aware is the last revision of the Amiga 1200. The insides are in relatively clean condition and a Kickstart 3.0 ROM is installed.

The biggest initial issue was the floppy drive which was failing to read disks. Listening to it running the motor sounded like it was running at the wrong speed. Flipping it over it was clear that the 4.7uF capacitor which controlled the motor timing had leaked. It had damaged one of the pads underneath and it was relatively difficult to remove.

I installed one I had spare, it was a bit of a bodge in part due to the difficulty of the damaged PCB pad. Also I only had a spare through-hole rather than SMT (although I’m not sure I would have been able to solder an SMT on to what was left of the pad. But I managed to solder it in.

I put Amiga Test Kit into the drive and I could tell immediately that it sounded better. ATK loaded and I ran a drive test to make sure it was all OK.

All good! That is as far as I have gotten for now. I need to recap the Amiga motherboard and I have some upgrades coming. But that is all for another day.