I have a local friend who is a private collector of vintage computers and consoles, and he has an incredible collection. He visited me recently to drop off a few awesome things. One of which is a ZX Spectrum +3, which I will blog about another day. The other is an Amiga 1000, complete with its original box!
The Amiga 1000 was literally “The Amiga”, it was the first model released, 40 years ago. I owned one in the past, which I have created a blog series about, but that one now has a happy home with Retro32.
I am developing a new product that will be released soon, and there will be an Amiga 1000 variant. This means I need to test with an Amiga 1000. I was chatting to my friend, and he offered to bring me one on loan.
What I was not expecting was for the machine to come complete in the original box!
The lighting wasn’t great in this part of my workshop, but as you can see, this box is in great condition for 40 years old. The machine comes in 3 layers of polys, once I unpacked it, this is what it looks like.
The original Kickstart disk was missing (I’ll talk about that later), but there is an extra mouse! Both mice are a little special, they are the same kind of tank mice that came with other Amiga models, but they have a special right-angle connector for the Amiga 1000.
As can be seen from the photos, the label has pretty much fallen off one of the disks. Other obvious things are:
Despite all of that, it seems to be in excellent condition. Let’s open it up!
I just had to show the inside of the lid there.
Under the shield, the machine looks almost immaculate. No dust in the PSU fan, I don’t think this machine was heavily used. It has:
The Denise is an 8362R6, which is good because early machines came with an R5 and that was missing the EHB mode used in some games.
If you have used any other Amiga, you will be used to an “insert disk” screen. This is from the Kickstart ROM, which does machine self tests, includes a bunch of libraries and sets the system up ready to boot from floppy (or hard drive).
With the Amiga 1000, things aren’t quite that simple. Rumour was that the hardware was ready for release before the Kickstart ROM was finished. So, instead, there is a small ROM which acts as a bootloader. This shows a slightly different “insert disk” screen which loads the Kickstart ROM from disk into a special RAM area called the WCS (Writeable Controlled Store). In early models it is in the form of a mezzanine board. In later revisions it was integrated into the main motherboard, but it stayed for the life of the Amiga 1000.
So, on power on, a basic test of the WCS happens (and a little tune plays too), and then you are asked to insert a disk. Kickstart loads from the disk, and then you get the standard Kickstart screen you will be used to in other models. When the Kickstart is loaded, the WCS is locked to read-only mode. Keeping Kickstart protected in there through reboots until the machine is powered off.
Everything looked OK, so I figured it was time to power it on. I flicked the switch and it came to life. But… Nothing but a black screen. I figured that it was possible that the Fast RAM board may have been dislodged in transport. I turned it off, pushed it back in properly, turned it back on and this time…
A great first step. I popped in a Kickstart 1.3 boot disk, the drive spun up, but it was clear it wasn’t being read.
I removed the FDD drive and plugged it into a Greaseweazel. Disks weren’t being read at all, in fact, I noticed the heads weren’t moving. Most floppy drives use a worm gear on a stepper motor, this drive is a little different. The drive heads are geared directly to the stepper motor. And the stepper motor appears to be jammed. I removed the stepper motor and everything loosened up. This was good news, but it also meant that the heads needed recalibrating.
To recalibrate, I had to loosen the screws either side of the stepper motor, and move it slightly until I got it to fully read a disk.
The first image is when I got it to read some of the disk, after several more tweaks I got to read of the 100% disk. In the end, I had it perfectly aligned. So, I put it back in the machine. Let’s try again…
Success! It had booted the Kickstart disk.
Now we had Kickstart, we could load something else. I loaded Amiga Test Kit so that I could test the machine. Long story short, everything tested perfectly!
I also tested the keyboard and one of the mice. The mouse’s horizontal axis was not working, and the keyboard…
Not only were there some dead keys, some keys such as Esc and Return got stuck down when pressed, they wouldn’t spring back up. The keyboard uses physical key switches, so some disassembly may be required to repair them.
The mice and the keyboard will end up being a separate post, they all need work.
I have some PLA which is pretty well colour matched to the Amiga 500, which in-turn is the same colour as the Amiga 1000. I used this to print this design. Unfortunately, due to the way the light is hitting the replacement side panel, it doesn’t look that way.
It turns out that the screws are simply self-tapping M3 18mm screws. Something I have in-stock here, so I replaced the missing one.
The black is the replacement screw, the silver is the original. This is more important on the A1000 keyboard than others because there are only four screws holding it together. Without this, one corner lifts up.
This is a fantastic find, better than I ever expected. There is still some work to do, but I’ll be reporting back on that. The machine is on-loan to me for now, with an option to buy it later. I will very likely be taking the person up on that offer.
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