Amiga 500 - Caps & Stuff

Inviere

I finally made it do taking care of some of my Amiga stuff, and this time it's my Amiga 500. A nice boxed example, completely stock, albeit with some yellowing that I'll take care of at a later date when I sort what I need for a small retrobrite festival! Anyway, not much needed here other than the usual capacitor change, and A501 battery leak. The Amiga was sealed & hadn't been opened before, so it was nice to "let there be light" to the innards since it was first assembled.

^^ you can see here the keycaps have definite yellowing going on. I'm planning to do some serious retrobriting maybe later this summer or early next year if not, so this will have to wait until then.

As can be seen below, the A5001 memory expansion has a battery backup that has leaked - a very common issue on these, so that had to come out.

Next up was to strip the Amiga down and get it prepped for cap removal...

Out with the old...

In with the new...

One major enough thing I wanted to achieve with this was to use a GoTek as a boot drive. On the Amiga 500, this can be done using a boot selector switch, which sockets/passes through the controller chip (Even CIA chip)

, and uses a switch to swap either the internal floppy drive to be the boot drive, or an external drive (GoTek in this case.)

Selector board in place of the chip, and the chip itself sitting on top. All that's needed now was to fit the selector switch itself. I refuse to drill holes for switches these days, and given the internal drive will likely never ben used as a boot drive again, I was happy enough to fit the switch internally within the Amiga, leaving it accessible from the bottom trap door if ever needed.

Next up was to test the GoTek itself. Unfortunately, it didn't work as expected, and I lost at least several hours trying all manner of things like different usb sticks, different boot parameters, and so forth. Nothing worked. The front led display didn't light up, and the GoTek itself would only perform an initial boot, and then error out. See below...

Ultimately I figured out it hadn't been flashed correctly from the seller, and obviously not checked before sale. Annoying to say the very least. The fix was easy, given the GoTek itself had flash floppy already on it, all I had to do was reinstall flash floppy by putting the update file on the usb root, and booting the GoTek with both buttons pressed doen for a few seconds. This put it into flash/update mode, and the process was all automatic from there. Once done, it picked everything up properly, and the front screen lit up.

The main led display is functional, but very basic. It only displays slot numbers, so you need to remember what games are flashed to what slots in order to boot them. We can't be having that in this day and age, so a small oled screen upgrade was bought and installed. Unfortunately, the listings on the sellers site doesn't state that the oled screen doesn't actually fit into this particular GoTek housing (this is an GoTek with an external case, I didn't want to fit it internally as I wanted to keep the Amiga as original as possible.) So some slight cutting was needed to accommodate the longer oled screen. Again annoying, it's a shame the seller pages don't state this.

The oled screen is far nicer, and displays each disc's name perfectly. However, due it not being compatible with this particular external case, I need a small 3d printed mounting arm (@Steve X2 is already on the case for me). Until then, some decent strength electrical tape will suffice. I tried some nicer Kapton tape, but it just wasn't strong enough to hold the screen where it needs to be.

I seen the next little 'upgrade' elsewhere and thought it was a great little idea. Basically you can fit a small piezo buzzer into a GoTek to mimic the sound of a floppy drive reading discs. The buzzer is synced to the drive access light, and is actually a lovely little effect.

I forgot to get a final pic of the buzzer in place, but a small piece of tape just secures it to the bottom of the case itself, all within the GoTek.

The phone mic makes it sound much more 'tinny' than it is in real life. It's by now means the same as a floppy drive, but it's quite decent in person.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAiyQhIA_Ig

Next up was to fit a custom battery holder to the A501 memory expansion. This allows the use of a CR2032 battery, and contains a small diode with ensure the Amiga can't 'charge' the non re-chargeable CR2032. As can be seen below when booting workbench from a cold boot, it now remembers the date/time perfectly, and is a really simple job to swap out the battery in future if needs be.

That wa smore or less it. All that was needed now was to load up the GoTek with legally backed up copies of all my legally owned games, and enjoy the thing!

Is there anything more evocative than this screen....

Job done...