Amiga 600 - Pt.2 - The Finishing Touches
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02-03-2023 5:51pm#1
Following on from my previous Amiga 600 thread, it's time now to give the machine what it's crying out for...some more memory, and a small bump in processing speed. It's more or less directly inspired by RMC's Amiga 600 trash to treasure series, with a slight change in that rather than using the stock 68000 cpu, I chose to try out the Furia 020 accelerator. Mostly because the 020 will just give WHDLoad content that bit more speed, and handily, the quit key will work better too from what I read. So, onwards...
^^ There she is, the oft-maligned Amiga 600. I've come to really like the smaller form factor, it's a lot more desk friendly than its cousins. There's a very very mild touch of yellowing on it, but nowhere near enough to warrant a retrobrighting at this stage.
^^ starting from the top, the new parts/upgrades are:
1) Keelog Amiga PSU (this will also do for my 500, 1200, and obviously this, the 600.)
2) The all important kickrom upgrades, a huge thanks to @Steve X2 as always....can't thank him enough for help with this and many other projects.
3) The 1MB Trapdoor Ram expansion. This combines with the existing 1MB internal chipram, to total 2MB chipram now.
4) The IDE2SD adapter/reader. No explanation needed here, it allows the use of an SD card in place of a hard drive.
5) CF-Flash with SD adapter - this will allow to me transfer files to/from the Amiga once done, without having to open it to access the SD card.
^^ This is the heart of the upgrade, the Furia 020. This replaces the stock 68k cpu, with an 020 variant, and delivers a whopping 9.5MB fast ram upgrade to boot. There's a FPU on the board also, which may/may not come in handy!
^^ A quick power on test shows the Amiga still works thankfully (you never know with retro machines these days!), and also the stick kickstart roms are the antiquated version 2.0 (these are too old to allow to to enjoy large hard drive support, among many other features.)
^^ The Keelog PSU working away nicely too. I bought one of these for my C64, really can't fault them as modern/safe replacements.
^^ Ok, time to get to work. The Amiga 600 opened up here, and ready for surgery.
^^ First thing was to remove the old kickstart roms, and fit the new 3.1 from Steve.
^^ 1MB trapdoor chip ram installed, no problem there. I didn't bother with a board that had a real time clock, because it offers no benefits to games, and really only matters for file attributes like creation dates etc - this will be a games machine, nothing else, so really no need for an RTC.
^^ The IDE2SD adapter added. Again, very simple, nothing to note here.
^^ I wasn't completely happy with how the active side of the board hangs over some metallic parts on the Amiga motherboard, so I removed it, added some Kapton tape as protection incase it ever leans over and shorts, and then fit it all back in.
^^ A quick test at this point, and ClassicWB boots right into the custom 3.1 image with large hdd support. Zero issues. All that's needed next is to add the Furia, and finish this off.
^^ The mighty Furia, sits directly atop the existing 68k with a pressure fit (a fair amount of pressure needed to seat the board down, but it grabs quite tightly once fit.)
Time to test.....aaaaannd....nothing. Black screen. Balls.
Queue hours, actual hours spent tweaking the WB installation, re-doing it, trying this, trying that, buying different brand SD cards, scouring ancient forums for clues....nothing. The Furia flat out refuses to boot in the machine with the SD card inserted. Similarly, the SD card will only boot without the Furia attached. To cut a long story short, I went back to the drawing board, back to WinUAE, and back to Youtube and older forum information.
The path led me to HstWb. A set of scripts that automate the building of an image. I'd decided at this point that kickroms 3.1 wern't going to work for me, so I needed to go with 3.1.4. I fed HstWb all of the bits and pieces it needed, clicked a few buttons, let it do its thing, that and it spat me out an 8GB image. I was able to tweak this to my liking through WinUAE before burning it to SD card. So let's continue from there...
^^ A set of two older 8GB Sandisk SD cards I grabbed on Adverts. I burned the newly generated 8GB image to one of them, and fed it into the Amiga....
^^ Closed up (again), and time to test.
^^ If you boot the machine now with the right mouse button pressed, it brings up the hardware configuration menu. You can see here, I've enabled the Furia card, and saved the config. This reboots the machine....crunch time....will it boot???
^^ Boom, thank the maker. There were weeks between the 3.1 problem and getting it to boot with 3.1.4 (time is limited these days, so this hung over me for a while.) This is the BetterWB desktop, tweaked and cleaned to my liking. I left icons out for the most commonly used tools, hid the rest, and cleaned up the layout, being sure to snapshot it.
You can see above, there's a Boot Menu that pops up for 5 seconds too, which gives shortcut choices to desired programs/features. I've tweaked mine to remove and reorganise it so it's a bit more aesthetically pleasing. It can be disabled too if desired, I chose to leave it though in this case.
^^ A quick test with Amiga Test Kit, shows this Amiga 600 now comfortably surpasses even an Amiga 3000. Nice.
^^ Furiatune, the software to control the Furia card, is automatically installed by HstWB/BetterWB, so no need to manually transfer that over.
^^ Of course, of course....one final sting in the tail. The Ctrl, shift, Alt's, and Amiga keys aren't working. Christ, will I ever finish this project?? I tried cleaning the ribbon connectors, no joy, same result.
^^ Some of the pins within the ribbon, at the connector end, looked very very flakey...there's no way to repair them so I decided to remove a small part of the ribbon, which contained the damaged pins, hoping to bypass them.
^^ It worked! But also no, it didn't. Now none of the Function Keys work. Help key also not working.
Queue some altering of the way the ribbon sits within the machine, and time to try again...
^^ All done. I think I'll go ahead and grab a new membrane next time I'm Amiga shopping, this one seems to be on its last legs. All the opening/closing because of the sd-card/kickstart rom confusion really didn't help either.
^^ The iGame frontend working away perfectly. My only gripe with this frontend is I can't seem to see a way to get it to ignore games that aren't installed (ie, internation language versions as you can see above.)
^^ This frontend is very nice to use, very simple, very lightweight too. You can remove games that aren't installed (so the international versions of Another World won't show in this frontend for example), and you obviously need to disable the music while browsing, then it becomes very very nice to use. This will be my default one.
^^ As well as Demos/Betas, and Games....there's a Magazine feature too. Nice to have as a curio, but that's about it really.
^^ Done and dusted. Lovely little machine to use now, freshly recapped, upgraded, and ready to...go back into its box obviously...what do you think I'm actually going to use it? 😁 I will of course use it, but for the time being it'll go back into the Attic to sleep.
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