A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000 | Hacker News Reader

A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000

celso.io

148 pointsdoener40 comments

That was beautiful. Nicely done, and congratulations on your restomod A1000!

I’ve heard people describe it as a 16 bit computer a few times lately though and it always catches me off guard. It was usually referred to as a 32 bit computer at the time, and defensibly so.

Some of its implementation details were 16 bit, like the data bus and ALU, but they were largely invisible to users and programmers. Assembly code used 32 bit math instructions, even if the CPU executed them in 2 steps. It had a flat 32 bit address space, although only 24 address lines were implemented (kind of like how not all 64 address lines are available on a 64 bit CPU today). Registers were 32 bits wide. And later 68K CPUs could run A1000 software on pure 32 bit CPUs natively with no emulation or trickery.

Credit it with those extra 16 bits. It earned them.

> That was beautiful. Nicely done, and congratulations on your restomod A1000!

Author here. Thanks, had a lot of fun! Not sure why the original post from a few days ago didn't merge with this one, it's the same url ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42832032

Yeah, you posted it a few hours before I did (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42839928), and neither got voted up (and, mysteriously, mine was not detected as a dupe inside a very short time window, as it seems like it should happen).

I'm going to blame the first part on us being in Europe and most of the HN crowd living in US timezones :)

There are some esoteric rules about what qualities for a merge and what doesn't. Sadly, I can never remember them

We really had fun reading this. Great games: firepower emerald mines, crystal hammer and dungeonaster.

My friend had the 512 fast ram upgrade, and later a Lucas accelerator.

680[01]0 had only 23 address lines (A1-A23), 16-bit word size, thus 16 MB addressable memory.

There’s also LDS (lower data select) and UDS pins for 8-bit I/O chips.

Modern AMD64 CPUs only have around 48 address lines, but we don't describe them as 48 bit. Registers and pointers are 32 bit, too.

Likewise, the 6502 and Z80 had 16 address lines, but we never describe them as 16-bit.

Right, it is generally about the ALU.

It is hard to give registers too much weight, because both Moto designs used large registers.

It was pretty commonly accepted at the time that the 68000 was a "16-bit CPU" because of its ALU and data bus width, despite the 32-bit being clearly ISA. The Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, for instance, is always referred to as a 16-bit console, even having it embossed right on its shell.

The technical truth is that using a single number to describe the "bits" of a CPU is going to be inadequate in many cases (including this) so this was a choice by marketing.

I'm not sure why that was the case; one would think marketers would have rushed to use the biggest, most impressive sounding numbers available. Maybe they wanted to keep something in reserve for when the 68020 came down the pipe? Maybe they were scared of being criticized or even sued for false advertising since the chip wasn't "truly" 32-bit?

Like the 6809 is an 8 bit chip?

I buy that argument.

My personal reference is the 68K is a 16 bit chip, like the 6809 is an 8 bit chip.

Moto just made really great CPUs at that time.

And the fact is Moto did well by making sure the future was clear for 32 bits. Mostly just a hardware change.

(Except for people who stuffed info into those upper address bits. Oops!)

Well, I don't think there was any consensus. Atari played on this with the "ST" (for sixteen/thirty-two) product label. From the software side it was 32bit. The flat, huge (at that time) address space made things so much easier (compared to the awful segmentation of the Intel CPUs then). That the ALU was just 16bits meant that some operations took longer than one would have liked, but was otherwise of no concern. No "far pointers" or any such crutches.

That's how I see it. As a developer, you still used 32-bit math operations in assembly and the CPU executed them as a series of 16-bit ops. The details are abstracted away. IMO, that made it 32 bits.

By analogy, SATA is a serial protocol, but you wouldn't ordinarily refer to it as a 1-bit bus.

That’s not my recollection at the time. It was always 16-bit. The Archimedes was often portrayed with the USP of being 32-bit at the time.

My father bought me an Amiga 1000 at a Federated Group store in late 1985.

Coming from a C64, my mind was blown by the Amiga's graphics and the multi-tasking. I could run the amazing RoboCity animation demo and then drag it down half way and see my Workbench.

Marble Madness on the Amiga looked and sounded just like the arcade.

1985 was a magical year in general for me, but a big part of that magic was conjured by the Amiga.

Same story here. Christmas 1985. I remember distinctly how my dad showed me how to type "DPaint" at the "CLI>" line, and the magic that followed.

He made friends with a sales guy at Federated, so we got a bootleg copy of Workbench 1.2 when it came out.

I used that computer daily for over ten years. From 1st grade through my junior year of high school. While the TV played advertisements for Windows 95 in the background, I was still plugging away on my A1000 (with upgrades, of course. I had 2MB of RAM and a second floppy drive. Never had a hard drive or modem, though!)

I still have it in a closet. It booted up about ten years ago, but I'm afraid to power it up now without taking a look at all the capacitors.

> I still have it in a closet. It booted up about ten years ago, but I'm afraid to power it up now without taking a look at all the capacitors.

I was surprised that the capacitors and the motherboard in general on my A1000 looked so good ~35 years later. Either way, yes, replace them.

The earlier machines had much higher quality capacitors that are mostly still OK afaik. Consensus (if I may be so bold as to try to represent it) in the Amiga community today is: definitely recap the later Amigas (A600, A1200, A4000, CD32) with their cheaper SMT caps that usually leak and slowly destroy the motherboard, but A1000* and A500 usually don’t need it.

*The caps on the motherboard, anyway. I am not sure about the durability of the internal PSUs. I haven’t bothered to replace anything in either of the A1000s I acquired recently.

I recall the sales guy giving us copies of something too!

I used the icon editor until I got Deluxe Paint. My first real job was doing graphics for a couple of game companies, mainly cross-platform conversions by hand.

I still have my A1000 keyboard and the manuals and quite a few floppies, but the main unit kicked the bucket.

There's still a big Amiga scene and an active forum community over at https://eab.abime.net/

Thank you for sharing! A year or two after you got your 1000, my dad bought the family an Amiga 500. It began my love of computing, gave me a scrappy hacker mind set (owning an Amiga in the US a rarity), and ultimately sowed the seeds of my career.

One of my absolute favorite series of YouTube videos is "Building a new Amiga" from RMC, where he basically builds a new Amiga 500 with as many new parts as possible.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECu6i6WR7mo

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87q-TTG48Ew

3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va91bISkpKI

4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EsRI-5fblM

My career path was pretty much set in stone when I was introduced to an Amiga2000 with a Video Toaster. I watched so many different pieces of equipment get replaced by that one card inside this computer. The replaced equipment dollar value dwarfed the price of the Amiga + Toaster setup. Eventually, we upgraded the CPU from the stock 68010 to a 68040 with another expansion card which was an incredible difference.

This happened the summer between my junior and senior year in high school, and I spent every day that summer learning everything about what I could do with that Toaster. By the time I graduated, I was a pretty decent technical director being able to handle the lower 3rds, camera switching, and running tape playback (and rarely used those skills later).

The Amiga will always hold a special place for me. Any post like this will also keep me from doing work for longer time than it takes to read as I always go down a bit of nostalgia rabbit hole after reading.

Nice restoration and article, thanks!

I bought my Amiga 1000 in 1986. I loved it. I was learning animation using Hash Inc's Animation:Master. People get impatient with web page loads today, but boy, waiting for a low-res animation to render could teach you patience!

I had started in 1977 with a Commodore PET 2001, and was a Commodore person until I bought an Apple PowerPC and loaded MkLinux with the Mach microkernel on it. Later Minix was my choice. I always rooted for Minix over Linux years later, and I still think a microkernel is better than a monolithic one.

Sadly, my Amiga 1000 was stolen from my NYC apartment in 1988, while I was at work.They left the HP laser printer which was more valuable at the time. I learned animation, kept up with programming from my PET days, and got into music trackers. I never bought an A2000 or A3000 or had a VideoToaster, although I really wanted one. Apple one the print/graphics market and Commodore lost its multimedia market with it.

The Amiga will always be my favorite Commodore. I had a Vic-20 and a C-128 at one point too.

As a keyboard enthusiast, I'll add that the commadore Amiga 1000 keyboard contains the fairly uncommon Mitsumi Standard Mechanical Type II tactile switch. The mechanism uses a horizontally placed spring, which gives it a unique feeling, in my opinion, comparable to a nice rubber dome keyboard but with a hard bottom out.

[1] https://deskthority.net/wiki/Mitsumi_standard_mechanical

Excellent and quite nostalgia-inducing story, thanks!

One thing caught my eye:

> The PAL Amiga 1000 came later, and WCS was finally part of the motherboard with Kickstart on an actual ROM chip.

I'm fairly sure that no stock A1000 ever came with ROM chips, so Kickstart always had to be loaded from disk. Happy to learn otherwise if I'm wrong!

Well, they did have bootstrap ROM chips that had enough firmware in them to get the Kickstart off the floppy and install it in the WCS. But I believe you're right that Kickstart in ROM wasn't until the A500/A2000 in 1987.

yeah you're both right, WCS is on the main board in PAL machines, but not the Kickstart ROMs. I got confused because when I finally fixed the issues with the CPU socket I already had the Parceiro plugged in and it injects Kickstart on boot from the SD card. I'll edit the blog.

> I’ll never forget that useless Ñ key.

That was uncalled for. You had your Ç too. I mean, it was the perfect Iberian keyboard.

:) fair

In a similar vein, I love this blog: https://linuxjedi.co.uk/

He fixes Amigas, BBC Micros, Archimedes etc...

I still have my A500 (with a 1084s), it has a failed floppy drive, but it still works otherwise as far as I can tell.

I want to spend some time restoring it.

The floppy drive cries out to be replaced with an SD card reader, there are several on the market :)

I thought about getting a gotek and replacing it with that.

Research FlashFloppy before buying anything.

There's many variants of hardware it can run on. Not all goteks are built the same.

Maybe the FD just needs some lube. I’ve fixed many drives that way.

Great Portuguese computer stories ;)

I have 4 of these sitting at my house. I should either do this sort of project or sell them off.

You have four Amiga 1000 or Amigas in general?

I hear you can perform an incantation transforming 4 Amiga1000s into 1 Amiga4000.

What a delightful piece - thank you.

My C64 has a USB interface!

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