I think Bill the Cat would have been proud of the noises that came out of me while cleaning out the 'beige box' - a thick layer of 10 year old dust was so deep I had to use 2 cans of compressed air just to find half the screws to dissasemble the beastie.
When all was said and done, I was able to take stock in what I had.
Rev 4.5 motherboard - OSC chipset. The battery hadn't leaked, which seems to be the common demise of these systems -- several critical traces lie just under the old nicad battery. I'd lucked out, the corrosion of the old battery hadn't made it down the stems to the board yet.. a quick 'snip snip' and now it never will.
I grabbed my trusty soldering iron and put a new style lithium battery in there and did a good clean of the board with air and some alchohol swipes.
Tested the Floppy drives, they are pretty much shot. DF1 reads occasionally with errors, DF0 refuses see disks, on the 1 in 6 occasion that it actually realises it HAS a disk shoved in it....
A crappy old bridgeboard got taken out, as well as a 5 1/4 drive - I mean why would I emulate a xt on a 10 year old Amiga when I can emulate an Amiga on my PC? Replaced the old SCSI controller with a G-Force 030 that has 4 megs of ram on it.
My wife laughed at that figure... a whopping 4 megs! Her machine having 2 gigs, and mine having 4.. it does seem funny, but when I start to explain the differences in program size - machine layouts - design paradigms - her eyes glaze over and you can nearly see the 'other thoughts' bubble appear over her head... She has as much interest in that stuff as my dog has in comic books.
A quick look up Google and a trip to Ebay and all missing components are on their way, hopefully soon. ECS chipset is pretty much a requirement, that 1 meg of chip ram makes developing easier.
Besides, half of this is about re-creating the fun I used to have, and the first step in that is re-creating the old machine...
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