Caught Up and the Trials of Hardware!

So this brings us to the present - from March 10th till today.

We've gone from a black and white only Amiga with no development software and no working floppies to a halfway decent dev setup... but there's more to do.

As you read I'm running a classic OCS Amiga - with 1/2 meg chip ram, and thanks to a good deal on Ebay, 4megs of fast ram and an 030 accelerator.

Today the last of some hardware bits came in so I'm going to delve in and open the box again:

4 gig HD - alas it has a different SCSI connector on it! So this gets put to the side - 80megs is enough for now anyways.

Fatter Agnus Chip - able to handle 1meg of chip ram
Super Denise - handling screen modes and finishing out the ECS setup for the 2000
1 chinon floppy drive.

Hardware at this level makes me nervous - I'd already cut off the battery and resoldered a lithium watch battery and holder into this box, and I was sweating like a whore in church.
Discussing all this on Amiga.Org didn't make me feel better as I heard tales of brittle chip sockets - shorting out chips - breaking and bending pins off legs....

As it was - the operation went very smoothly - so what follows is what to do if you want to update a A2000 rev 4.5 motherboard to the ECS chipset:

1. In my case I went from 2 floppies that didn't work to one - so Jumper 301 (next to the floppy cable) is set to open (so DF1 will appear on external if I add one later) - the drive is jumpered to DS0 and connected to the 'twisted' end of the cable.

2. Ground yourself by touching the powersupply - put on a static wrist band.... now WITH A PLCC EXTRACTION TOOL (can't stress that enough - it only costs 4 bucks!) take out the old Agnus chip (labled FAT LADY on the board) - note it's orientation - one corner of the chip will be 'ground down' - take the new Agnus and carefully put it in the socket and gently press it down to seat it - make sure it's seated well.

3. Using the tool of your choice (mine is a jewellers flathead screwdriver with some anti static foam around it) lift the DENISE chip up - note the orientation (there's a little depression in one end that's easy to spot) - line up the new chip and seat it - be careful to avoid bent pins!

4. Locate Jumper 101 - it's near the power supply socket. Set it to the pins closest the power socket.

if you test as you go along - because like me you're paranoid - your ami will boot up until step 4. You won't notice anything new unless you look in Sysinfo - but when you do step 4 it will stop booting until you do the next (and final step)

5. (And this is the fun one!) Locate J500 near the CIA chips - it's a jumper trace (2 solder pads and a fine connection between them) - with a sharp exacto knife or other tool of choice, cut/scrape/break that connection between them.

Then reassemble and boot - voila - 1 meg chip ram!