Building the Worlds Newest Amiga - The A500++ (2/4)

our MC is supported by monster joysticks calm level up your retro gaming with their joysticks feature in genuine San where arcade paths and one click print comm for your photos on canvas acrylic gifts and more local craftsman and global delivery [Music] hello cave-dwellers welcome to the cave look at it just look at it it's a thing of absolute beauty a purple Amiga 500 plus plus this is a board which I've built from the ground up this week I've been held a lot of solder fumes I've drunk a lot of coffee but I've got it built and it's working miraculously what we've got here is a board made by Rob Taylor he's known as pepo UK on twitter and it's born out of necessity because so many a 500-plus is are destroyed by leaking water batteries of the water normally lives here we haven't got one in and you can see that it's cheeky Lee crossed out on the board there the battery leaks it destroys the traces if not chips if it if it leaks too badly fact I saw one the other day that was stored up right and the VAT had leaked all the way down to the Agnes chip and it completely ruined that so all of these boards are getting destroyed if you're very careful you can repair them you can rebuild the traces but some are just too far gone so the next best thing is to now get this board transfer the custom chips like Agnes Deniz pool or Gary which are not made anymore so you transfer the moment and everything else that you see here is pretty much brand new this is a 99% brand new Amiga the newest Amiga on the planet at this moment why have I built it well this is not a channel where we ask why but the reason behind it is the recent checkmate 1500 plus case which we saw on the channel here it is this is Steven Jones's invention and a beautiful case it is - so I was contemplating what I should put in there and what better to go in a new media case than a brand new Amelia on a brand new Amiga that looks as good as this so there are three things that need to happen today one I'll show you the building of the board that will take up the biggest portion of today's video - is transplanting it into the case and then three which will be another video in the near future we'll be considering what upgrades we should buy and really a pimping my Amiga to create the ultimate brand-new Amiga with all the bells and whistles added so let's get to work on building it because it wasn't without issue as you'll see [Music] it all started them with a bill of materials or bomb a list of the components needed to build our Amiga and I have to be honest it was a little daunting when they arrived over three hundred and thirty components make up this build on a positive note though this electronics jigsaw is made up of through-hole components which will be a much easier to work on the Ness surface mounted equivalents the best approach then is to break our big problem down into lots of smaller ones and focus on one part of the build at a time and also to have lots of tea nearby lots and lots of tea looking at the bomb which is freely available to anyone who wants to tackle the build I decided to start with the small and Hardy components and build the board up from there to minimize the risk of me damaging components melting sockets with the hot iron and the like so I kicked off with the resistors one down 339 to go Rob Taylor who created the board is a good friend of the cave so I had the opportunity to ask him about its creation amazingly it's the first PCB that Rob is seen through to production although he did experiment with creating an a 501 that's the RAM expansion for the Amiga 500 and also a Commodore 64 board but it was the Amiga 500 Plus that he decided to see through to production and the first solder is now on our board the Amiga 500 has some great big ground planes which like to quickly conduct heat away so I worked on this board at 370 degrees C and once or twice I did hit close to 400 degrees but made quick work via those temperatures so as not to lift pads [Music] the Amiga 500 and 1200 were Rob's childhood computers just like the 500 was mine so they hold a special interest to us both and many of you watching I'm sure a recreation of the 1200 is already out there thanks to John Chucky hurtle and John is a name whoo Rob thanks on the silkscreen of the board so Rob decided to tackle the a 500 plus instead it's a machine that has a reputation for destroying itself thanks to a voter battery on the system board which leaks and destroys anything in its path the 500 plus plus board then is a chance for us to revive those dead 500 plus machines by transplanting the custom chips across to it because those chips aren't produced anymore but anything else can be salvaged and reused because I chose to use new parts across the board this build came close to 130 pounds which is ridiculous and all just to say that this is the newest Amiga on the planet you can save yourself lots of money by reusing sockets and components from the old board if you just allow yourself some more time to remove them and on the subject of costs this wasn't without cost for Rob to create this is board revision 2.1 a couple of mistakes did exist on earlier versions which after production left Rob a thousand pounds out of pocket and with only a pile of 40 PCBs to show for it thankfully though 2.1 which we have here also known as the purple beast is without problems and it sounds a whole lot better than the earlier revision which was known as baby vomit owing to its unusual color purple is a much much better choice for the final product [Music] next up I fitted this row of blue capacitors along the back of the board these have three instead of two leads and are used for EMI or electromagnetic interference suppression they were usually an orangey brown color on the 500-plus or sometimes a purpley blue which when you hand really came down to which company was selling them the cheapest at the time commodore was ordering stock sometimes from Urata sometimes TDK anything to keep the costs down and that applies to all components on the board commodore would buy in bulk and buy as cheaply as possible the finish to my work will not be anywhere near as perfect as a board produced in a factory by a machine of course I'm not a machine but I do feel like once here working on it all day long but I will try to get as neater finish as I possibly can on to our next component the resistor packs the ground pin on these are indicated by a little black dot to look carefully for them and make sure that they do go in the correct way around a really nice and unexpected touch on this board is a list of thanks shown here to those who have supported Rob in the project I was quite touched and surprised to see that my name is on that list so thank you rob it makes the bode all the more special for me as to I'm sure it will to the other names on their cage man Chrissie game Whisperer kai jinx Abraxas pillock and mine Flair retro who were also on the roll of honour [Music] so how do I keep my patience when I'm working on a project like this you might be thinking well that's easy big old headphones and relaxing music or a must to block out any distractions [Music] [Music] and it really is worth taking your time over each joint with so many components to install a single component in the wrong way round or a bad joint could lead to hours if not days of troubleshooting to try and get to the bottom of it so despite the cost Sir Rob he was really encouraged by the community who rallied around him to get it finished and the board is now available to buy so I'll post a link in the description where you can buy yourself one and Rob can try to cover his costs while providing a really valuable service to us Amiga fans and he's already working on his next project it's a Jupiter ace recreation Jupiter ace is quite a rare machine and it doesn't have any custom ICS so that's an opportunity to create a computer from scratch that you might otherwise not have had a chance to buy this whole idea of building a computer from kit form is something that I thought I'd missed out on I was too young when the Sinclairs at X 80 or 81 appeared in our shops as kits to build so to have the chance to do one now and to be doing it on a machine that was so pivotal to my own computing career it's just really heartwarming and I appreciate the opportunity that Rob's given to us [Music] with our icy sockets in place this is really starting to take shape and look like a real Amiga the next job is the rare connectors starting with the db9 for the mouse and joysticks then our phone Oh audio outputs with that huge immediate stereo separation on left and right you know what I'm talking about if you've used an Amiga and also the commonly available db25 ports but we do now run into a problem the power port is not available so we'll need to reclaim that from and damaged old a500 and the DB 23 ports are really hard to find these days DB 23 is used most importantly for the video output so again we'll need to reclaim some parts to complete that whole row of connectors designer Rob has discussed changing the DB 23 to a DB 25 port and now that he has this complete replica board he can go off on tangents and modify it however he wishes my only concern however would be if you were a bigger porting and you also need to modify the case which is more destructive than many would like to do so maybe he'll come up with another solution in the longer term we switch over to an old donor board now which is not that lovely purple colour but good old-fashioned green and with lots of flux in a very hot iron we reclaim the old connectors this our board was sent to me with evidence of a battery leak as well as lots of missing chips a ram module had been taken and lots of logic was missing and had been socketed and then removed so I just have empty sockets on it in short he had been terrorized hopefully to fix another machine but who knows maybe it was just an abandoned repair so I don't feel too bad about taking parts off of it another important part to claim is the hybrid video I see air this is responsible for turning our digital red green and blue signals into analog ones for the monitor or RF modulator and it also generates the monochrome composite video output it's another part which is no longer manufactured we've laid claim then to the DB 23 and power sockets the 28 megahertz oscillator the floppy drive power header the hybrid video board and an FB 802 ferrite and these all now need to go into our new 500 plus plus if you're in any doubt as to what you need to take from the old board it is all listed on the BOM sheet everything you need is there to get this job completed in migrating these old parts to our new board then it's the rear connectors where I really ramped up the iron temperature because not only are they electrically connected to the board they're also mechanically anchored to the board with great blobs of solder on the ground plane making sure they're well in on these anchor points prevent stress being caused to the more delicate solder joints when your plug-in devices in and out and potentially causing those ports to wobble slightly over time that can break the joints then we put the custom chips in from my lunch box of Amiga spares because we've all got our lunch box full of a meager IC 7-way this being a 500 plus we want the CIA chips Gary and Paula as well as the new Agnes chip so we can support two Meg's of chip Ram and the newer super deniz chip you'll also spot that there's a red custom Ram board in the RAM sockets pretend you didn't see this because there's a fault in it and we'll revisit that in the next episode so for testing I do revert to some spare RAM chips of the type V 500 originally used which will magically appear as we finish our build now and return to the desk [Music] that was the board built then but didn't quite go to plan because when I first checked it out I just got a black screen didn't work at all and there are so many variables involved in building there's so many components that my natural reaction was it must be something I've done it must be my soldiering it must be that part in the wrong place and sure enough I had made a few minor mistakes and put one capacitor in the wrong way round over in the audio circuit over here and I'd put the rs-232 chip in the wrong socket that was it I'd caught them in time before any damage was done and considering the number of components on here I was quite happy with that error rate and no damage was done so that was the important thing but it still didn't work and after a lot more diagnosis I discovered that my agnes chip was not working so it's one of the custom chips which was at full I had no way of testing it because the 500-plus agnes chip doesn't work in the 500 it's um it's not pin compatible so I didn't have another 500 plus to test him so thank you to Keith over at the digital orphanage who has lent me his Agnes this is a loaner in here at the moment until I buy myself one we put that in and we immediately got a green screen which was some progress a green screen indicates normally that you've got a ram problem and sure enough I swapped out some RAM chips and we were going we got the kickstart prompt here a 1.3 by the way so this is an older kickstart ROM that I had in my box of bits rather than what you would have got with the 500-plus originally so for that reason I only have 512 K of RAM in this board but we will fix that in future the important thing is that it's working the other thing that the eagle-eyed among you may have spotted this missing is the expansion connector here and the reason that that's not in there is because a lot of the other guys who have built this have told me that the header on the bill of materials which I've bought here because it's a rounded pin it sits quite loosely in expansion boards they're not very it works but they're not very happy about it so I'm gonna get something that gives a snugger fit by donor that I'll even use that it all depends on what upgrades I fit because the extra Ram will likely come off of the Bizzaro card or whatever it is that we put in here as an expansion so you may not even fit that at all but as I said the important thing is that it's working let's pop a disc in I think I've got defender of the crown on here just to prove to you that it goes beyond the simple kickstart screen and I've tested this as extensively as I can the audio works that joystick the mouse works the picture is solid until perfect really happy I don't want to tempt fate but I'm really happy with it and it's working beautifully so the next step then is to get it into that checkmate 1500 plus case before I do any damage to it give it securely in there see how glorious it looks and decide on the next steps that we need to take so let's do that right now returning to the channel then hits the checkmate 1,500 plus case if you haven't seen the review already then you can find it in the description where you can get a much closer look at just what this case is and I hope you consider the 500 plus plus to be a worthy resident of this new case we could of course opt in to put an original Amiga board in a PC and FPGA all kind of things but today the 500 plus plus we've gone with an installation really isn't to taxi why because I learned my lesson when I reviewed this case I read the manual which I'm sure Stephen Jones creator of the case will be delighted to hear at the time of making this video Stephen has just passed the 50% mark of shipping all of the cases that he sold on Kickstarter because it was due to the Kickstarter backers that this thing exists and hopefully when he's finished that process there will be more made available so I'll include links to his website so that you can keep an eye on that now our 500 plus plus board sits at the bottom of the case on some standoffs which I need to install and then there's this additional board which slots on to the side expansion we'd normally fit a hard drive or an a5 70 CD drive any kind of expansion like that to the side of your 500 and that would stick out the side of the case well this card does two jobs it allows us to fit expansions internally in the case because it brings them back around and inside the case rather than outside and it also allows us to power the Amiga with a modern PSU eliminating the old and potentially dangerous power brick it's an optional extra the standard board inside the case which are removed now it can also be used with a modern PSU but instead of power in the Amiga via the edge connector it loops back out of the case and into the regular power socket at the back of the board and of course it's lacking the slots to allow you to install a Zorro expansion card so it's a really useful to go for that upgraded option [Music] [Music] next up it's the power supply and it's important that you get an SFX form-factor PSU to fit properly in the case because a regular sized one is just too large to fit in the case you have to get this reduced size one they are readily available though and a just a quick search away if I will provide a link to the one that I've specifically bought in the description it installs just like any other PSU in any other case with screws around the back of the case to hold it in and then the power cable runs across to our expansion board the keyboard is the next thing we need to consider the optional keyboard case from checkmate add support to the case which we plug into the amiga board and then fit to the back of the case here an original Amiga keyboard then slots straight into the checkmate case here which also has holes for the power and disk activity lights and a nice long cable which connects the two together whether or not I'll use this in the long term I still haven't decided there are plenty of options out there and we'll explore those in part three and then with everything in place it was time for the big moment a new Amiga built by my own hand in a newer media case let's just take a moment to enjoy it [Music] I cannot begin to tell you how rewarding it is to have built this from an empty board he 500 plus plus and then see it working in this glorious checkmate case and hopefully that feeling is something that you might get to feel for yourself if you decide to tackle the 500 plus plus build which I wholeheartedly encourage you all to do so what do you think for me it really is a thing of beauty if the purple PCB wasn't enough for you this case is just glorious even more so now that is actually working there's still a lot more work to so you'll noticed I've kept the gotek external that's just because I like to swap it between all of the amigas that I use I don't like to go to the expense of lots and lots of go techs so what we'll have to do is blank this off or I do have a slot loading CD drive so we might put a CD drive in here there's obviously upgrade to go in there I'd like to add hard disk capability I'd like to increase the clock speed all sorts of good things that need to go in there in the next episode and the wonderful thing about this is down here is a slot for SD cards so I can get a hard drive solution that I can extend out to the front we can just have an SD card that pops in and out we can set that with whd load and that can be a really accessible and easy to use a media where I can swap the card out to my PC to set it up if I need to I think that's about everything that I need to do obviously there's a sticker to go there a checkmate sticker or otherwise just to finish it off and with the keyboard I haven't decided if I'm going to keep this or if I'm gonna find a modern solution maybe a modern mechanical keyboard I've got the garage for this so I can put two spaces underneath to lift the whole case up and then you can slide the keyboard under it like the 81,000 which is really nice but this one it's too wide to do that so if I can find a nice solution that doesn't sacrifice too much in terms of the custom Amiga keys and keeps it nice and usable then I think that would be a nice finishing touch otherwise I'm really pleased with it so I think that's quite enough Amiga for you all for one episode today I'm getting hot under the collar after all this and I bet you are too because it's been let's be honest it's been a sexy episode I can't wait for part three I hope you join me for it until then take care and see you next time guys [Music] if you enjoy my content and would like to toss a coin into the hat to support the cave then check out patreon.com/crashcourse you can see on the screen now thank you for your support [Music] you [Music]

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 216,079

Rating: 4.96 out of 5

Keywords: computer history, nostalgia, retro, retro computer, retro man cave, commodore amiga, amiga 500, a500++, new amiga build, solder, repair, new build, amiga 1200, retro gaming, how to

Id: 87q-TTG48Ew

Length: 22min 48sec (1368 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

That's absolutely fantastic mate! Job well done, I'm jealous!

[u/sublight21]

A new Amiga?! OMG a tear roll from my eyes... Those where the days.

[u/xxesus]

I want to I really do, but it would take me 40 hours and probably wouldn't work because of some mistake I made and I dont have any custom Amiga chips like Fat Agnus.

Otherwise this, and the VAMPIRE card stuff, is awesome.

[u/SmoothRunnings]

Do you have to install the battery on this board?