EEVBlog #438 - Amiga 500 Retro Computer Teardown

hi welcome to tear down Tuesday now I actually asked on Twitter what I should actually tear down today because well I do actually do the teardown on Tuesday here in Australia not Austria now I had the overwhelming response said do the Amiga 500 ton ah here it is the Amiga 500 in all its a bromide yellowed glory about 25 years old 9 I'm not sure the exact vintage of this one but the Amiga 500 Commodore Amiga 500 which came out in 1987 discontinued in 1991 so let's round it to a 25 year old vintage computer technology mm-hmm hope it's better inside than it smells let's go and yes unfortunately it does have that old garage smell because that's exactly where I got this sucker from in fact I got two of them they look up very similar that one's got a key missing and one supposedly works and one doesn't go figure anyway we'll open this one which has all the keys intact and yes that it is turning that classic yellow colour as a lot of these old computers did as I've mentioned before due to the fighter flame retardent bromide used in the plastics you can actually get a chemical way in a process to get rid of that if you want but here it is folks tada state of the art from 25 years ago very popular incredibly popular personal computer one of the most popular of all time the Amiga 500 many millions of these suckers sold 512 ki ram which was that pretty huge back then this is almost a follow up to essentially the Commodore 64 although there was an Amiga 1000 a couple of years before this but really that was like a big box you know type 1 so this all-in-one that keyboard unit very kind of reminiscent of the Commodore 64 so it is a bit of a successor in that respect so 68000 processor very common processor used back in those days just to shade over seven megahertz or so of course came in power in NTSC standards as all computers of the day did this ones obviously comes from Australia so it's going to be a yeah power one we have built-in floppy disk drive which is actually yeah completely the three-and-a-half inch floppy disk drive by the way folks not that five and a quarter rubbish this is state in the art of course for 1987 and it can read and write IBM dis and Mac this and all sorts of stuff because it's fully programmable apparently so the controller isn't fixed to one particular type of format disk and of course it had the separate numeric keypad separate cursor keys that was a huge thing back in those days actually to you know very professional rule if you had a separate numeric keypad Wow a little a separate cursor keys whoo-ho playing with the big fellas the IBM now we got to our nine pin joystick interfaces left and right audio it actually had four channel audio arm 8-bit audio at I think twenty-something kilohertz sample rate so it had four independent up PWM channels so quite advanced audio capability for its day disk drive interface serial port interface yeah at the big 25 weigh one and a parallel port as well the power unfortunately I don't have the power adapters for it but maybe we'll be able to pair it up with a bench supply see if it works RGB video output and also a composite mono monochrome output as well on the bottom though we have an expansion slot down here arm affectionately known as the trapdoor I believe by the Amiga 500 aficionados and let's take a look at this sucker here it's a Commodore Amiga 500 serial number 72 a double nine seven I have no idea if that one's what date or you know if that's a fairly old or whatever but there you go attempted repair by unauthorized persons voids warranty ha ha we're going to screw that that's for sure I think there is a screw under there it's Gonski ah I thought that was a screw under there but I think it is no it's not ah and on the opposite side of the floppy under this little cover here we've got a big expansion header and I believe you could get processor expansions and all sorts of stuff for this one so what quite a flexible expansion slot and if we lift up the trapdoor as they call it that folks is incredibly disappointing we have what looks like sure all right no it is a module for that I thought it was a how does that come out I don't know it looks like there's a pin header down this side yeah all the Amiga 500 fishing arrows are probably screaming at me ha it does slide out folks there you go tada what's under there I wonder I don't know let's crack that open first it's actually soldered is that salt yet it's soldered completely through hmm tied to some Stoke up the iron so we'll just rip this open though pretty serious about shielding on this so it's just whoo oh yeah it's got that old smell you better believe it whoo-hoo there we go we're up smoked in hope that doesn't set off the building now smoke alarm how to be embarrassing Oh old solder smell our classic my GBC iron has no problems with thermal capacity on that huge bit of metal shielding by the way not a problem whatsoever I only got my iron set for like 300 there and it's just ripping through that not a problem oh look at that we have some dip packages and I wonder what it is sure you're you're me 500 aficionados know instantly but I don't is it Ram expansion probably and well no surprises whatsoever it is a merry expansion card 512 K Ram so this is a one Meg Amiga 500 war and we've got ourselves a real-time clock down here there we go it's an Okie part there's our thirty two point seven six eight kilohertz watch crystal is a little tweaking cap there and our backup battery has and I start to get a bit crusty and there's the money shot for you retro fans hooha Texas Instruments TMS four to five six hundred and fifteen nanosecond DRAM woohoo 256 K bit unbelievable so obviously we need that 16 of these chips to give us 512 megabytes and that's exactly what we get and check out the date code 31st week 1987 so yeah this could be one of the very early units will I be able to see this a bit more when we open the main board see what all the date codes on there it could have been you know old stock our RAM or something like that when they assembled a bit you know back in the day I don't know these things were you know usually pretty high turnover so yep we might have a 1987 vintage first year unit here folks and we have ourselves a rev 5 board those so yep your guess is as good as mine and yes assembled in Hong Kong as where or low-priced dubious products back in the mid 80s and as everyone knows what are you talking about doc all the best stuffs made in Japan and we have a confirmation date on the PCB as well 29th week 87 that would have been the bare board PCB manufacturer putting that date on there most likely now as for the main unit we have a combination of Torx bits and Phillips so I'm not sure what's going on here there's a couple missing so someone's had a someone's probably have a hack at this not sure if all of them have to coming out on the sea I mean this is holding down some sort of no that says we're holding down some sort of extra metal thing in there this is a much deeper screw here so I'm going to assume they only have one over there it's kind of weird and there's a couple of talks on the top here so I'm not yeah they all look much so they're probably original so maybe these Phillips ones actually holding down something else in there which will we might find out yeah okay yep the top cover is probably going to lift off I think yes ah it's a bit crusty tonight whoa whoa leave that and here's our keyboard controller check it out we've got a 65 70 - Oh three six from moss that is um I googled it quickly Amiga 500 keyboard controller yeah thanks for that wahoo folks seven triple five timer awesome old school brilliant 74 LS 123 and a 74 LS 27 and then we've got our two LEDs over here which are quite an unusual package actually oh man check out the PCB folks look at this double-sided board but non plated through to save cost look so they've got the jumper links on here like this and then soldered on the topside where it needs to be ah man really crusty Hong Kong eighties technology stuff yeah yeah this thing really is crusty like it did come out of a garage from some forty year old guy who's still living with his parents that's the kind of yeah you know what I'm talking about and it looks like shield here if you saw the screws and Miss in so looks like we've got a tab under there let's lift that up but I reckon somebody's had a crack at this and they have a bastards haven't replaced see ya screws how dare they another one there we go now shield should now hopefully lift up come on tada got it we're in and here we go single board construction or through hole of course all the main chips are socketed all around here and of course they have the famous names on them we've got a fat Agnes we've got a poor we've got to Gary we've got a Denise up here they're the custom Amiga ASIC chips which were given these names they stand for various things all done by Moss technology as well same as before 68000 processor we've got 512 K of RAM down here and we've got some audio filters stuff around here I've got all sorts of EMI stuff at the top which should take a look at power in there's really nothing in the power side of things that come straight from the external power adapter like straight in there there's no why switch mode stuff no nothing so the external linear power supply makes it all easy and got an interesting looking hybrid up there and our floppy maybe there's some extra circuitry under there as well with the floppy out and we'll take a look at some of this in more detail check it out folks that 40-year old guy in his parent's garage really yeah he's a bit of a doofus cuz look what he's done we just put the floppy cable back in here he's missed a couple of the pins on there whoops maybe that's why one of these units doesn't work we've got ourselves a river v board here silkscreen date code by looks of it 13th week 88 so there you go that one could actually date it too early 88 and of course the famous internal code name for the Amiga 500 is the rock lobster and of course b-52s you young whippersnappers wouldn't know who the b-52s are or how rock lobster associates to them I will leave that up to you to google it and will who some really advanced audio filter in here folks TLO 8 4 quad op-amp and Samar C's and yes folks we have genuine Fox conic connectors and yes that is the same Foxconn you've heard of these days in association with Apple slave labor and suicides if you believe all the stories hmm yes they started out manufacturing not components most notably connectors no wonder the thing was sold is not working or four of these Asics here mounted in the sockets upside down all the electrons are going to fall out cheese and here's our first ASIC we'll take a look at which is Denise and the first ASIC will look out here is Denise and Denise actually stands for display enabler and this is actually the display ASIC controller capable of famously are locking onto and syncing to external video signals so you could buy an external Gen lock adapter to overlay video on an external signal very popular use for the Amiga 500 back in its day and Denise actually does a whole bunch of you know all the video time in all the planes and bit planes and stuff like that nor the the ham the hold and modify operations which all the Amiga 500 people will know or what I'm talking about if you don't there's plenty of info out there on it but there you go for Asics manufactured by Moss technology and we have a date code there of oh six eighty eight and there it is the right way up so the electrons don't fall out and we've got ourselves an interesting single inline package or sip package at ceramic hybrid here and that would be a whiter ceramic substrate on there and it looks like they've got a whole bunch of passives or chips or something on there it's um of course that like a conformal e-type coated with this black stuff to actually protect it but yeah some sort of ceramic hybrid not sure why they needed to go to that effort anyone knows post in the comments and of course this thing hand us state-of-the-art graphics for its day normally our 640 by 320 graphics if you didn't over scan the thing there were various are techniques available to actually get higher in interlaced mode and things to get higher resolution on this thing and it could have up to what 4096 light colors if you used up various special modes and things but usually you couldn't achieve that in you know fast-moving graphics and games but pretty advanced video technology for its day let me tell you I have no idea what this means Feb 3 1 to 512 or 512 obviously 512 K Amiga I'm assuming but some sort of fabric plant our fabrication number I don't know anyway here we have Paula which is our audio controller and Paula stands for well ports audio and you art and and by coincidence apparently it was also the gilt name of the chip designers girlfriend yeah go figure wonder if they're still together does anyone know get the gossip come on we need it and this actually contains our for 8-bit PWM channels up to 29 kilohertz sample frequency so you know quite versatile for its time really and also handles the UART interface and stuff like that hence its location here like if you if it was just purely dedicated to the audio you would think well why is it sort of you know here why isn't it sort of over here right over near the audio and the audio output stuff over here well it also controls the UART stuff up here so I guess it wasn't really needed to put it right over there and also of course when you're talking about laying out a board like this by the way which is a 2 layer board I mean you know we've got our processor down here which you look at but you can see all the tracks snaking around and then these ones from my fat agnus here up to poor whoa and really you know you can't just whack this chip all the way over there get those big 8-bit or 16-bit data buses or the way over here and stuff like that and back here and I just not going to happen so there's certainly a bit of art to sort of laying out a double-sided board like this really because you know all the memory of course has to be in line you can't just whack the chips anywhere you like of course near the i/o here we've got our output some seven for f-series chips are not short latching or whatever buffering or whatever they're doing right near there we've got our data flowing out from these two four four latches our buffers right down into year LS three seven threes and it all just you know flows nicely it comes from the processor over to the ROM is of course linked very close to the processor fact agnus here one of the main controllers sort of right in the guts of that going down controlling the memory and all that sort of stuff going and of course interfacing to work to sound and you are chip paula going over to Gary here and it all just flows nicely there's a lot of art to get in I lay a double sided layout like this anyway getting back to Paula here Paula not only handles the four channel PWM audio as I said handles the you arts handles interrupts handles the joysticks all that sort of you know external IO stuff now all these Asics here are originally stemmed from what what's called the OCS or original Amiga chipset but this one is actually the I believe it's the enhanced art chipset because down here we have fat agnus instead of regular agnes used in their original chip set and here's fat agnes in 84 pin PLCC the original version of agnes was in a 48 pin dip package but the later versions the fat ones big chunky 84 pin PLCC the biggest pin count device on this board by far and it handles all of the memory interfacing handles up to this one handles up to one Meg so hence you can see it's coupled down here into the DRAM so effectively this is the DMA the direct memory access controller down here it also contains some of the video stuff like the up litter interface and things like that so real critical chip in the entire amiga 500 design and one of the main things responsible for its excellent performance for the day and all of the timing in this thing was actually all built around essentially the video mode you're in and the essential video timings because back then you know video dictated you know pretty much everything in terms of the the way these computers were designed and operated from our hardware architecture point of view so effectively what the video blitter inside this thing can do was transfer stuff in memory without hogging up the cpu basically so it's sort of you know took a lot of the video processing away from the main CPU and really even though this is a pretty powerful you know 68000 processor for its day you know seven megahertz and if you want a lot of high-end graphics you can just bog the whole thing down just bloody refreshing stuff so really that's what this direct memory access controller and the bleeder engine inside this thing was able to do offload a lot of the grunt work from the main processor and it could also do things like our draw lines as well so effectively a very you know a very early art version of the you know the real high-end video processes that you get these days which can you know decode video in a real time without any CPU and all that sort of stuff this one could draw lines and hence it could use a few tricks to draw polygons and stuff like that or without the our CPU all of that complexity and those algorithms would be handled inside the video processor essentially now another sub component in this makes for interesting reading it's called copper and it's basically a essentially an independent finite state machine inside this thing that allows you to change video modes and all sorts of stuff on any point on the screen at any time so really the Amiga 500 very flexible in terms of you know just displaying pretty much essentially anything you wanted on the screen including different resolution in different modes on the one screen at once it's crazy but very advanced video technology for the day and of course here we have the classic 68000 processor manufactured by significant 7:45 but some of the chips on here of course some 88 so this unit appears to be a sort of early 1988 vintage machine anyway and and and we have our rom of course which is a mask ROM and it's up you know commodore labelled know this EEPROM rubbish no mask all the way we've got one yes folks a triple five timer brings a tear to the eye ah and here's the only guy in the group we have Gary g'day Gary how you doing mate no worries and Gary stands for gate array and it there's just glue logic and bus control and stuff like that so and floppy disk control things like that just some general housekeeping stuff it is not considered part of the Amiga chipset and there's an 85 20 CIA or complex interface adapter this one's called the even Siri and this one handles our floppy control serial and some of the parallel stuff and the other one over here the odd CIA that handles the parallel port the keyboard and some of the floppy and mouse stuff and as far as the power supply goes as I said at the start I'm all I got as a common mode joke here it's an external linear supply plus 5 volts and plus and minus 12 volts and that's it so there's no switching circuitry no other stuff doesn't look like there's any fuse protection or anything in here so yeah that's what you get when you use external linear supplies easy and you'll notice quite a bit of EMI stuff around here on the external port you'll notice all those ceramic caps there and over here you'll start noticing some ferrite beads there we go or for our external EMI even at you know back in the old days still important even at those low frequencies and I just peeled off a label there and we have our artwork number three one two five one three which we saw on the silkscreen back over there and assembly number three one two five one oh so there you go rev five board and it's been burned in and somebody's left their little mark I burnt that in in the Hong Kong factory back in 1988 whoo-hoo claim to fame and here we have our main processor and that's twenty eight point three seven five one six megahertz of course you divide that by four bingo we get our processor clock a 7.0 nine three seven nine megahertz screaming but you can see a budget resistor down in the corner down there there we go lovely little budge we've got a insulating sheet on here of course just to make sure nothing shorts out but apart from that I can't see any other budges on the bottom of this board and check out the solder mask back in the day folks I mean here's the fibreglass down here nice and smooth and of course we've got our copper this is our gold plated pins on our edge connector here but look at that solder mask it's really is quite rough have a listen to that and if you rub your fingers over that you can really feel how incredibly rough it is you know what type of solder mask sort of or coating they were using back in those days please let us all know fascinating stuff really different you don't see it these days I've actually decided to take the complete board out here so I could solder some wires on to that din connector on the back make sure you get a good connection and you can see some of the layout here it really is quite nice of course being a double sided layout they've got predominantly the bottom side of the board of course running horizontal like this and the top side of the board running traces are vertically that's how they've done most of it you can see quite some beautiful layout work down in here over to the connector flowing through and down to the main ASIC chip here the processor tied very coupled very directly into the expansion bus over here with no no protection resistors nothing just bang straight under the processor and of course further down here you don't have much space to especially when you're put in a couple of big fat power traces down in here to run these traces between all of your 40 big 40 pin dip chips down in here so you know it really is that's just like completely devoted to horizontal layout there almost no vertical and the exception to this bottom horizontal rule they've done that up here on the memory chips you can see that it's effectively our just ground and a couple of vertical traces running through here whereas most of the other processor down in here is all horizontal and all the ASIC stuff and then on the top side there instead of vertical for most of the other stuff on the board here or your RAM runs horizontal and check this out folks look at that broken joints on the din connector down here look at that see those just popping straight through so even if I did they have the power adapter would have been that completely intermittent operation ah classic look at that just too much stress on that diene connector there I'm just wiggling it with my finger there you can see those joints just popped straight out of that sucker go on ski maybe that's why this one doesn't work and of course that's a classic case of what happens when you get a connector like this and yeah there's effectively very little light strain relief on it there's one that looks like shield pad down in here for that but it's not taking any of the weight whatsoever so all of you know every time you plug in that cable someone's putting a lot of pressure on that to plug in the power cable on this thing and pull it back out by the cable and wiggle it around and it's putting all the stress on those solder joints and that's what happens so there you have it no real surprises on this thing really it leveraged existing Amiga technology they developed for the Amiga at 1000 in terms of all of the chipset Asics they alone would have taken a you know a hell of a lot of work so if you've got any info on who worked on it how many people worked on these ASIC chip sets of the day process technology all that sort of thing by all means are leave it note in the comments or discuss it on the EEV blog forum so there you go twenty-five-year-old state-of-the-art technology smells 25 years old - let me tell you folks so it's only one thing left to do are try and power this turd up well I don't have the original adapter so we'll just shove a couple of prongs up its backside and see what happens no wait we have a bonus Amiga 500 Mouse beautiful made in Malaysia oh not in Hong Kong what a letdown the old-fashioned ball type beauty ah check it out folks all we have is a Hitoshi wih a 17-3 39 but that's actually just an lm339 quad comparator and that's it it's just getting the optical outputs and feeding them and you know through the comparators directly back to the well they are not the processor but the controller which handles the mouse and that's it man ancient manufactured by Mitsumi there we have our diet and photo transistor combo and our will of course with the obligatory slots cut in there to get a pulse every time it moves and the obligatory hair still in there 1988 vintage here alright let's power this turd up I've got the four wires running out ground five volts and plus/minus at 12 volts I've hooked them up to my a 10 power supply and yes everyone keeps asking yes I will do a review and a teardown of this thing I'm really annoying user interface by the way but it does seem to actually work anyway yeah I got five volts and plus minus 12 volts out of this sucker so programmed in so let's it up shall we we can turn on all the outputs at once by or you can turn them on individually by around the user interface really annoying but power on and there we go we're drawing one app just over an app on the five volt rail point seven ants on the plus twelve and the positive and the top one is actually minus twelve or got it configured for - here is drawing nothing bugger all because that's just for the serial interface I'm sure and our red power LED over here is on so I assume those are normal power consumption figures but unfortunately I get nothing on the monitor actually I am getting something on the monitor here this is just a really old crusty digit or a brand you know rebadged crappy Ola TV and I can actually see the shape of a disk on there um I don't think it's anything to do with the Amiga I think this piece of crap has that failed on me so let me dig around for a bit yeah it's gone ski folks I like I call up the mount like it's not just the video I disconnect the video and everything and the menu nothing's showing up so it looks like the backlight on the thing is dying and watch this I think I can get it to briefly it should it does briefly come up watch this and there we go you saw it briefly yeah there we go it briefly popped up so yeah piece of crap well let's not muck around this monitor will surely work and it does - there there we go we have some sort of boot screen version 1.2 Amiga workbench so presumably we need the Amiga workbench disk I thought it'd be built into ROM but hmm well thankfully it did come with a huge bunch of disks and I do have the Amiga 500 workbench international and the extras and basic disk for the 500 slash 2000 let's give it a try well that's a fail I'm afraid uh it's not doing anything and I don't hear any floppy drive noises bummer all right I've taken the other amiga 500 apart that I've got under as you can see the main board is actually like a gold-colored or a clearer solder mask so you can see the copper through it now it's different to the slightly green tinge we had on the other board now it's exactly the same red 5 board though a few are component differences like a if you were capacitor brain differences and stuff like that and um we have a different board in here it looks like we have a small memory board with a real time clock in it so I'm not sure about the capacity of that one it's not marked at all but the floppy drive is different it's only got a two way table on it here's the one out of the other one it's actually got a 4-way cable here whereas this one's only got a two way table so anyway I'm just going to with the floppy driver this one put it into the other working machine and hopefully ah we can get it to boot yes folks I think we're in I put it in floppy drives sound good it's loading Sam's workbench disk somebody's personalized it released 1.3 super version 34 point for copyright 85-86 amiga corp there we go so yeah there was something wrong with the floppy drive and it seems to be loading this original disk no problems at all Sam's workbench disk he's a whoever Sam is I don't know is this normal has he modified it for his own use there we go Mouse works not a problem it's taking a while to boot but this thing works absolutely perfectly even after what 25 years the floppy drive still works and the discs still works workbench release 1.2 297 3 6 Oh free memory because I haven't installed the memory module and we're in Sam's workbench that's pretty bland so here we go I have no idea how to use this thing but let's click on Sam's workbench can we know left right no single click up there we go where we've opened Sam shell utilities preferences system trash can man it's really really clunky all the Amiga people are probably screaming at me because I have no idea what I'm doing can we drag the window no here we go can we drag that yes we can I'll do this state of the art folks absolutely state-of-the-art stuff titles preferences system it's going to system little drawer opens there how do I open that yeah thanks I'll double click ok format CLI neat printer disk copy fast memory first wha we got the command-line interface sorry folks I don't know any of the command line stuff what are we gotten the utilities it's really no it's quite quirky to open this thing can't open utilities no idea what's working ok now let's see what happens to the current drawer when I insert a disk I see what will auto-detect and here we go yeah there we go yet the 5 volt rail it looks like it's only using it well it is only using the 5 volt rail I can see because it only had those two wires the red and the black coming from the 5 volt there so yep it just jumped up when it spun up the motor there but apart from that it just drops back all right let's try and run 688 attacks sub yeah it turns out if you're right click on the mouse here it gives you these menus here for disk and workbench open there we go all right though the files on the disk and I'm running now 688 attacks up it's sleeping now here we go we're going to run it Edie unfortunately it's only in mono hey I can see myself it's only in mono folks so we would need well look at that come on load up load up the power LEDs flashing is that normal ah software fire press left mouse button to continue guru meditation I love it press left mouse button to continue all right well something something happened there folks I'm not sure what megadose still executing maybe it there was a read error on that disk or something like that yeah that five ah Trail Joo is just over two amps 2.1 amps when it's reading from the disk there we go note we're in 688 attack sub put on your John W Ratcliffe wonder what he's doing these days if anyone knows leave a comment press a key to begin mission selection I just pressed a key oh there we go alright torpex 89 work you bastard no oh you got to put your right can't use the mouse I think you have to press the number keys ah how archaic there we go number one and enter tada begin game yes please Wow so I cake oh look at this we're on the sub for can't astok look at the graphics what's that 320 by 240 berserk I don't know about you but I really don't miss the days of these old PCs really they're just pretty awful I mean yeah nostalgia value but apart from that anyway it's amazing that this thing still worked there you go I had to what you don't know what's wrong with a floppy drive don't think I'm going to bother at least I do have one working machine here and I can't believe it read those three and a half inch floppy drives after you know 25 years amazing you know not a single bite out of order it loaded up the workbench don't how to use this bloody thing but it worked amazing so I hope you enjoyed that trip down memory vintage retro laying there and if you want to discuss it jump on over to the eevblog forum and if you like tear down Tuesday and these vintage tear downs please give it a big thumbs up catch you next time you you

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 284,242

Rating: 4.8360395 out of 5

Keywords: commodore amiga 500, amiga 500, amiga 1000, amiga 2000, teardown, retro, review, powerup, boot, amiga dos, vintage, vintage computer, 1980's, paula, gary, denise, rock lobster, b52 rock lobster, amiga rock lobster, amiga computer, computer, classic, operating system, sound, circuit, schematic, pcb, mod, hack, internet, video, repair, power supply, disk drive, floppy disk drive, odd cia, even cia, mouse, gui, genlock, agnus, fat agnus

Id: HKNVIgsbYrA

Length: 40min 58sec (2458 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/tinkeringtechie]

Does anyone not watch him?

Teardown Tuesday is my favorite segment.

[u/mentaldemise]

This guy is why I'm like a grand into setting up a bench. :(

[u/Fumigator]

His topics are interesting but his videos ramble on for far too long.

[u/bitbang]

When he realises all the ASICs are upside-down "all the electrons are gonna fall out!" His silly humour makes me love those videos so much :)

[u/wanderingbilby]

Dave is a great enthusiast and I do like watching his videos, but he'd be better if he had someone else editing them. He gets too ranty and repetitive and it makes the videos sooooo looooong. I like -some- ranting but not -all- ranting.

Dave comes at electronics from the perspective of "expert simplifying for enthusiasts". Ben Heck does "enthusiast teaching beginners". I'd love to see some collaboration videos.

[u/AnalogKid2112]

I stumbled across Dave's videos when I was trying to decide if I wanted to get into engineering or not. I watched one where he designed a circuit to have a momentary switch function as a toggle switch. 90% of it flew over my head, but I remember being so fascinated by the way he explained the design process and the use of ingenuity to work around constraints. I can honestly say his videos are a part of why I'm in university studying EE right now (also why my closet is full of broken electronics awaiting teardowns)

[u/classicsat]

I do, mostly mailbags, teardowns, and reverse engineering a bit.

Yeah, I yell at the screen, the obvious to me that he is missing.

That one (the VFD), I would try Hitachi 447800 codes/library.

Another one I watch I think is called Mike Harris, and tears down non medical X-ray, FLIR and other cameras, and interesting things. Another one is another Aussie bloke, who amongst other things bought an old ATM, and got Doom to run on the embedded PC.

[u/hatsune_aru]

Literally watched every video.

I wish he had more educational vids...

[u/Auto_Turret]

Hoi! Welcome to mailbag monday! Hell yeah I watch Dave Jones. Educational as well as entertaining. Go find the vid where he tries to do the MC Hammer dance wearing the clean suit.