Pimpin' the Amiga 600 in 2021 | MVG

[Music] at the end of last year i had a fan reach out to me on twitter and he offered me an amiga 600 that was sitting in his storage for over 20 years with no idea if the system actually worked but i decided to clean up the system get it working and pimp it out with some modern enhancements so we're going to take the amiga 600 that was kindly donated we're going to take it all apart clean all the pieces restore it put it all back together and hopefully we have a fully working amiga 600 that we can place some really awesome games on this amiga 600 has been sitting in storage and hasn't been powered on for over 20 years so it's really unclear if it even works amiga 600s can have capacitor leakage issues and other points of failure include the disk drive i have no idea about the condition internally but the first thing i did was start cleaning it we're going to tear down the system and we're going to get a look at the internals anyway so the first thing i decided to do was just spray the case with some windex and start cleaning it with a cloth now you can already see even just with a bit of windex it's starting to clean up rather nicely the plastic is still quite white initially when we saw it we thought well maybe it needs a retro brightening or something but in my experience just cleaning older computers really will lift up the gunk and grime that's on there now unfortunately the windex is only going to take us so far as you can see it's very difficult to clean these keys individually so what we need to do now is basically take out these keys we're going to have to open up this machine and separate all the plastics and get them more cleaned up so we can basically make this look really really nice now to open the case we flipped the machine upside down then i remembered the trapdoor expansion as it turns out it contains a baseboard 601 memory expansion these were very common for amiga 600s a stock a600 would come with one megabyte of memory on board but the baseboard would provide an additional one megabyte bringing the machine to a total of two megabytes most games at the time didn't need this much memory but it would help with things like disk caching ram disks and it meant that you could multitask easier without running out of memory the amiga was a multitasking operating system but it did not have any virtual memory built into the os so once you ran out of ram you would need to close down applications and start freeing them up so opening the case is quite easy with a phillips head screwdriver there are three screws at the base and one in the middle on the right hand side you will notice the warranty sticker has been broken in the middle which means that this machine was previously opened up at some point once the screws are off the top and bottom of the case are held together with clips be very careful that you don't break the clips as there are no screws on top of the case to keep the system secured and now with the case removed let's take a look at the internals now when you lift up the amiga case be very very careful because there is a keyboard connector that's attached to this keyboard here and if you don't unplug this if you just lift this keyboard up fast you are going to break these connections and it's one of the most common things that happens when you first open up an amiga 600 and you're not really expecting it let's go ahead and pull the keyboard out [Music] with the keyboard removed i start cleaning the case there is lots of gunk and grime in the grooves so i take a toothbrush and clean it out as best i can but i'm going to rinse all the plastics in a sink to really give them a nice deep clean now comes the part that i dread the most the keyboard not only are the keys themselves dirty and need to be cleaned individually underneath the keys gets particularly grimy and collects dust gunk and dirt over many many years and there's really no other option if you want to do this right you will need to pull out each of the keys individually one by one now i know someone is going to call me out for pulling keycaps without a keycap puller tool but i've done this many times before so i gently use a flat head screwdriver and my finger to balance the transfer of force now i did leave some of the larger keys on the keyboard as they are trickier to remove and reinsert so i started scrubbing the keyboard with windex and a toothbrush and some cloth removing all the gunk that i can and as you can see after some time it cleaned up rather nice now we need to get to the bottom plastic piece of the a600 which means removing the motherboard the amiga 600 comes with metal rf shielding which is something that needs to be removed first this shielding is quite pointless in 2021 and it's not something that i'm going to re-insert back once we rebuild the system the shielding is held with small metal tabs that can be lifted with a screwdriver once we've dealt with all the metal tabs the shielding can be simply lifted out of the case before i pull the motherboard out i take a quick look at the motherboard itself and at a glance it looks pretty clean a lot cleaner than i expected taking a closer look at the capacitors none of them appear to be leaking this is a good sign and it does give me a lot of hope that this amiga 600 is still in fully working order now the next thing that i do is take all the plastic pieces including the keys and clean them up in a sink with soap and warm water and for me this is the best way to clean your old retro computers once you have the plastics exposed make sure you give them a nice deep plane let them dry for a couple of hours and now we can start the process of reinstalling everything back together and hopefully we have a fully working amiga 600 now before we put the amiga 600 back in its case one thing that i want to do is take a look at some existing hardware internally and replace it with modern enhancements the first upgrade is to replace the old 40 megabyte mechanical hard disk with a four gigabyte compact flash card these are modern and work great on any amiga with an ide bus i've got a pre-installed image with workbench the amiga's operating system whd load and as many games as i want to play i reinstall the floppy drive now i have no idea if this works but it's not something that i'm particularly interested in anyway since all our games will be running from compact flash but i will make sure it's reconnected back and mounted in its place now for the next upgrade i install an aca 620 processor expansion this simply connects directly on top of the 68000 processor the aca 620 upgrades the processor to a 68020 class clocked at 16.67 megahertz with an additional 10 megabytes of fast ram this will give the a600 a nice little performance boost all round which will be great for whd load games and now the fun task of putting all the keys back onto the keyboard this can take you a while and make sure that you didn't lose any of the springs because they can be easily lost in the shuffle but you can see how well everything has cleaned up and looks taking the time to clean up all the keys really does make the difference [Music] i then reinstall the led pcb back in its place and reconnect it back into the [Music] motherboard now the final part is putting the case back together and the screws back in place i did notice some spots on the side of the case that i missed cleaning so i gave them a quick scrub so in the end how did we do well this is the before shot and this is how it looks now there is no color correction or effects that i applied to the screen this is the difference and it came out great and this is one of the reasons why everything doesn't need to be retro bright when we first got the machine it looked like it was yellow and it needed a retro brighting to widen it up but you'd be surprised how many layers of white can be restored by simply cleaning plastics with soap and warm water okay so we have everything put back together the amiga 600 is looking to be in great shape it really cleaned up quite nicely and honestly i'm quite surprised as to how well it actually cleaned up but now the moment of truth let's plug in a commodore power supply turn the power on see if it works and see if we can play some games so does the amiga 600 work fortunately i have a commodore power supply and by plugging it in and connecting it up to my display by turning the power on shows the drive activity and after a few seconds yes we are in the famous workbench screen and everything looks good the mouse and joystick ports work fine the only issue is the floppy drive it let off a high-pitched squeal and it doesn't read disks so i disconnected it not really a huge deal since we'll be using whd load anyway after a few hours of use the amiga 600 ran great without any hitches and of course whd loads are the main reason for owning an amiga 600 so i'm very pleased to see that a machine that hasn't been booted in over 20 years works without any issues now if you are looking to get your own amiga 600 i think it is a very good machine to pick up there is a lot of easy ways to expand the system and get a lot more out of it but i will say that with most things amiga these days it's quite expensive to buy on ebay so my recommendation would be to take a look at local facebook groups such as craigslist or gumtree depending where you are in the world as well as amiga related forums such as the eab forum as well as the amiga facebook forum you may be able to get a better deal on amiga related hardware there but guys we are going to leave here for this video i had a lot of fun doing this restoration video for you guys let me know what you thought about it in the comments below if you liked it leave me a thumbs up and as always don't forget to like and subscribe and i'll catch you guys in the next video bye for now you

Channel: Modern Vintage Gamer

Views: 83,698

Keywords: amiga, commodore, a600, 600, amiga 600, amiga 500, commodore amiga, mvg, modern vintage gamer, pimpin the amiga, 2021, retro, computers, 68000, 68020, restoration, retrobrite, 16 bit, 32 bit, fast ram, chip ram, amiga games

Id: fECbYweDTjA

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2021