Other Amiga A1200 - re-capping and a couple of other things

Hi all, long time no see Hope we are all doing well.

I have recently dug my old Amiga A1200 out of the loft and given it a bit of a once-over inspection. Good news is that there's no Varta battery in sight - it does have an accelerator board (68030 at 33Mhz with a 68882 and 4MB - I think - of RAM) with a real-time clock, but fortunately it's a coin-cell battery not a Varta deathtrap. However, I'm slightly concerned that the caps may not be at 100% given this thing is 31 years old and hasn't been powered on for at least 20 years.

I haven't removed the RF shielding to check the motherboard caps, but I strongly suspect that they will need to be replaced, along with the floppy drive caps and the caps in the PSU. My soldering skills are extremely rusty as I last held a soldering iron in my teens, and the vast majority of the A1200 motherboard caps are SMD so firmly in dangerous territory for a bumbling amateur.

My main question for you fine fellows is: has anyone used any of the re-capping services out there? I see that places like AmiKit and Retro Passion offer this service, for about £40-£50 which seems reasonable enough, but of course the thought of posting off my beloved A1200 to some stranger (and trusting it to the postal service / courier lottery) is concerning. It also seems like some of these services will only re-cap fully working Amigas, which leaves me in a bit of a chicken-and-egg position - I really don't want to power this thing up in case any of the caps go boom!

I do have some other questions: I used my Amiga with an OG Phillips CM8833, which is no longer with us. I still have the RGB to 8833 cable (which ends in a SCART plug) but I recall that this isn't wired quite the same as a TV SCART. I could get myself an Amiga RGB to SCART lead easily enough but will it look horrific on a modern TV? Is there any easy method to connect an Amiga to a modern PC monitor without great expense, lots of soldering or dreadful picture quality?

Finally, the A1200 PSU was notoriously weedy at about 23W, even assuming mine still works. I've seen some replacement units online at around the £50-60 mark but I have no idea if these are worth it. I think the PSU on my Amiga struggled a bit with the accelerator & IDE HDD (which I would replace with an IDE to SD Card adaptor, I think).

I was also very pleased to find that I still have my collection of big-box games, a mouse, two Zipstiks, lots of loose floppies (three full 80-disk boxes!) and bizarrely, a 520 RF modulator which must be a leftover from my A500.

Cheers for any input you retro-lovers may have, and hope you are doing okay these days

Bawjaws

 

I feel like this is right up my alley....

Good news!

I have! I've used AmigaKit, but I have the slight advantage that they're just the other side of town from me. I was able to literally drive an A600 board across to them rather than post it. Great service though, and they did a tidy job.

Another one I can recommend is PureAmiga. It's run by one of the RMC - The Cave community members and while I've never personally had a board repaired by him, there are many glowing reports from satisfied customers. (If you head over to the discord server mentioned below, his username is Pillock (no, I'm not kidding! ))

Either way, if you have to post your A1200, whether it's the full computer or just the board, make sure it's well-packed and suitably insured - they're a damn pricy thing to replace these days! For really expensive or important stuff I usually swear by Royal Mail, but this very much depends on where you live.

Pour one out for another lost CM8833, my CM8833-II from back in the day is also long long gone...

You certainly could, they're not terribly expensive.

Yes, without any processing in between, it certainly won't be the best picture quality. It will definitely work if your TV has a SCART socket (I don't think many new TVs do these days), but it'll be down to how good your TV's built-in upscaler is. That's a total lottery - some are surprisingly good, but some are utter garbage. But an Amiga RGB SCART cable certainly isn't a huge investment and it's probably the cheapest way to test the video output - if you have a TV with SCART.

A modern PC monitor, instead of a TV, will almost certainy require an upscaler. On the whole they can't accept 15kHz vertical sync frequencies, and many don't even support VGA connections any more.

I have saved searches on eBay for the Dell U2410F and Dell P2314HT monitors, as they have been reported by many people to support 15kHz sync signals over VGA and do a good job of upscaling. They go for about £40-£50, but I have never tested them myself. If that's an option you're willing to try then make sure you look for those exact model numbers and not any variations of them. And you'll also need an Amiga 23-pin to VGA D-sub adapter or cable, such as this one.

The best results will be obtained with an upscaler. This is a seriously expensive rabbit hole to get lost in, so I would personally say that the best bet would be an OSSC. They can be had for quite cheap these days, Amazon are currently listing one at £110 - although double-check the listing, because I can't tell from a quick scan whether it includes a power supply. An upscaler also has the added advantage that it'll work for pretty much any retro system you want to hook up, not just your Amiga. Providing you have the right cables, of course, but the OSSC makes that real easy because it has a SCART connector. I cannot describe how grateful I am for the SCART connector, I am so glad this became a standard in Europe! A final note on the OSSC is that there is a new "Pro" version in development, but it's been delayed a couple of times so far.

Here's a couple of modern replacements I've seen: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/353653053510 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/353653096810. The second one has a built-in OLED screen to show you the voltage readouts, which is a nice reassurance - whether it's worth the extra £15 is your call though! Same caveat applies: I have not personally tested either of these, but they have come recommended many times by Amiga users.

That's fantastic! Hopefully the floppies are still readable! I was lucky with the A600 I picked up a couple of years back (which I have since parted with), both the internal and external drives worked perfectly and every disk I tried worked fine.

Feel free to yell again if you've got any other questions! Also feel free to drop by the RMC - The Cave discord server; there's a dedicated Amiga support channel (as well as many many other systems!) packed full of enthusiasts: https://discord.gg/rmcretro

 

Wow, thanks @Byron C ! I had it in my head that you had a bit of an Amiga habit, so thanks very much for all of that info And thanks for the Discord invite - I will definitely be popping in there!

I think I'll give PureAmiga a shout and see what their advice is re: caps (see what I did there?) and take it from there. Reckon the OSSC rabbit-hole is too deep for me just now, and I'd be happy just seeing a picture on my TV (which fortunately does have SCART) so will try an RGB-SCART cable in the first instance (pending the cap situation). And thanks for the links to those PSUs - I'd seen the Keelog PSUs on their own website but it didn't look like they had a UK presence, so it's good to know they sell via eBay.

I should really post a list of the games & other titles I have - a couple of dozen big-box games, a few jewel case efforts (including F/A18 & New Zealand Story from my original A500 Batman bundle, although there's no sign whatsoever of Batman itself, plus about half of the Tenstar pack that also came with the A500) and even a complete boxed Desktop Dynamite software pack from my A1200, although sadly the A1200's own box and the accompanying DD sleeve are no longer with us. And of the 200+ loose discs, some are originals where the box is no more, there are also plenty of magazine coverdisks and of course, being an Amiga software collection, quite a few "backup" disks if you know what I mean I also have the original A1200 manuals and a complete set of WB3.0 disks in their original cardboard wallet. Annoyingly there are definitely a few things missing but all in all I am delighted with how much stuff is still here and in good cosmetic condition too. Not sure how readable any of these disks are going to be after such a long time but even just sitting and flipping through the big disk boxes brought back a lot of very happy memories.

I might stick up some pics once I've gone through everything properly.

On a completely different track, also in the box with the Amiga stuff were the manuals from my Spectrum+ and +2, plus a complete boxed Multiface 128 from Romantic Robot. Considering that my +2 was pensioned off in 1988 when I got my Amiga 500, those items have done bloody well to survive 35 years!

 

No probs!

Actually I was on the wrong side of that particular divide: I was an Atari STe fanboy back in the day . But I've spent a lot of time talking to Amiga folks, poking around the A600 I had, looking up hardware upgrades/mods, etc.

I parted ways with the A600 back last year, it went at a pretty cheap price to someone who's going to get a lot more use out of it than I will. I now use an FPGA-based system, the MiSTer Multisystem, which can replicate pretty much any model of Amiga with up to a 68020 CPU (and floating point unit). More than enough for what I'd want from it, which is literally just playing games!

EDIT: That sounds like an excellent collection, btw!

 

Aye, these seem like great wee bits of kit, but to be honest I think I'd just emulate stuff on my PC I can also appreciate things like the PiStorm for the Amiga, although I have to question where the line between emulation and "running on original hardware" is with these. Still, it's cool to see people continuing to produce modern hardware like this for such vintage systems!

 

Ooh, get you with a SCSI adaptor! Fancy. I vaguely remember from back in the day that adding a SCSI adaptor to my accelerator was an extremely pricey option, which I declined to take up 68010 is a bit of a rare beast too, don't see many of them about.

 

On the one hand it isn’t strictly emulation, because the hardware is being re-created on the fly in silicon. The FPGA fabric is literally being reconfigured to match the original hardware and there’s no software trickery to translate instruction sets.

But on the other hand, you’re replicating one computer using another one, and isn’t that… y’know… emulation…?

The FPGA is the best compromise for me. I had a ton of original hardware at one point: C64, Atari 800XL, Amiga 600, Atari STe, Atari STfm, Mega Drive, Game Cube, Wii, Wii U, PSX, PS2, OG Xbox… I’ve kept the ones that either have sentimental value or (most of) ones that the FPGA can’t do, but the majority of that kit didn’t ever get used. The MiSTer Multisystem can do a ton of those systems in one box, no need for getting systems out of storage, wiring up cables, etc. I definitely appreciate having and running original hardware, but it was turning into a “Gotta Catch ‘Em All!” collection of stuff that’s never used.