my Amiga 1200 comes back to life

in my pile of not working but will one day, sat my Amiga 1200, between moving with it from New Orleans >Houston>New Orleans and it getting many hours of use, it stopped working.

first pin back in place, cooling, on to the next two. (pulled frame from microscope camera)

found two reason why, it was the accelerator card which dragged it from a blazing 14.### Mhz to a screaming 28.### Mhz (oh the raw power) and added a huge 8Megs of brutal fast memory. can you smell the sarcasm compared to today’s Ghz standards? The other reason was.. please dont laugh, i had a penny in the RTC battery slot. i have no idea why i thought that was a good things to do instead of buying a battery that fit. it worked like that for many years so i cant call it too silly of an idea.
the the 68030 chip had damaged pins, i dont know how that happened, and it must have been broken when removing the card at one point (maybe to put that penny in the battery holder) anyway. i carefully bent those pins back down to the pads (still intact) and carefully resoldered the 3 broken points. after putting the card back in, i booted up with the 80M harddrive i put into it years ago, and started my nostalga run.

all is not perfect, the sound barely works, and investigation points to the need to replace all of the old capacitors, so that project is now in its early stages and will be carried out AFTER i get ALL of my Amiga floppies to a modern medium since my 1200 never had TCP access. Im waiting on a kit that will use the PCMCIA card as a mass storage device so i can do a backup of everything. The internal floppy drives has issues, but im going to use the external on i have for as long as i can before opening the computer again. if the external fails, i have already done the “MOD” to to old PC floppy drives that should allow them to be dropped in if needed (untested).

Whats next? bit by bit, im going to get it back to its full glory, even if i just put it on a pedestal running old demo’s. im going to get it upgraded as far as i can with CF hard drive replacement, new kickstart, new workbench, scandoubler, and working sound so i could hook it up to my music gear and use it as an extra piece of music gear

in the meantime while waiting for parts to arrive, im also running a PC based emulator with the exact configuration and accelerator card as my real thing that can be loaded from my home file server. i will be making a raspberry pi version to hopefully replace the need to run the hardware (glass case pedestal time) and cram it into a mockup of the Amiga 1200 power “brick”.

an acquaintance of mine gave me an Amiga 500 and loads of amiga video editing gear and software. i haven’t even powered it on and have no idea if any of it works. i dont know what i will do with it. maybe try to upgrade it and use it… one day.

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