26 Nov
2007
26 Nov
'07
8:28 a.m.
On Nov 26, 2007 5:57 AM, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at usap.gov> wrote:
I bought my A1000 in (IIRC) 1989, upgrading from my C64. I still have
it, and I just booted it up a few weeks ago. The original mouse is
unfortunately broken (some of the little plastic bits inside are worn
out) but other than that it's in good working condition.
Here is what used to be my booting preocedure - no longer possible,
unfortunately - but it involved 1) turn machine on with Kickstart disk
(patched with antivirus) 2) fiddle with the (20M) harddrive to make it
spin up. The (MFM) HD was sitting outside on top of the sidecar,
(since I wanted to keep using the 5 1/4 drive in the sidecar) with the
ribbon cables and power just squeezing out the side. 3) Boot with my
custom Workbench disk, that would load the Janus software, then alias
almost everything over to directories on the hard drive.
Unfortunately, the Sidecar has not survived the long years. It still
sort of works but does not boot up properly anymore, the floppy drive
shows a solid LED. I still have the full length MFM controller card
and the HD.
The A1000 is also the first computer I modded in a major way:
upgrading to 1meg ("slow", bit not chip) ram. The A1000 had 256k on
the motherboard, and everyone had the 256k expansion in the front slot
- the extra 512k ram were added by piggybacking 2 chips onto each of
the motherboards ram chips (can't remember if there were 8 or 16) and
a mess of wires to hook up the correct chip selects. (This really is
the part that amazes me it still works!)
It's "slow" ram since it was still slowed down to the chip ram speeds,
but could not be accessed by Gary and Denise (?).
I should open the thing up and take some pictures. But I remember even
opening the thing was a tricky affair, due to the RF shielding...
Why was the A1000 better than the A500? Well, there was the sidecar,
of course, but I also like the feel of the (detachable) keyboard of
the A1000 to the A500 one.
Joe.
Anyone with a spare sidecar and original A1000 mouse in the Montreal
area, feel free to contact me :-)
On Sun, Nov 25, 2007 at 11:41:43PM -0600, Jim Leonard
wrote:
Agreed.
It's the first, so historically it has
significance. It's also worth a
bit more money than an A500 or A2000 because of the production run
numbers.
Personally, I think it's a bit more stylish than the A500 as well. It's a bit
annoying to operate since you need both a kickstart
disk and then an operating system disk to get to the operating system.
For a stock machine, yes. Mine has an add-in board, a "Rejuvinator".
It's a kickstart board replacement with ROMs, a Fat Agnus, 1MB of Chip
Ram (max of 2MB if you can find the right DRAMs), and 95% of an A2000
video slot. It was a somewhat cheaper way to get A2000 functionality
and not obsolete A1000 peripherals - a serious consideration to those
of us who had a couple of grand tied up in our machines 20+ years ago
(I bought my A1000 new in 1986). (Some bootable
games will only require the kickstart.)
I still have a few of those - "The Halley Project" was one of the best
games to come out in the A1000-only days. Once AmigaDOS 1.3 came out
and people started booting from hard drives, developers started to move
away from games that required a reboot to start.