Restarting Old Amiga's

[Ethan O'Toole]

> I have the urge to get my Amiga’s back up and running.  I’m still trying 
> to find my main Amiga A3000, but have found my A500 and my A600.  The 
> problem is, I don’t remember the last time I powered these on.  It’s 
> been a long time since I’ve had time.  In the case of the A3000, I think 
> it’s been about 17 years.  My Atari TT030 has been even longer. :-(

Nice collection!

Sooooo now for the bad news.

On the Amiga A501 trap door memory expansion, there is a battery for the 
time clock that will leak. It can damage the memory board. Also, the off 
gassing of it can cause corrosion in the main computer as well.

the Amiga 600 has surface mount capacitors that will leak and eat the main 
board. The machine will smell kinda funny, like fish or something. You 
will want to pull it apart and investigate it. The caps are in the upper 
left, upper right and middle for the most part. Have one on my bench I've 
been trying to fix for a while and it's been tough. I advice recapping 
before powering it on. And the cap job takes some work since it's all 
surface mount and the solder is funky from the electrolyte corrosion.

the Amiga 3000 suffers from a battery leak issue as well. Take it apart, 
clip out the battery on the mainboard. It's under the drives if I recall. 
Check the damage around the area. Look online for neutralizing it all on 
this and the A500. There are replacement mainboards that have been 
produced if you're adventurous and your board is no good anymore from 
extreme damage. You have to solder everything on and move over parts.

There are some killer upgrades for the A500 that give it ~40mhz, 8MB of 
RAM and hard drive via SD or CF cards. These upgrades might run $150-$200, 
not bad compared to the flash cards that cost $120 for many systems or 
say, the CF disk only for the Apple II @ $120ish.


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: Ethan O'Toole