Haha, thanks. I‘m not sure if I’ll ever manage to reach release candidate status but I’m working on it! :D

Definately an improvement on Jan Alpha anyway.

Yes, I kind of feel the same. Putting new capacitors in would maybe be a good idea if the Amiga is going to be used in the future but I somewhat want to keep the changes minimal on the other hand, too. Not an easy decision!

Hope you enjoyed it! :)

Thank you! I'm so happy that I got it working again! :D

Yeah, I think that's my preferred way to go on. I'll communicate with Stéphane and the community and we'll see where it's going to go. In my opinion, the Amiga should be used rather than stored away and gather dust. There are some museums that let people play with the exhibition pieces so maybe that would be an option.

Thanks! Super happy I got it working again! :D

Thanks! Super happy that it was such an easy fix in the end and all the original chips still work fine! :)

Thanks! Yeah, definitely going to take a closer look at the disk drive. It would be amazing if that could be rescued, too.

Thank you sir! It was fun to dig in and figure out things. Glad the fun translated through the video. :D

Thanks! Super happy I got it working again! :)

Yes, the Amigas are amazing! Still one of my favorite systems to this day. It was absolutely mind-boggling to see what they could do back in the day (and it somehow still is)!

Ditto, except I bought mine in the Navy Exchange 87. Blew my mind.

Well spotted! :D I rewatched both series a while back and absolutely loved them (even more than back in the day when I first watched them on TV).

Oh! And here I thought the joke was just that it was an impossibly long time. I do recall the "656" cadence of the end of Voyager's, but Defiant's never sticks in my brain (besides beginning with 72- except, no, see, the 2 is the _third_ digit!)

Thanks! :D

So yours is an early Rev 5, nice! Yeah, the sockets Commodore used are often a cause for trouble. I’ve had to replace many of them (both in Amigas and other Commodore machines) because they didn’t make good contact. They probably bought the least expensive ones available at any given point. :D

If you need more in-depth A500 troubleshooting videos, I can recommend GadgetUK here on KZfaq, he has a plethora of repair vids for all kinds of faults. :)

@@JanBeta Thanks! There is hope!

Ah, nice! Thanks for letting me know. I guess they did that on all the early boards then!

Happy new year!

Happy new year! :D

Happy new year to you, too! :)

Happy new year! I am going to take a closer look at the keyboard PCB for sure. There might be cracked joints, wonky capacitors etc. At this point I’m pretty convinced that there’s an issue with the board rather than with the connector (which I cleaned meticulously and it seems to be just fine).

Frohes neues Jahr auch! Freut mich sehr, dass dir die Videos gefallen! :)

Happy new year!

Thanks! The Rev 3 boards are relatively rare, they seem to have changed the production to Rev 5 pretty early on (for FCC approval reasons as far as I understand - the Rev 3 boards produced a lot of noise it seems).

I agree on this one. Don't recap unless there's a problem. These machines were not part of the "capacitor plague" that affected late 90's machines. I'd leave the Amiga board alone. For the disk drive, I would try to fix it first before replacing it. It's the original drive that came with the machine so it's worth keeping. The solder mask is gone on some of the memory expansion, try to add fresh solder mask on this.

All caps go bad from age, however i do agree on if it ain't broke don't fix it. For the disk drive it is definitely an avenue worth exploring.

I'm definitely going to dig deeper into the disk drive soon (literally). The main board repair took so much time that I couldn't really fit in an exhaustive troubleshooting of the drive. But I'm not giving up on it yet!

Yeah, I'm going to look into that. My primary suspect are still the caps though but who knows. Definitely going to run alignment tests on the drive to figure that out. :)

@@JanBeta Please do - I have a box with 15-20 glitchy A-500 drives that I would love to fix at some point 🙂. I have heard of the problem with misaligned heads - would love to see a vidoe on how to diagnose/fix this

Thanks for the tips! Very useful for further diagnostics. I'm not giving up on that disk drive yet! :D

Hope you enjoyed! :D

@@JanBeta yes very much - loved it!

Yeah, the quality of the sockets Commodore used in their machines is legendarily bad. I've seen so many of those fail, no wonder they even failed when they were new.

Ah, the pullers usually work fine in my experience. :D The socket was pretty worn out, too, so it was easy to not damage the valuable chip. I'm definitely going to dig deeper into the disk drive. I am very much convinced it is the original drive the Amiga shipped with so it's definitely worth trying to rescue it.

Yes, I’m going to try the alignment tests for sure. Kind of horrified of aligning disk drives because so much can go wrong (especially with those double sided drives). We‘ll see! I guess the caps in the Amiga are probably all still in spec. I have a fancy ESR meter that I can check them with. I looked at the supply rails with the scope briefly and they all appeared to be super clean so not too worried about the filter caps at least. Recapping would be preventative maintenance mostly, in case the Amiga is going to see some extended use in the future. I guess using a good power supply is more important than the caps on the board though. 👍

DiagROM does have a bug in the memory test which caused an AddressError when it finishes testing less than 2MB of chip ram. It's not fatal and not a problem.

Ah, I see. That would explain it!

As the owner of this machine, I'm seriously wondering what I'm going to do with it. Sure, I'll play with it a bit when I get it back, but (with the exception of the keyboard which is better than anything Commodore has released in the past), it's not really a machine for everyday use. I have other Amiga's that are better, have more memory, a better processor, bug free Gary, etc. As a wise man once said, "It belongs in a museum". As much as I'd like to open my own retro-computing museum, I can't afford it and I doubt it will ever happen. That's why I sent it to Jan in the first place, so that he could show it to as many people as possible and document every aspect of it (which he has done wonderfully - and more than that, he has frankly exceeded my expectations). Once it's working at 100%, working on its aesthetics to make it look like it did when it left the factory seems like the next logical step in the restoration work. And as there has been no yellowing on this plastic - the interior is the same colour as the exterior - and on the keyboard, it will be mostly a matter of cleaning with IPA and soap! Maybe no retrobrighting needed! The caps... not sure. I'd say to extend its lifespan it would be a good idea, but as Jan says in the video, that's for the community to decide. Once it is 100% functional and 100% aesthetically restored, perhaps a final, slightly different "documentary" video could be produced, using all the knowledge gained during the repair and restoration, including the valuable insights found in the comments section of the video series. This would fulfil part of its "museum" destiny. Then, when I get it back, if I am contacted by a (serious) museum in Central Europe (to keep it where it was supposed to be and allow me to visit it) that promises to take care of it (and turn it on for events), I am all for it. Beats waiting for my own death in a box and then being thrown away by my descendants.

@@stephanerieppi Hi There. Well done in acquiring this machine. 100% working may be a bit of an issue with the floppy disk drive unless it is looked at by someone with in-depth knowledge of repairing these devices. If you wish to go down the museum route I am sure that you would be able to find one that would accept it on "extended loan" so that you still maintain ownership but it is able to be seen by the public. With respect to the capacitors, it also depends on whether you want to take the risk of the old capacitors just starting to leak over time and damaging the motherboard. Much as it is fun and interesting to ask "the community" what to do, in the end it is your machine so you have the final decision. No matter what you decide thanks for letting Jan and other vintage enthusiasts see this piece of history. 😁

@@spacedock873 Hi! Not sure about the FDD, we'll have to see what else Jan can (wants to) do for it. Thanks for the "extended loan" idea, I'll definitely consider it. As for it being my machine, as I said to Jan... I'm just the guy who gave 120 EUR to a local seller three months ago and got incredibly lucky. So, technically, sure, it's my machine. But I don't feel very legitimate about it and I'd like it to be handled more like a community project - I mean, of course, with a definition of community as "people who are legitimately interested in it and have knowledge about it".

Thanks! That is very good to know. So it indeed seems to be a factory mod in these early revsion A500s. :)

Thanks. I just felt a bit embarrassed about the whole language thing and needed to briefly apologize at least. :D

Yes, that might be an option. I’m looking into ceramic and polyester caps as replacements!

Yes, I considered using a higher wattage resistor but decided against it to keep the machine as original as possible. Would definitely make sense from an electronics point of view!

That’s the area where an oscillator is populated on some boards I think. Some have a crystal near the RAM (like the one I’m working on), some have an oscillator close to the Denise chip (X1 and Y1 on the board). Not sure why they did that.

@@JanBeta probably pricing options... initially the separate crystal and suitable gate IC to form the oscillator may have been much cheaper than the oscillator cans.

Oh, might be a good idea to take a look at those caps then. I scoped the supply rails and they looked very clean so it's unlikely anything is as severely wrong with the caps as in your case. Still going to look into that, thanks for the heads up!

I'm definitely going to try that next. I just took a preliminary look at the drive to rule out some common faults yet (fixing the main board took long enough). More diagnostics and troubleshooting coming soon. ;)

Heads have been cleaned but I didn't do much else yet. I'm going to do some more in-depth diagnostics soon.

Have to admit, I like his calm, soothing way of speaking.

Thanks! That's quite a compliment. I feel like my English got a bit better since I started making these videos a couple of years ago. I find watching my earlier videos pretty unnerving myself these days... :D

Ah, that would explain it! Thanks!

Had the same thing. I think it expects 1mb of chip. However, it throws this error at about 480k when you only have 512 installed. So just ignore it

Du hast recht, die älteren Laufwerke haben Probleme mit HD disks. Die Testdisks sind aber alle passende DD disks, die in meinen anderen A500 problemlos laufen. Das ist also hier nicht das Problem.

Oh, the test passed. It just threw me the IRQ errors after it ran through. I think it detects the amount of RAM installed and the memory locations quite well and only tests what is actually installed in the system. At least it should. :D

Yep, I think that might be the issue, too, from my experience with these drives.

@@JanBeta I am surprised its such a common failure point with the amiga disk drives and not just the built in drives too, I have repaired external ones with the same treatment, caps... Funnily enough I remember repairing my first drive and when looking at the caps they looked fine, no bulging, nothing oozing from the bottom of the caps that the naked eye can see, but as soon as the soldering iron started to heat up the capacitor legs, there was that familiar smell of rotten fish that the electrolyte gives off as it gets hot, knew it was caps right away at that point. Have you considered getting an ESR meter or the capacitor wizard unit at all, these help a lot.

I have a fancy ESR meter actually. I’m going to try to measure the caps in the drive in-circuit.

Yes, very common in my experience. Especially on the Rev 5 and older boards it seems.

When I received the machine, the cable for this switch was actually connected to the pins where Jan placed a jumper. This was a very common mod at the time (I didn't know anyone at the time who had the 512 KB expansion without the switch). The reason for this is that a handful of very old games (or cracks?) would not boot if more than 512 KB were detected, for reasons that are still not clear to me to this day. This is now completely unnecessary (these games have since been fixed) but many cases have ended up with an unsightly hole. A shame, really. Let's see how Jan will fix this in the probably upcoming aesthetic restoration video. :-)

Haha, well spotted! :D

I have a fancy ESR meter that can perform in-circuit measurements quite well. Might be worth a try.

Good call! I’m going to try the Amiga Test Kit/DiagROM alignment checks and see if that gives me any clues.

Yes, I came to the same conclusion and carefully recapped the board in the meantime (see the next video in the series). :)

@@JanBeta Yep, I watched that video minutes after making that comment and didn't bother going back to change it.

Mine also have the resistor

The transistor is a fix for the GARY timing issues in the early revisions as far as I know. :)

If I remember correctly World of Wonders required the OCS chipset where as later A500's had the ECS chipset or a mixture of both. I pretty sure I have seen an OCS A500 with Kickstart 1.3 run it with no problem but it was a while back so maybe I'm wrong.

This wow- intro was on floppy disks from Carlifonia Games, purchased in the schoolyard of course. No problems with my friend's Amiga rev 3 with Kick1.2. With my A500 rev 5 and kick1.3 the intro was broken. So there were differences between the Amigas A500, I wasn't thrilled.. It's been a long time..😊

Mostly Teslanol T6 Oszillin for the contacts. The other stuff is another product from Teslanol called "Lectro Clean", that's more of a general purpose PCB and component cleaner.

Oh, so the filter is always on instead of always off! I was wondering that. Thanks for clarifying!

I think they added that for the later board revisions only. The contacts may be there but they are not marked on this Rev 3 board.

Hi! Ich hatte noch keine Zeit, weiter am Amiga-Projekt zu arbeiten, habe aber vor einiger Zeit schon mal ein Video zur Reparatur von Chinon-Laufwerken gemacht: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gbWbjc5ht83FgHU.html Vielleicht hilft‘s ja!

​@@JanBeta Ja, danke, das habe ich mir schon angesehen :) ... ich denke, ich werde die Kondensatoren (großen Elkos) tauschen, mal sehen, ob es dann die Disketten wieder liest... klicken tut es ja, es fängt halt nicht an, die Diskette zu lesen...

No, the schematic shows an EMI filter with 0,01µF. An EMI filter is a component with three terminals: the two outer terminals are connected through an inductance (with a very low ohmic resistance). The middle terminal is connected to a capacitor which taps to the middle of the inductance's windings. The inductance suppresses current spikes, while the capacitor smoothes voltage spikes. That's what an EMI filter is supposed to do. But for some reason Commodore had an issue with these early PCBs, so they replaced the EMI filter - by bridging the outer terminals with a 1 Ohm resistor (so, using an ohmic resistor instead of an inductance). The resistor now still limits the current on the Vcc supply - but no longer filters current/voltage spikes, like the EMI was supposed to.

@@fgaviator Thanks for you clear explanation. Regards Boudewijn.

Trying to settle the question once and for all: Flemish/Dutch is spoken in the north of Belgium, French in the south, German in a small part of the south-east (about 75k people) which is adjacent to Germany. The Brussels Region is even more particular, since Flemish/Dutch, French and a little German are spoken there, but also many other languages, including a lot of English, as the EU headquarters are in Brussels. Only three languages are official, and they are Flemish/Dutch, French and German. The Constitution is available in the three languages. English is more of a "lingua franca" in Brussels.

I used to know a German-speaking Belgian living in the German speaking part of Belgium, and she spoke high German with a northern German accent. I could be wrong, but I don't think they have a Belgian dialect of German. If they do, it would be pretty close to Plattdeutsch I suspect. Correct me if I'm wrong! Danke 😋

@@stephanerieppi Thanks, my goodness what an important thing wasn't it... it ruined the video. /s /s :) People can be so quick to defend something, who cares.

@@stephanerieppi Well, I am going to be facecious by giving you high marks for trying to settle this question, which Belgians can be quite nationalistic about, with trying being to key word. This is a generally accepted description of the language issue in Belgium but far from a definitive settling of the issue once and for all. The reasons include that the Flemish area which that language is spoken extends far south into France in areas to the west. Moving eastward we encounter Waloon, a french dialect and finally into the Province of Luxembourge where Luxemborgish is spoken also. In BXL only french/flemish can be considered native, while a high proportion of other languages are spoken due to presence of international organisations like EU, NATO, multinationals and so forth. Except for few people coming from the Netherlands there is absolutely no dutch-speaking going on in Belguim, that would be flemish, which varies per province. lol. Of course generally most Belgians speak two or more languages pretty well like english, flemish, french, german and Spanish. Unless someone lived there and knows people from all the areas and been there on the ground there is no way for them to know this so they are forgiven haha

Yeah, the through-hole caps are usually pretty robust in the Amigas. They have a limited life-span by design though so I'm not sure if it's a good idea to just wait for them to fail in the future (which they certainly will at some point).

Yeah, I'm going to take the keyboard apart in the next episode of this series. I suspect the issues can be resolved with lots of cleaning and maybe some re-soldering of joints on the keyboard PCB.

@@JanBeta Might also be corrosion or a flaky connection somewhere giving the flashing caps lock too, I can only hope its something that simple :)

Oh, KS 1.x can read FFS disks if the driver is installed on the disk. I tried several standard Amiga file system disks and also some games with their own formats. Most failed to read. I don't think it's a matter of the file system.

@@JanBeta yes, y must have L:FastFileSystem, clean it ... JUST try OFS, and tell us.

Yeah, the electrolytic caps definitely have a limited life-span. I guess it depends a bit on whether the Amiga is going to be used (which I would kind of prefer) or if it's going to end up as an exhibition piece of sorts.

That’s probably because the Guru is generally caused by software and not the hardware. I occasionally get Guru meditation errors when I use my Amigas but the videos are repair focused mostly so they don’t appear in the footage frequently. ;)

@@JanBeta ahh, didnt know that :) thanks for the reply

Oh, I genuinely didn't know that there's cadmium or any other dangerous substance in those batteries. Thanks for the heads up! I'm going to be more careful in the future!

When I had Amiga's all the ram expansions cards I had left a gap at the connector like that but my accelerator card did not. It depends on the depth of the socket that is fitted on the expansion card but will not cause any problems and is nothing to worry about as long as it is plugged in as far as it will go.

That is very common with those aftermarket RAM expansions. I guess the connectors were less expensive than the "deeper" ones that would fit the expansion port perfectly. They usually work fine though so it's more of an aesthetic problem I guess.

@@nemesis2264 Small Nitpick: 1.2 shown here doesn't have any animations. They appeared with 2.0x. :-)

Debatable! It's the screen stored in the Kickstart ROM asking for the Workbench disk. So I guess we are both right to some extent! :D