Amiga 500 turn up adventure after over 20 years

[jcrubin]

PART I

     To start off I go through the Amiga 500 power supply before attempting to apply power to it.  More importantly, before attempting to connect it to the Amiga.  This is not an overly complicated power supply though worth noting the interesting capacitors soldered to the bottom of the board upon opening.

Gotta love linear.... No noise, keeps the feet warm.

     The only real source of failure were the electrolytic capacitors, so a comprehensive testing of the caps were accomplished.  The resistors tested fine.  Yeah we can see one bad cap was a false alarm, but thats ok, better safe than sorry.  But the fact that even one bad cap was found made the project worth it.

     I took the bad one and tried to reform it to see if it would improve the ESR, and it made it worse, cap was replaced.




PART II

Continuing on from the power supply repair its time to turn up this computer and ensure that it is operating properly.  This started with an inventory of the system as found, though not 100% familiar with the components I work my way through it along with some research.  This includes a ram expansion, real time clock and 68030 accelerator.

     The inter-operability challenge was the monitor going from RGB to HDMI, so I went with the RGB to SCART to HDMI converter which worked very nicely in the modes that I required.  Luckily I have some disks to include workbench boot disks to get the computer going.  This allowed for checking out aspect ratio and sharpness of the picture and clarity.  An IFF close up also displayed the picture quality as well. 

     A further exercise was conducted to move disk images from the internet to the Amiga using the serial port and the process that I used to accomplish the task without any hardware purchases using Hombre, transwarp and a linux box.




TO BE CONTINUED

[Shock]

Nicely made videos, good stuff.

[@rt]

Not going to watch the videos. They are probably good, but I’ve done enough of these that I don’t fancy watching someone else on video

But.. did you just say you tired to reform a capacitor?
Nobody who collects these are trying so hard to maintain originality to that extent
All of the SMD versions have capacitors spewing their guts over the board, and there really is no choice.

[jcrubin]

In keeping with an opportunity for experimentation aside from the amiga project itself, I wanted to see how reformation would effect the baseline ESR captured on the offending CAP over time.

[@rt]

Yeah ok. It can be possible to wake the dead. Even for caps far older than that.