At least it didn't explode.
Sep. 5th, 2016 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psipsyThis year's Otakon is out of the way, and summer itself is winding down. To be honest, this summer was kinda lame. I think that's my fault. On the plus side, I got quite a bit of clutter out of the way. But that's not what I'm here to talk about.
The backstory of why I have an Amiga is that back in the '90s, a friend and I hatched an idea of fansubbing anime. So, we got an Amiga from ebay, later on getting a couple additional cards (including the Genlock).
Back then, fansubbing involved a computer with a Genlock card. This took a video signal in, overlaid text on the signal, and sent the modified signal out, presumably to a VCR to record to tape. A program (such as JacoSub) would run a script, with each line having a start and end time in reference to when the script was started. This required amazingly little of the CPU. All it had to do was "read" from the script in real-time.
What does this thing have? A Motorola-based 68000 CPU, 3MB of RAM, an 80MB SCSI hard drive mounted on a card, and 2 3.5" floppy drives. I'm sure that back in the day when it was first built (1988 or 1989 or so), it was probably a monster and cost more than a good used car.
FunFact #1: The power consumption of the Amiga is about 50W, not including the CRT monitor. For comparison, my i3 laptop uses 10W on average.
While we were still trying to wrap our heads around how the Amiga worked, things changed. Rather rapidly, I might add. DVDs came out, quickly followed by a licensing/release frenzy by anime companies. Digital fansubs in .avi format started to gain traction, with its own array of improvements. On top of that, the Amiga's clock stopped working after 12/31/99. Those things rendered our plans moot. But for whatever reason, I never got rid of the Amiga.
We never did get our fansubbing group off the ground. Not that I didn't continue to use the Amiga; I found it necessary to use since my TV at the time was going haywire, and I found I could patch the VCR through the Genlock and use the monitor to watch anime.
Over the years, I've had other computers, and all of them much more powerful than the Amiga. A phone that I replaced 5 years ago had more internal storage. Every now and then, I'd turn the thing on. Once I turned it on and found it stuck on a white screen. Turns out the motherboard battery was a NiCd battery soldered in, it started to leak, and oozed all over, putting some corrosion on some of the pins. Cutting off the battery and cleaning the pins helped, as it booted up. But with each power cycle, it kept reverting to 1978.
Meanwhile: Present day, present time. Hahahah.
Lately I found there was a variety of fixes for the battery issue and the clock. All I had to do was install a 3.6V battery. The circuitry is designed around the battery being rechargeable, so I opted for a battery for a cordless phone. Easy enough, except for the corrosion from the old battery getting in the way of my soldering. After trying with several ground pads, I just stuck a wire under a mounting screw. Anyway. Fixing the internal clock was trickier, as it involved somehow getting the new control panel from the internet to the Amiga, which is not inherently internet-capable. All I would need is a working computer with a serial port! I do have one working computer with a serial port, right? Yes I do, the one I put Windows 10 on.
The other option would be to use floppies, but the Amiga uses an obscure file system, and floppies formatted by it are unreadable by anything else. Serial cable voodoo it is. After some re-learning the Amiga interface, typing obscure commands, finding info on websites that hadn't been updated in 10 years, I was able to transfer files back and forth between the Amiga and a much newer computer. So I put the new clock file in, and I was delighted to see that I could now set the time and date to something in the 21st Century.
Except while I could set the time, the clock wouldn't advance. It was stuck. It would only move when the computer was powered off. I turned it off and waited about an hour, just to see what it would do. In this case, now it wouldn't boot up off the hard drive, instead asking for me to put in the Workbench disk. Which I did, and the disk didn't work. We're talking about floppy disks from 20+ years ago so I wasn't entirely surprised.
At this point, I'm thinking what may have happened was one of the following:
-The hard drive finally decided to give up.
-The new clock file gummed things up.
-The battery surgery had unexpected complications.
-The Windows 10 computer sent over hidden files it shouldn't have.
-Corrosion on the hard drive controller card contacts.
-All of the above.
So now I'm kinda stuck. No usable Workbench disks, no way to make them, no way of independently checking the hard drive for health or file integrity. The only thing I have with the immediate capacity for SCSI is my G3 Powerbook, and that's only through adapters. There's no guarantee the Powerbook will see that drive at all, much less the contents of it. Until I come up with some new ideas on what to do with it, it's tucked away for the time being.
FunFact #2: The modern day version of SCSI is SAS, which is used in fancy servers.
Why save the Amiga when I gladly kicked much newer computers to the curb? The Amiga is unique. It's always been a "just to see if I can" sort of thing. A challenge. Money isn't the main concern. The amount of money I've already put into this is nowhere near the cost of a main component on a regular computer. I've sunk far more money into more frivolous ventures. It's the computer equivalent of a classic European roadster: Fun to drive, aggravating to fix. The parts are cheap when I find them; the difficulty is in finding them in the first place.
Most importantly, the main reason I'd like to get this running is that it'll make for an awesome retro-gaming system. Emulators can only go so far.
In other news, I'm planning on doing a computer build running only Linux. Just to see how that goes.
The backstory of why I have an Amiga is that back in the '90s, a friend and I hatched an idea of fansubbing anime. So, we got an Amiga from ebay, later on getting a couple additional cards (including the Genlock).
Back then, fansubbing involved a computer with a Genlock card. This took a video signal in, overlaid text on the signal, and sent the modified signal out, presumably to a VCR to record to tape. A program (such as JacoSub) would run a script, with each line having a start and end time in reference to when the script was started. This required amazingly little of the CPU. All it had to do was "read" from the script in real-time.
What does this thing have? A Motorola-based 68000 CPU, 3MB of RAM, an 80MB SCSI hard drive mounted on a card, and 2 3.5" floppy drives. I'm sure that back in the day when it was first built (1988 or 1989 or so), it was probably a monster and cost more than a good used car.
FunFact #1: The power consumption of the Amiga is about 50W, not including the CRT monitor. For comparison, my i3 laptop uses 10W on average.
While we were still trying to wrap our heads around how the Amiga worked, things changed. Rather rapidly, I might add. DVDs came out, quickly followed by a licensing/release frenzy by anime companies. Digital fansubs in .avi format started to gain traction, with its own array of improvements. On top of that, the Amiga's clock stopped working after 12/31/99. Those things rendered our plans moot. But for whatever reason, I never got rid of the Amiga.
We never did get our fansubbing group off the ground. Not that I didn't continue to use the Amiga; I found it necessary to use since my TV at the time was going haywire, and I found I could patch the VCR through the Genlock and use the monitor to watch anime.
Over the years, I've had other computers, and all of them much more powerful than the Amiga. A phone that I replaced 5 years ago had more internal storage. Every now and then, I'd turn the thing on. Once I turned it on and found it stuck on a white screen. Turns out the motherboard battery was a NiCd battery soldered in, it started to leak, and oozed all over, putting some corrosion on some of the pins. Cutting off the battery and cleaning the pins helped, as it booted up. But with each power cycle, it kept reverting to 1978.
Meanwhile: Present day, present time. Hahahah.
Lately I found there was a variety of fixes for the battery issue and the clock. All I had to do was install a 3.6V battery. The circuitry is designed around the battery being rechargeable, so I opted for a battery for a cordless phone. Easy enough, except for the corrosion from the old battery getting in the way of my soldering. After trying with several ground pads, I just stuck a wire under a mounting screw. Anyway. Fixing the internal clock was trickier, as it involved somehow getting the new control panel from the internet to the Amiga, which is not inherently internet-capable. All I would need is a working computer with a serial port! I do have one working computer with a serial port, right? Yes I do, the one I put Windows 10 on.
The other option would be to use floppies, but the Amiga uses an obscure file system, and floppies formatted by it are unreadable by anything else. Serial cable voodoo it is. After some re-learning the Amiga interface, typing obscure commands, finding info on websites that hadn't been updated in 10 years, I was able to transfer files back and forth between the Amiga and a much newer computer. So I put the new clock file in, and I was delighted to see that I could now set the time and date to something in the 21st Century.
Except while I could set the time, the clock wouldn't advance. It was stuck. It would only move when the computer was powered off. I turned it off and waited about an hour, just to see what it would do. In this case, now it wouldn't boot up off the hard drive, instead asking for me to put in the Workbench disk. Which I did, and the disk didn't work. We're talking about floppy disks from 20+ years ago so I wasn't entirely surprised.
At this point, I'm thinking what may have happened was one of the following:
-The hard drive finally decided to give up.
-The new clock file gummed things up.
-The battery surgery had unexpected complications.
-The Windows 10 computer sent over hidden files it shouldn't have.
-Corrosion on the hard drive controller card contacts.
-All of the above.
So now I'm kinda stuck. No usable Workbench disks, no way to make them, no way of independently checking the hard drive for health or file integrity. The only thing I have with the immediate capacity for SCSI is my G3 Powerbook, and that's only through adapters. There's no guarantee the Powerbook will see that drive at all, much less the contents of it. Until I come up with some new ideas on what to do with it, it's tucked away for the time being.
FunFact #2: The modern day version of SCSI is SAS, which is used in fancy servers.
Why save the Amiga when I gladly kicked much newer computers to the curb? The Amiga is unique. It's always been a "just to see if I can" sort of thing. A challenge. Money isn't the main concern. The amount of money I've already put into this is nowhere near the cost of a main component on a regular computer. I've sunk far more money into more frivolous ventures. It's the computer equivalent of a classic European roadster: Fun to drive, aggravating to fix. The parts are cheap when I find them; the difficulty is in finding them in the first place.
Most importantly, the main reason I'd like to get this running is that it'll make for an awesome retro-gaming system. Emulators can only go so far.
In other news, I'm planning on doing a computer build running only Linux. Just to see how that goes.
