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I brought it home the day that news of Kurt Cobain’s death hit the news, April 1994. It was an upgrade from my A500.
I used it for many things, lots of computer graphics stuff, lots of video. It got a new processor, it got an animation recorder card, it got several hard disks.
Then it died. The power supply wasn’t particularly strong to start with and I’d been pushing it a bit past where I should have. There was bitter, acrid smoke, and all the breakers in the house tripped. Catastrophic failure.
A PC AT style power supply was quickly pressed into service. The motherboard plugs cut off and an amiga 6 pin molex grafted on.
So “Dogfood” was born – christened when a friend remarked that all the giblets were hanging out, just like dogfood.
Ideally, I would have done a better job of PSU replacement. The top of the case didn’t fit any longer, so Dogfood spent a few years sat on a set of drawers underneath a worktop, facing backwards with all the ports showing, working hard but not as cherished as it should have been.
So let’s do something about that now.
Continue readingBack in 1992 I bought an external floppy drive for my Amiga A500 Plus.
This completely transformed the way I used the machine and was such an improvement right up until I bought a GVP Impact HD8+ hard drive – a SCSI Quantum LPS52 drive which gave a mind blowing 52 Megabytes of storage.
I’m slowly working through my collection of Amiga stuff and getting things tested and working. One of the godsends has been a Gotek floppy disk emulator. It allows you to download .adf disk images onto a USB drive and emulates a floppy drive. It is great for getting things set up and installing hardware drivers etc.
So, I thought I would convert the slightly unreliable 30 year old floppy into an external Gotek drive.
Opening the Cumana CAX354 shows a citizen floppy mechanism and a small board to allow pass through and disable switch.
It has been quite a while since I fired up the forge, so I thought I would forge a couple of tapers (and make some hooks with them) by way of getting the swing of it again.
Continue readingI’m selling some old computer stuff. I’ve included pictures here to avoid cluttering up the for-sale listing. You can click on the pictures for a full resolution version. I’ve used flash to try and get a reflection off the surfaces so you can see the texture easier. If anything is unclear drop me a line and I’ll take pictures under natural light tomorrow.
I’ve been asked for some more info, so…
This one is a bit crap – I don’t have a graphics card in this machine so it is having to run in 8 colour workbench… It does however show that the ppc is there and working. It is a 233Mhz, and the voxelspace demo takes very little of the cpu power.
I’ve been archiving some old hard drives – Amiga hard drives as it happens.
I have a USB to Parallel ATA adapter, but powering the drives was a bit of a headache. Usually I’d just pull the side off the PC and find a dangling cable. Instead, I made a quick 12v to Molex converter.
A couple or three decades ago, I was a lot geekier than I am now.
I favoured a non IBM PC compatible type of computer known as the Commodore Amiga. At the time it, and the community surrounding it was a huge part of my life. I used to host meets at my house where 20 or 30 folk would show up and many would bring their machines.
My hot and cold water tanks are accessed through a small door.
This door has never closed properly and opens into the tank space, making it difficult to move around. I’m having some work done in there, so though it a good idea to improve access, hoover up all the dust and clean out the debris left when things were installed several decades ago.
As is usual, this fairly trivial task becomes more complex. However, I found the hinges to the access door rather interesting.
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