Back in the mists of time, in the previous century, I bought a computer, an Amiga A4000/030

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.

Back 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.

I’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.

Cyberstorm PPC

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.

Cyberstorm mk3

CyberVision PPC – fits either CS-PPC or CV-PPC

Cyberstorm 060

SCSI Module for Cyberstorm Mk2