Category - How to’s

Commodore VIC20 ‘breadbin’ Case Repair

4th February 2020

Whilst working on my VIC20 recently I noticed a number of issues with the case. The first thing was that most of the little tabs along the back of the lid had broken off. This meant that the case didn’t close properly along the back at all. The other issue I spotted was that a couple of the plastic screw posts that hold the keyboard in place had split. Not sure why, possibly as a result of over-tightening at some point or the plastic expanding and contracting over the years. It was pretty clear that my dear old Commodore VIC20’s case was in need of some repair and TLC.

By the way, even though this post is all about the VIC20 the contents would be just as valid for a Commodore 64.

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Naturally I want my VIC20 to remain in as good a condition as possible so I set about looking for a means to remedy these problems. My search concluded when I came across a company in the US called Soigeneris that 3D prints suitable repair parts. The product I ordered from them was the ‘C64/VIC20 Case Saver Repair Kit‘. The whole thing cost me less than $20 including international shipping (which took about a week). *Note to self – get a 3D printer!

A look at what’s in the repair pack

Inside the pack there are actually 3 different parts to deal with common ‘breadbin’ case issues. New PCB standoffs (not needed here), replacement top case rear tabs and screw post repair sleeves. The drill bit is provided to help centre the PCB standoffs if you are using those.

From left to right: new PCB standoffs (with drill bit), replacement top case rear tabs and screw post repair sleeves.

There are several different case styles and they each have different types of hinge tabs. I had to check which variant mine was before ordering otherwise the replacement may not have fit. My particular VIC20 case needed ‘Type 2B’.

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Fitting the new hinge tabs

I decided to fit the new hing tabs to the back of the upper case lid first. This necessitated completely removing what was left of the existing ones to make way for the replacements.

Cutting what’s left of the existing tabs off with a craft knife

This was a simple matter of slicing the tabs off flush with the edge of the case. I used a sharp craft knife for this (and ended up slicing my thumb open) so do be very careful if you are following this post yourself. The plastic was a lot more brittle and softer than I expected so I applied way too much pressure…

Tabs completely removed allowing the fitment of the replacement

Before proceeding any further I test fitted the tabs to make sure they fitted flush to the edge of the case. Where needed I shaved some more ~~skin~~ plastic off my with knife.

Test fitting of replacement tab

The replacement tabs are well constructed and have been designed to align easily within the existing channels.

Test fitting of replacement tab

The instructions recommend using epoxy glue to fix them in in place as it sets rock hard. It also recommends roughening the surface of the case and cleaning it with isopropyl alcohol before gluing to ensure maximum adhesion.

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I applied a generous amount of epoxy glue and then held the tabs in position using some modelling clamps.

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Even though my epoxy glue is supposed to be quick drying I set the case aside for 24 hours to fully harden before going any further.

Holding the new hinge tabs in place whilst glue sets

Preparing the screw posts

Once I was happy that the glue had fully hardened I moved on to tackling the split screw posts. Thankfully only 2 of the posts were damaged but the kit includes enough replacement parts to fix all of them if necessary.

Broken screw post

Not only was the screw post split but it had also ‘mushroomed’ out at the top. This meant that it would need to be filed down to it’s original size before the repair sleeve would fit over it.

I used some of my wife’s emery boards to sand the post down. They worked really well too!

I used a few emery boards to sand the posts down to size but a small metal file would have done just as well. It took around 5-10 minutes to get it down to the correct size. I was constantly stopping and checking to see if the sleeve would fit. The last thing I wanted was to sand too much off and have the sleeve become loose.

Test fitting the sleeve. Note how the castellation allows it to slip over the post buttresses.

Eventually I found the sleeve would slide into place with moderate force so I stopped sanding. Then I just needed to repeat the process on the other broken post before gluing both sleeves permanently into place.

Gluing the repair sleeves

First I cleaned both the post and inside of the sleeve with isopropyl alcohol to make sure no plastic dust was left from the sanding. Then I mixed up a small amount of epoxy glue and applied it to the top of the post before sliding the sleeve down until the two top surfaces were flush.

Screw post fitted with repair sleeve after sanding it down

I smeared a little extra epoxy on the top of both the posts to fill the splits in the plastic too. There was no need to use any sort of clamp this time as the sleeves were a tight fit. The friction alone was more than sufficient to do the job.

An extra application of epoxy over the top helped fill any splits or gaps.

Once more the case was then set aside for 24 hours to give the glue ample time to harden.

Top part of case with all repairs complete

Reassembly

Now it was time to screw the keyboard back into place and to reunite the top and bottom parts of the case.

Keyboard fitted back into the repaired top case

I must admit I was a little concerned that the added thickness of the sleeves might have prevented the keyboard from fitting correctly.

Keyboard re-fitted – just enough clearance with repair sleeve

Happily, although a tight fit, the keyboard slotted into place without any extra trimming needed.

Screw in repaired post

The screws went into the repaired posts without any issues and were held very securely.

New hinge tabs seated in their corresponding slots on the bottom case

The two halves of the case also fitted back together perfectly. The hinged tabs were very securely held by the epoxy glue and the little tongues aligned perfectly with the grooves on the bottom half of the case. The back of the case was held tightly closed, a vast improvement from how it was before the repair.

Back of VIC20 nicely demonstrating the tightly fitting case halves post repair

This turned out to be a very worthwhile, rewarding and cheap little project. The biggest cost was actually my time, both in preparing the case and making the actual repairs. The whole thing took me three evenings plus a couple of days of glue setting time.

Coupled with my heatsink project and keyboard repair my VIC20 is now in tip top condition again. Hopefully she will be able to take her upcoming 40th birthday in her stride as she marches on up to the big 50.

Cooling my VIC20

2nd February 2020

Steven

How to's, VIC 20

7 Comments

Although my VIC20 is working perfectly I thought it would be prudent to take some precautions to help it continue to lead a long life. I’ve read about chips failing in the VIC, often due to excessive heat build-up. To this end I set about checking just how hot the various chips were getting and see if I could find a way of cooling my VIC20.

Here’s a diagram I knocked up identifying the main chips on my VIC20 motherboard. I made it for my own future reference but it may be helpful to others too.

Commodore VIC20 Motherboard with main chips labelled. (Click for larger version).

The first thing I did was leave my VIC20 running a game for a couple of hours. I chose GORF as it continually runs in ‘attract mode’ which I hoped would give everything a good workout. I let this run for 2 hours before lifting the lid and checking the chip temperatures.

To perform the testing I used a cheap infrared thermometer that I picked up off Amazon. With this gadget I could simply point the laser at a chip to instantly read its temperature. I found that different areas on the same chip could give significantly different temperatures. The difference was often as much as 5C so I noted down the highest temperature measured for each chip.

Chip Temperatures

Perhaps not surprisingly the hottest chip on the board was the VIC running at 46C . The next hottest were the 2 VIA chips at operating at 40C. Running in joint third place was the Character ROM, BASIC, Kernal and CPU chips at 35C each. Last place and probably of little concern were the two large RAM chips in the bottom left which reached 30C. The rest of the chips were all below 30C so I felt these didn’t warrant any further attention.

Packs of Copper Heatsinks

I didn’t want to install a fan in my VIC20 so I decided on heatsinks to help cool things down. Because all the chips are different sizes a ‘one size fits all’ approach wasn’t going to work. To this end I took a few measurements and went looking for something suitable. In the end I settled on these copper heatsinks from Amazon and picked up 3 packs in total. I had already bought a pack of these in case any of the smaller chips needed cooling too.

Copper Heatsinks alongside the thermal tape fixing pads

Although they look square, they’re aren’t quite as they measure 10mm x 11mm. However they are the perfect size to both fit the width of each of the main chips and to be used in multiples to maximise surface coverage on the various chip lengths. They also came supplied with self-adhesive thermal tape which allowed easy installation.

Preparation

Before even thinking of installing the heatsinks I needed to do some cleaning. The chip surfaces needed to be squeaky clean to ensure good adhesion of the thermal tape. Also, besides a few blasts of compressed air I hadn’t got around to cleaning the motherboard since I rescued my VIC20 from the attic. A bottle of Isopropyl alchohol and a box of Lidl’s finest (i.e. cheap) cotton buds was the order of the day here.

Dirty cotton buds after the chips and motherboard had been cleaned with isopropyl alcohol.

All I did was gently wipe the surface of every chip, component, contact and the surface of the board itself until the cotton buds came up clean. Of course if the board was already clean I would have simply cleaned the surface of the main chips and stopped there. The whole cleaning process probably took about half an hour, maybe a bit more but i found it quite therapeutic. I also cleaned the base of the heatsinks just to be sure they were squeaky clean.

Cleaning up with an alcohol soaked cotton bud.

The next task was to carefully attach the thermal tape to the heatsinks. I simply peeled one square off the sheet and carefully aligned it with the edge of a heatink before pressing it firmly into place. It was important to get these aligned correctly otherwise it would have made placing them next to each other very difficult.

Heatsink with thermal tape applied

Once I was ready to attach a heatsink (I’d already loose-fitted them to check the best way to arrange them) I just needed to peel the protective film off the thermal tape. I found a sharp blade was very useful here if I couldn’t catch the edge of the plastic film with my fingernail.

Heatsink with thermal tape applied, protective film removed and ready to be stuck into place

Installation

This was the best part, sticking the heatsinks onto the chips. For the bigger chips like the VIA, VIC and CPU I used 4 heatsinks butted up close to each other. For most of the other chips like the RAM, BASIC and Kernal I just used 2. By this stage I ran out of the ‘not quite square’ heatsinks. Because of this I used 2 of the tall slim heatsinks to top off both of the RAM chips. These were only reaching 30C anyway so didn’t need serious cooling.

Here’s the VIC fully covered by heatsinks.

I found the thermal tape stuck the heatsinks down really well which made it all the more important to position them correctly first time. Moving them around after they’d been stuck down was almost impossible.

First VIA chip done… that ceramic capacitor bent over the lower part of the left VIA chip needed to be carefully bent away before heatsinks could be fitted

From left to right, the BASIC, Kernal and CPU chip (not finished)

Did it actually do anything?

Here’s a photo of the completed project with all the main chips covered by heatsinks. It certainly looks the part now but did the addition of the heatsinks actually have any appreciable impact on cooling my VIC20?

Finished project with all the ‘hottest’ running chips fitted with heatsinks

In order to see if the project actually made any sort of meaningful impact I repeated the same test as before. I popped the lid back on, slid GORF into the cartridge slot and let my VIC simmer for 2 hours. I measured temperatures in the same way as before, noting the highest recorded reading for each one.

I’m happy to say I found that the heatsinks did actually result in a decent improvement in temperatures across the board. The biggest improvement came from the VIC chip which went from hovering around 46C down to 38C, a drop of 8C which is fantastic. The VIA chips fell from 40C to 35C and the VIC Character ROM from 35C to 31C. The remaining chips showed drops of between 2-3C which whilst not as impressive is still an improvement.

I’m not really sure why the different chips exhibited different levels of improvement but nevertheless I’m very happy with the results. My VIC20 is almost 40 years old now and I’m hoping this little project helps it last a good few more!

Retrobrighting with Just the Sun!

17th May 2019

Steven

How to's, VIC 20

5 Comments

Came across this idea of retrobrighting with just the sun on YouTube. I was highly sceptical so thought I’d give it a go myself! It’s a pretty simple idea. Instead of slathering your yellowed computer in peroxide, or immersing it in bath of bleach, simply stick it out in the sun for a few days! Sounds too good to be true right?

Enter the VIC

My VIC20 had some pretty unpleasant yellowing to it so I used that as my test subject. For 4 days straight I put it outside on a south-facing bench in the garden. I’d place it there before I left for work in the morning and bring it in once I got home in the evening. Today was the 4th and final day.

I’ll let the results below do the talking. I used the same white cotton bud in each photo as a frame of reference to judge the level of yellowing. I also took the photos in the exact same location at the same time of day to keep the lighting as similar as possible. No flash was used in any of the photos.

Before & After Results

: VIC20 before

: VIC20 after

: Badge area before

: Badge area after

: Grille before

: Grille after

: Power LED corner before

: Power LED corner after

I’m extremely pleased with the results. The overall yellowing has vanished, even the quite pronounced yellowing around the grill area has gone too. The beauty of this method is that I literally did nothing – the sun did all the work for me. I didn’t even need to dismantle the computer!

Conclusion

I’ve had some disastrous results using peroxide gel in the past. On one occasion I ended up with an appalling marbling effect on a rare C128D keyboard. After that incident I had vowed never to try my hand at retrobrighting again, however this test has changed my mind. It looks like it’s the safest and easiest way imaginable to brighten up yellowed plastic. It’ll be interesting to see if the brightening effect lasts. If the yellowing comes back in future I’ll update this article.

Modding Amiga 500 Floppy LED to Display IDE Activity

9th May 2019

Steven

Amiga, How to's

33 Comments

Introduction

Unlike the Amiga 1200, the A500 was never designed to allow the fitment of an IDE Hard Disk Drive (HDD) inside it so naturally it never included an HDD activity LED. For the longest time this was never really an issue. Sidecar expansions such as the A590 were the only way to add HDD’s to the A500 and they came with their own drive activity LED. However, now that many owners are fitting expansions like the Vampire into their Amiga 500, things are a little different. These new devices facilitate the use of 2.5″ HDD’s or Compact Flash (CF) cards inside the casing of the A500, something that was never possible before.

The problem with this is the lack of a drive activity light. It can be quite disconcerting at times when you turn on your ‘Vampired’ Amiga 500 and nothing appears to happen. You sometimes wonder if it’s actually booting up or simply frozen. The same issue crops up whilst loading a game or running a program. There’s simply no way to tell if your Amiga is doing anything, especially if you’re using a CF card as they are completely silent. At least if you have a 2.5″ HDD they do at least make some sounds whilst being accessed.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could add a hardware activity light to your A500 to solve this issue? Well, recently I stumbled across a nifty little mod from Arananet that claimed to allow you to do just that by using the Amiga 500 floppy disk activity LED to show IDE HDD/CF activity. It’s called the ‘IDELED’ and is only €7 plus postage so I ordered one and sat back waiting for it to arrive. (Direct link to the Amiga 500 IDE activity LED can be found here).

Incidentally, if you fancy making this modification yourself all you need is a phillips screwdriver (to open the A500 case up), some wire cutters/strippers and a soldering iron. Don’t worry if you’re not an expert solderer, I’m rubbish at soldering but this is very basic stuff and should be well within most peoples capabilities.

A closer look at the IDELED device

The device arrived in a little anti-static bag with no instructions. It’s a tiny little 1″ square circuit board that incorporates an 8 pin socket one one side and 8 pins on the other. There is also a small hole for you to solder a wire to, plus a few components that allow it to ‘do its thing’.

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Getting Started

The IDELED is designed to sit between the Amiga 500’s keyboard connector and the keyboard cable. This gives it access to the floppy drive LED circuit and allows that to be used as an IDE activity LED in your Amiga 500. After opening up your A500 the first thing you need to do is carefully unplug the keyboard connector, lift away the keyboard and set it to one side.

Unplug the keyboard connector (circled in red).

You’ll then have access to the 8 pin keyboard connector on the mainboard which will look like this:

Keyboard connector pins

Next you need to attach the IDELED board to the keyboard connector pins on the mainboard. Make sure that you connect it the correct way around – orient the board so that the keyboard connector is at the back if you are looking at it from the front of your Amiga. It should then look like this:

IDELED fitted to keyboard connector

At this point I connected the keyboard to the pins on top of the IDELED board. You might want to leave doing this until after you’ve soldered the connecting wire but I needed to experiment a bit and wanted the A500 powered on and the LED’s working. At this stage the project looked like this:

IDELED board fitted between mainboard and keyboard cable

Solder time

The next job is to attach a short wire to that little solder point on the left side of the IDELED board. The wire needs to be long enough to reach the IDE connector on top of your Vampire (or other accelerator card) with enough slack so that it’s never under any strain if you have to move things around in the future. You will need to strip off a few millimeters of insulation from each end of the wire before you go any further. It’s much easier to do this before one end of the wire is attached to anything. I’d also suggest ‘tinning’ the exposed wire each end as this makes soldering them easier.

Insert one stripped and tinned end of the wire into the little hole in the board and apply a blob of solder. You should now have something looking like this:

IDELED board with ‘activity’ wire soldered on

Locating pin 1 and 39

The other end of the wire needs to go to ‘pin 39’ on your IDE adapter. This is the pin responsible for transmitting drive activity. If you have a CF adapter like mine (pictured below) then you should be OK to just hook the wire up to the same pin as I did.

A closer look at my IDE CF adapter (without CF card fitted)

Locations of pins 1 and 39 on my 44 pin IDE adapter

To locate ‘pin 39’ on my adapter I used the 44 PIN IDE connector diagram below for reference. Note the way the pins are numbered – it alternates up and down with 1 top left, 2 bottom left, 3 back to top row and so on. My particular adaptor has the upper row of 22 PINs connected to the top of the circuit board and the lower row of 22 pins to the underside.

Diagram showing pin numbering of a 44 pin IDE connector

2.5″ 44 PIN IDE pin layout & numbering

Provided it was connected up the correct way round originally, the purple edge of the ribbon cable indicates which side ‘pin 1’ should be. Thankfully the Vampire card clearly indicates where ‘pin 1’ is (see the little ‘1’ above the bats head in the photo above) so my cable was oriented correctly. Once I was sure of the location of ‘pin 1’ it was a simple matter of counting along to identify ‘pin 39’. Obviously if you have a different kind of adapter then you will have to confirm its location yourself. Hopefully the information above will help you out.

Amiga 500 IDE activity LED - pin 39 activity wire soldered on

Wire soldered to pin 39 – not the prettiest soldering job in the world but it does the job.

The completed modification

View showing the completed modification in its’ entirety.

Assuming you’ve connected everything up correctly (check before you screw the case back together), you should now how a fully working IDE activity LED on your A500.

Demonstration

In the video below you can see my Amiga 500’s new IDE activity LED flashing away whilst it boots into Workbench. The loud clicking sound is just my empty floppy drives clicking – the anti-click software doesn’t run until workbench has finished loading.

I’m really pleased with this mod, it was cheap, pretty simple to implement and above all else, really useful. No longer will I be in the dark about when my CF card is being accessed!

But wait, there’s more!

When you pop in a floppy disk the activity LED still flashes away as usual so there is no loss of functionality. Quite the opposite in fact as the LED even flashes when I use an SD card (the Vampire supports SD card storage too) which is totally awesome and something I definitely wasn’t expecting. An added bonus is that because Commodore simply labelled the A500’s floppy activity light as ‘Drive’ it’s still labelled correctly! How’s that for future-proofing!?

Anyway that about wraps this article up for now. I do hope you found this article both interesting and useful. If you did, please let me know by leaving a comment below, I’d love to hear from you.

Replacing Grotty Game Library Cases

1st March 2019

Steven

Commodore 64, Gaming, How to's, VIC 20

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Replacing your game library cases is a very quick and easy method of rejuvenating some of your old cassette games. If yours are anything like some of mine then you may have several scratched up, chipped, broken or yellowed cases skulking around in your collection. The good news is that there are still companies out there supplying replacement cassette library cases. The company I use, based in the UK, is called Tapeline but there are probably others too.

The ones I’m using here are just standard black library cases costing around 26p each at the time of writing. You can get a variety of different types and colours too, even double and triple cases should you need them.

Standard Black Library Case

Once the cases arrive it’s simply a matter of removing the cassette tape and paper ‘J’ card inlay from the old case and popping it inside a nice shiny new one. Here’s a few before and after photos to show the difference they can make. I’m sure you’ll agree that after replacing the game library cases the games look infinitely better, almost like new!

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

How to Format an SD Card for Amiga to PC File Transfer

26th January 2019

Steven

Amiga, How to's

16 Comments

Introduction

The whole benefit, to me at least, of having an SD card reader on my Amiga 500 is to allow me to transfer files to and from a PC. In order to do this the SD card needs to be formatted in such a way as to be readable by both systems. Turns out it’s not too hard to do. This post will show you exactly how to achieve this and also serve as a reminder for myself in the future when I inevitably forget what I did!

Stuff You’ll Need

I used a MicroSD card for this task but the process would be the same for a regular full-size SD card too. I have personally got this working with a 32GB card and more recently with a 200GB MicroSD card! Please note that I have a Vampire Card in my Amiga (which has a MicroSD card slot) and use Apollo OS (Coffin R34 – Amiga OS 3.9). This solution is based on that scenario. If you want to find out more about my Vampire upgrade please read about it here and adding an SD card reader here.

By the way, this should work with most SD cards you may have lying around. I used to link directly to the card I bought but time stays still for no man and it is no longer available. However this 32GB MicroSD Card is almost identical.

Formatting the card on a PC

First things first – the card MUST be formatted on the PC, not the Amiga. The format we need to use is FAT32 as this is easily readable on the Amiga whilst still being compatible with the PC. The main disadvantage with FAT32 is it has a 4GB file size limit but this should never really be an issue with the Amiga as most of the files we will be dealing with are only a few MB in size.

I’m using Windows 10 which annoyingly doesn’t have a native FAT32 format option (only NTFS or exFAT). After searching around I settled on this free 3rd party FAT32Format app to get the job done. If you already have some FAT32 formatting software then by all means go ahead and use that. If not then this one is free and very simple to use, you don’t even need to install it, just run the executable.

Run the .exe file you just downloaded and make absolutely sure that the drive letter under ‘Drive’ matches that of your SD card.
Leave the ‘Allocation unit size’ at the default setting.
Give your card a name under the ‘Volume label’ heading but keep it short. No more than 11 characters and avoid using any symbols. In the example below I called mine ‘AMIGA SD’.
Ensure ‘Quick format’ is ticked (otherwise it’ll take forever) and then click ‘start’.
When the format warning box pops up click on ‘OK’.

View after the card has been formatted

A few moments later you should have a nicely formatted FAT32 SD card! As you can see from the image below it has been correctly formatted as FAT32 and shows approx 29GB of free space. It’s perfectly normal to lose some space when formatting disks so don’t worry that it doesn’t exactly match the capacity of your card.

SD card properties viewed in Windows after formatting.

Configuring the Amiga side of things

Now it’s time to take the SD card over to your Amiga for the next stage of the process. This is going to involve editing a DOSDriver on the Amiga with the parameters needed to successfully read and write to your SD card. Unless you’ve been messing around with SD Cards already there won’t be an SD0 device in your Amiga’s SYSTEM:DEVS/DOSDrivers directory. Fear not though because you can finding it lurking in the STORAGE directory (SYSTEM:Storage/DOSDrivers) waiting to be put to good use. Find the SD0 file and open it in your editor of choice, for me that’s the one built into Directory Opus. Edit the file so that the contents look exactly like the one in the image below:

SD0 DOSDriver File contents (shown in Directory Opus Editor)

Slightly clearer copy of the config (pasted into Wordworth to make it clearer to read)

Save your changes to SD0 and close the editor. This next part is particularly crucial otherwise, despite all your efforts thus far, the card will still be unreadable. You need to move the file OUT of SYSTEM:Storage/DOSDrivers and place it INTO the actual SYSTEM:DEVS/DOSDrivers directory. Doing this will force the Amiga to read the config on boot and enable it to recognise an SD card when present. You can do this in a number of different ways but again my preferred method is Directory Opus.

Edited SD0 correctly placed in DOSDrivers Directory

Once you’ve done this, assuming the card is already inserted, reboot your Amiga (CTRL-A-A) and when Workbench has loaded back up you should see a lovely SD card icon on the screen similar to the one below.

SD0 Icon on Workbench

The next image shows a 200GB MicroSD card working and you can see the Amiga recognising the card capacity as 183.3G.

200GB MicroSD card working on the Amiga. 183.3GB of space 🙂

Here’s a regular 32GB card working recognised as being 29.1GB capacity. If you remember from earlier on that reported size is pretty much the same as how Windows saw it.

32GB MicroSD card working on the Amiga. 29.1GB of space.

SD Card Amiga <-> PC Usage

I find my Amiga/PC formatted SD card incredibly useful, not only for transferring files between systems but also for storing CD’s on. I don’t have a CD drive on my Amiga but I do on my PC. Any Amiga CD’s I get, such as the Amiga Future Coverdisks, I simply copy into a folder on the card and they’re instantly available on the Amiga. The 200GB card is particularly useful for this purpose as it can potentially hold nearly 300 CD’s plus all my other stuff.

I have noticed that SD cards work a little differently on the Amiga. You can’t just insert one and expect it to appear in Workbench. The card needs to be present in the card slot before you boot your Amiga up. Likewise, if you remove it, it will still show the icon on your Workbench. For these reasons I’d recommend always inserting the card whilst your Amiga is off and not removing the card until you’ve shut down your Amiga just to be safe. If I ever find a way around this I’ll update this post.

Anyway, I hope this post proves useful for a few people, I know it took me quite a lot of stumbling around before I brought all the parts of the puzzle together!

Network your Commodore 64

8th December 2018

Steven

Commodore 64, How to's

4 Comments

I’ve had my 1541 Ultimate II+ cart for around a year now. It’s a fantastic modern addition to my Commodore 64 and one that I certainly wouldn’t ever want to be without. However in all that time I’ve never bothered to explore using its built-in Ethernet port. Well the other day I finally got around to setting it up and am really glad I did too. I thought I’d share my experience in case it can help someone else get more out of their device. Basically this post will explain how to network your Commodore 64 (with a 1541 Ultimate II) to copy your games, music, demos, documents or anything else straight to your 1541 Ultimate II without ever needing to swap USB drives around.

Connecting to your network

You may have noticed the red ‘Link Down’ status that appears on screen when you press the menu button on your Ultimate cart. The is basically the built-in network card of the device telling you that it’s not connected to anything. The ‘MAC’ with the 12 Hexadecimal codes along side is the ‘MAC Address’ of your cart in case you need to find it on your network router.

‘Link Down’ Status shown in red

All you need to do to network your Commodore 64 is connect it to your router with an [amazon_textlink asin=’B00J3UYNII’ text=’Ethernet cable’ template=’ProductLink’ store=’lyonsden-21′ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’885964d9-fae3-11e8-9619-05a5a6b29c97′]. Providing your router is configured to use DHCP (and by default, pretty much all of them are) your cart should pick up an IP address on your network straight away.

Ethernet cable plugged in. Note the Green link/activity light. This should blink on and off.

After you have plugged the cable in you should see a green activity light appear on the device itself. You should also see an IP address appear on the menu screen and the red ‘Link Down’ status should change to a green ‘Link Up’.

‘Link Up’ Confirmation Status and IP address shown

FTP Software

So far so good, but it’s still not much use at the moment. To be useful you’re going to need some FTP software on your PC. I’ll use Filezilla as an example as it’s free and easy to use. The principal will be the same regardless of what software you choose to use. (As a side note I normally use Directory Opus which is still going strong – only just for PC’s these days rather than the Amiga). Note, if you are going to download and install Filezilla it’s just the client you want, not the server version. Also make sure you un-tick any boxes during the install to avoid any unwanted ‘bundled extras’ being installed (one of my pet peeves these days). The FTP software is going to allow you to connect to the USB storage device that is plugged in to the 1541 Ultimate II and transfer files across.

Configuring the FTP software to connect to your C64

Adding your C64 as a ‘site’

Once you’ve got your FTP software up and running you need to add a new ‘site’ to it (basically your 1541 Ultimate II). Simply got to the ‘File’ menu and select ‘Site Manager’ and then click on ‘New Site’. Give the site a suitable name so you’ll be able to recognise it easily in future. I simply called mine ‘C64’. Now make sure all the various settings below are entered. These have already been entered in the screenshot above.

Protocol: FTP
Host: (this will be the IP address displayed on YOUR C64 screen)
Port: (you can leave this blank)
Encryption: Only use plain FTP (insecure). (You are only transferring stuff within your own home network so this is not an issue)
Logon Type: Anonymous

Once you’ve checked that all the above settings are correct, click on ‘connect’. The new site you’ve just created will be saved and it should connect to your Ultimate cart and display something similar to the screenshot below.

FTP software – PC on the left, C64 on the right

The top window is basically a scrolling log of the actions performed by the FTP software and is just for info purposes. The two areas highlighted in blue and red above are where you can get stuff done. The left hand side is your PC and the right hand side your C64, or rather the USB drive plugged into your 1541 Ultimate II. The upper window on each side is where you can browse through the directories / folders whilst the lower section shows you the contents of them.

How to actually transfer games onto your C64!

To transfer games across to your C64 all you need to do is click through to where they are stored on your PC in the left window, where you want them to go in the right window, and then simply drag and drop them over, it’s that simple.

Files being transfer over FTP

In the above screenshot I’ve dragged a bunch of Rob Hubbard SID tunes across from my PC to my 1541 Ultimate II’s USB drive. You can see a log of what is happening in the top window and view the individual files’ transfer progress in the bottom window.

The files on my C64 after being transferred across

The file transfers are really fast, taking just a few seconds so I find this a really quick and convenient way of getting new software onto my C64 without constantly faffing about with a flash drive. I definitely won’t be unplugging that USB drive from my 1541 Ultimate anytime soon now!

Reservations

One other thing you should probably do is to ‘reserve’ your C64’s IP address on your router. Most routers offer the facility to do this. This will ensure that every time you turn your C64 on it will pick up the same IP. If you don’t, it will likely get a different one each time and you will need to change the connection info in the FTP software.

Apparently you can also connect to the 1541 Ultimate using Telnet and use it for stuff life swapping disk images on the fly for multi-disk games. I might explore this in the future but I doubt it would be something I’d use much, unlike transferring files across which I do on a regular basis. Anyway I hope this has helped you to network your Commodore 64. If you have any questions or comments please do get in touch.

AIWA HS-PC202 Mk3 Cassette Player – Replacing a Drive Belt

19th October 2018

Steven

Gadgets, How to's, Retro, Vintage Hi-Fi

8 Comments

Introduction

I recently bought a ‘New Old Stock’ AIWA HS-PC202 Mk 3 Personal Stereo off eBay as I just couldn’t resist the idea of unboxing a ‘new’ walkman in 2018. Now I’m fully aware that you can buy brand new ones off Amazon but these are pretty cheap and nasty affairs designed to cash in on nostalgia rather than offer a quality audio experience. This Aiwa model is a quality bit of kit with the ability to play Chrome tapes, Dolby B & C noise reduction, auto-reverse and a super slim, attractive design.

However it had been sat in storage for about 25 years so when I popped in some batteries and tried to play a tape – nothing happened! I could see the power LED light and hear a hiss from the headphones but the spindles didn’t turn. Thankfully I could hear the motor run momentarily if I held the unit to my ear whilst pressing ‘play’. This was a sure sign that the belt had failed in some way which is very common on vintage cassette decks.

This post will provide instructions on how to open up the AIWA HS-PC202 Mk 3 cassette player, and replace the belt. The only tools you need are some small watch-makers screwdrivers and a pair of tweezers. It’s quite a straightforward job as the player has been designed with the foresight that one day someone would need to change that belt!

Getting Started with your AIWA HS-PC202

The first thing you need to do with your AIWA HS-PC202 is unclip the battery compartment as one of the screws you need to remove is hiding behind this. Now you need to remove the backplate from the player to expose the belt. It is held in place by 3 tiny screws and a clip that fits inside the case near the play button.

Take your philips screwdriver and remove the first screw shown in the picture below. Place it in safe place, preferably in a small container as the screw is incredibly small and easy to lose. This is a slightly different size to the next two so it should be easy to identify when you are putting things back together.

Remove this screw first

Now spin the player around so you are looking at the side where the lid hinges and remove the two screws indicated in the photos below.

Remove the left screw

Remove the right screw

Removing the Backplate

Store these two screws safely with the other and put aside as you are ready to begin removing the backplate now. You need to be careful and not rush this next part as there are a few things that are held in place by the backplate and they will fall out and get lost if you’re not careful. The one thing seems to fall out no matter what you do is a small, circular, black plastic spacer that fits between the backplate and the DC power socket. Now you know about it, be prepared for this and catch it. Store it safely with the other screws.

The other things held in place by the backplate are the Dolby NR and Tape Bias selector slide switches. It’s simple to put them back if they fall out – but if you’re not expecting them to drop out they could easily fall on the floor un-noticed and get lost.

This is the small plastic part that will fall out from around the DC power socket.

These are the Bias and Dolby selector switches that may drop out when you remove the backplate.

The backplate needs to pivot away from the case from the battery end first. There is a lip at the opposite end by the volume wheel and switches so you need to picture it hinging from that position and focus your efforts on making it open that way. If you place your AIWA HS-PC202 vertically it’s easier to do this and it will prevent the switches from falling out.

Gently prise the backplate off, starting at the battery end (the bottom in this photo)

As you can see in the above photo there is a small metal tab on the front edge of the backplate that fits into a plastic lug inside the case, above the play button. You will need to carefully slide a small flat bladed screwdriver in and gently lever the plastic around the play button outward, away from the backplate to release the tab. The backplate should now be free and you can pull it away from the body and slide it upward to remove it, leaving the switches on the top in place.

The backplate – note screw holes and cut-outs for controls and DC input.

Inside the AIWA HS-PC202 Mk3

Now that the backplate if off you should see be able to see the circuit board with a cut-out for the belt and pulley wheels just like in the photo below. A belt in good condition should be taught and fit around all the pulleys tightly, something that mine was definitely not doing!

The smallest wheel is the motor pulley, the two large brass wheels drive the capstans and I think the smaller black wheel is there just to guide the belt around the others.

Inside the player. See how the rubber belt is no longer taught and is just lying there looking lumpy and uneven

Replacing the Belt (Take 1)

It took quite a lot of investigative work to locate a new belt that was an exact match for the original. Avoid those cheap multi-packs you can pick up off Amazon and eBay from China – the quality of them is variable at best and the chances of getting one that actually fits correctly is next to zero.

The belt fitted to this walkman has a square cross-section, not round or flat like many other belts. It is also very thin – about 0.6mm thick. The length is 76mm. For belts most suppliers use the measurement of the diameter of the belt when laid out flat in a circle. So basically you need to find a 0.6mm x 76mm belt. I couldn’t find one this thin at first so I bought a 1mm x 76mm belt. It did fit and work but was quite a tight fit around the black wheel where it nearly touches the side of the case. It was also only a fraction of a mm away from touching itself (ooerr) where it passes beneath the nearby brass pulley (see the photo below to see how tight it was).

The company I bought the belt from (SignalsUK) was super helpful and based in the UK too. The belt arrived a couple of days after ordering. Although it was thicker than the original it did appear to work OK. (Edit: Sadly this company no longer appear to exist (at least online) so I’ve removed the out of date link to their site).

The belt is very easy to fit. Use your tweezers to place it around the motor spindle and around the other pulleys following the path in the photo below. There is a small plastic tab that protrudes out of the case towards the black plastic wheel. The gap it leaves is very small (you will find it at around the 8 o’clock position) so be careful not to snag or damage the belt here. There will be a a degree of tension in the belt and this is normal so you will need to stretch it a little over the final wheel.

The 1mm thick belt – notice how it is practically rubbing against itself where it passes back beneath the left-hand brass pulley wheel.

Replacing the Belt (Take 2)

If a jobs worth doing, it’s worth doing properly – so I continued my search for a better fitting belt. Eventually I stumbled upon a place that custom manufactures belts for a variety of machines, including the AIWA HS-PC202 Mk3. The Mk3 is apparently mechanically identical inside to the Mk2 and so the belt they supply for the Mk2 also fits the Mk3. Here’s a link straight to the correct belt – here. The company, FixYourAudio, is based in Slovakia and is run by a very helpful guy who makes the spare parts purely as a hobby to help enthusiasts keep these old machines alive. A week or so after ordering my belt arrived in the UK so I have no qualms in recommending them. It is ever-so-slightly thinner than the original but is definitely a better fit than the 1mm thick one.

New 0.5mm belt fitted

Comparison between the old stretched and worn belt on the outside and the new one on the inside!

Putting it back together

Before you finish off – if you have any additional problems with your player such as unwanted ‘scratchy’ noises when turning the volume wheel or when the headphone jack is twisted in the socket then take advantage of the opportunity and squirt some DeoxIT on them whilst you’ve got the player open. Don’t forget to operate the volume wheel fully a dozen or so times to work the fluid into the pot and clean it up. Likewise for the headphone socket, squirt some in and then insert the plug and twist it around in circles a bunch of times to clean off the contacts.

Now you just need to put it all back together. If you knocked off the slider switches then pop them back on now. You will notice that one side of them is hollow and this will sit on top of the appropriate switch sticking out from the circuit board. The larger of the two fits on the Dolby NR slider whilst the other belongs on the Tape Bias switch. Don’t forget to place the little round spacer back over the DC input port. There is a little flat spot on one side of the circle and this should be positioned facing the outside of the case so that it fits flush against the flat edge of the backplate.

View of the controls – note the small white Bias and Dolby switches. It is on these that the black ‘cross’ pieces will sit on if they have fallen off

You may need to press and squeeze gently in a few places, particularly around the play button to get the tab to engage in the lug correctly. However you should not have to force anything. If you feel any resistance stop and check, reposition the backplate, check the spacer and/or the position of the slide switches and try again. Once it has popped back into place and you are happy with the fit all around, replace the 3 screws and you should be good to go! Enjoy the new lease of life your personal stereo has been given!

The small plastic spacer fits here. Flat edge towards the backplate.

If you found this guide to replacing the belt in an AIWA HS-PC202 useful then please leave a comment below, it would mean a lot to me. Likewise if you have any questions I’ll do my best to help.

If you’d like to know how to go about de-magnetising the play head in your AIWA HS-PC202 then take a look at this post.

How to access IMAP email on an Amiga 500 in 2018

30th April 2018

Steven

Amiga, How to's, Retro

72 Comments

2021 Update – This article on how to access IMAP email on an Amiga 500 has been superseded by this one as unfortunately I have been unable to replicate this setup with the latest versions of AmiSSL 4.8+ and SimpleMail 0.45 on Workbench 3.1.4.

Yep, you read the title correctly, this article is a step-by-step guide on how to access IMAP email on an Amiga 500 in 2018! This works with any IMAP email system including Gmail!

Who would have thought 30 years ago that we’d be able to get electronic mail on our Amiga 500 computers in 2018. It really is a testament to both the original designers of the Amiga and to the ingenuity and tenacity of the current community that this is actually a real possibility now. In this guide I’ll show how to get it working, step by step. It’s entirely feasible and actually works really well! Read on to find out what you need and how to get it configured.

What you need

First things first, you need to head on over to the SimpleMail website to download the latest version of the software (currently 0.44). Click on the downloads page and select the appropriate installer file from the list. I’m using Workbench 3.9 so downloaded the simplemail-0.44-0s3.lha file. If you’re using anything less than Workbench 3 then I’m afraid you are out of luck.

The SimpleMail page on the SourceForge website

The download page – choose the OS3 version.

One you’ve download the installer go ahead and install it and meet me back here for the next step. If the program doesn’t run then go back and check the readme file. There are a number of additional custom MUI classes that it requires to run and you may need to download and install one or more of these too.

Launching SimpleMail

Find the folder where you installed SimpleMail and open it. Inside there should be a Readme, an AmigaGuide document and the program itself. Double-click the SimpleMail icon to launch the software. After a brief splash screen you should be presented with the main application screen. This is the point at which we can begin to configure the program to get our emails.

The SimpleMail folder

The SimpleMail Splash screen – very attractive!

The main program window

How to Configure your email account

Select “Configuration…” from the Settings menu and then Accounts from the configuration screen that pops up. This is where we can add our account and do lots of other things later on to get the mail program working just how we want it.

Here is how you access the configuration screen.

The ‘Accounts’ section of the configuration screen.

Adding your email account

The next step is to add your email account and you start the process by clicking on the ‘Add’ button in the top right of the window. I should point out that the program has very helpful tool-tip descriptions that pop up if you hover the mouse pointer over a particular button or text entry box for a few seconds.

Click this button to begin adding your email account

The account name can be anything you want – this is just a label so you know what the account represents in the future. Enter your name, email address and reply address (if you want one) associated with your email account.

Entering the account name and personal info relating to the account

Setting up IMAP – the ‘Receive’ configuration

Click the IMAP4 radio button in the ‘Receive’ section..
Enter your IMAP server name in the ‘Server’ box.
Enter the port number in the ‘Port’ box.
Ignore the Fingerprint box for now – this will be automatically filled later on.
Select the type of security your account uses next to the ‘Security’ drop-down menu (for SSL select TLS).
Enter the username and password you need to authenticate with in the ‘Login’ and ‘Password’ boxes respectively.
Lave the rest of the settings in this section as they are.

Entering your IMAP details

Setting up SMTP – the ‘Send’ configuration

Enter your SMTP server name in the ‘SMTP Server’ box in the ‘Send’ section.
Enter the port number in the ‘Port’ box.
Ignore the Fingerprint box for now – this will be automatically filled later on.
Select the type of security your account uses next to the ‘Security’ drop-down menu (for SSL select TLS).
If your SMTP server requires authentication (most do these days) then click the ‘Use SMTP AUTH’ tickbox.
(If required) Enter the username and password you need to authenticate with in the ‘Login’ and ‘Password’ boxes respectively.
Leave the ‘Login into POP3 server first’ and “Use IP as domain” boxes unticked.

Entering your SMTP settings

Testing your setup

Now it’s time to see if everything works! Click the test button over on the far right. This will first test your IMAP settings and then run through your SMTP setup to make sure everything is in order.

Testing your account settings

You will see the following error appear twice, firstly for the IMAP connection and secondly for SMTP. Click ‘Trust Always’ to have SimpleMail save the certificate ‘fingerprint’ so this error doesn’t re-appear in the future.

This error will appear but it’s OK to click Trust always as you know this is you email provider.

Now in order for these 2 fingerprints to be saved permanently, preventing any future warnings from popping up every time you try to download or send email you must save the configuration using the ‘Save’ button at the bottom left of the configuration window.

Prompt reminding you to save the configuration.

Correcting Errors…

Now at this stage you might end up with the following screen with everything highlighted in red! Don’t panic – this just means that the test failed due to an error in one or more of your entries. Go through and double/triple check every piece of information you have entered. Make sure the ports are correct, there are no typos in the server name etc.

The problem in my case was the passwords as mine contain numerous weird and wonderful characters. Now this isn’t normally an issue but for some reason the keyboard mapping on my Amiga was wrong so these characters were actually appearing as something else entirely when typed…

You cannot see the password you are typing so I highly recommend opening up a shell window and typing your password into that just to check it appears correctly. Once you have ironed out any kinks with getting it to appear properly, go back to SimpelMail and enter it again in both boxes.

This screen means you’ve made a mistake somewhere!

Final steps

Hopefully you’ve got every bit of information correct now and can see a screen similar to the one below with the fingerprint boxes fully populated.

Success – IMAP and SMTP settings have been correctly entered and tested,

Don’t forget to click on ‘Save’ at the bottom left of the configuration window otherwise all your hard work up to this point will be lost!

Don’t forget to SAVE the configuration!

After you have saved the configuration you will return the main program window. You should see your newly added email account appear at the bottom of the folder list. At this point it will not have downloaded any of your emails or even folders for that matter.

Your new email account initially appears like this…

Accessing your emails

Now click on the name of your email account and SimpleMail will connect to your email server and download a list of all the folders within it. This will include your Inbox, Sent items etc. along with any custom folders your have created too. This might take a few seconds – you can see what is going on by checking the status bar at the bottom of the window.

You will always know what is going on by checking the status area of SimpleMail

Your email folder heirarchy

At this stage the program still hasn’t downloaded any of your emails. To do this you must left click on any of the folder titles for it to fetch the contents of it from the server. In the below example I clicked on my Inbox and it fetched 17 mails from the server. This took just a few seconds – if you have hundreds or even thousands of mails it will take a bit longer.

This is the progress bar. If you have a lot of emails then it will move quite slowly

Inbox with 17 new emails.

Main program window with Inbox emails displayed in the top right pane

Finally – Viewing an email!

Even though the messages are now displayed in the list view, these are only email headers. The body of the messages have not been downloaded. Click on an email to download the message – the body will be display in the bottom right viewing pane. If you would like the program to automatically download full messages you can of course enable this but it will greatly slow down the process of fetching emails.

Unfortunately SimpleMail does not yet support HTML mails so you will only see the plain text version of them like the example below. Personally this doesn’t bother me too much as most HTML mails are sent from companies trying to sell you stuff. Friends and family send plain text emails so I can live with that.

Example of how HTML mails are presented

Downloading Complete emails rather than just the headers

As I mentioned above, you can have SimpleMail automatically download complete messages, including the full body. It does make reading through your mailbox quicker, but at the expense of longer fetch times. Only you can decide if the trade-off is worth it. To do this, left click on the folder or Inbox you want to make the change to and select settings.

Selecting the settings option

Now you should see a window like the one below. Select ‘Complete mails’ from the ‘Download’ drop-down menu and then click OK. The next time you perform a fetch/click on that folder it will download each and every message inside it in full.

Getting the software to download Complete mails instead of just the headers

Renaming your email account

You may have noticed that your email account has an odd name. The program seems to name the account itself based off the server it connects to. Don’t worry though, you can easily change it to something more recognisable. Simply right-click on the mailbox name to bring up a folder menu and select ‘settings’.

Selecting Settings option in the Folder menu

Here you can enter the name you want to appear in the folder list by entering it into the ‘Name’ box under Folder properties. Hit ‘OK’ at the bottom of the window when you are done.

Entering your mailbox folder name

You should now be back at the main program window and your mailbox should be named correctly in the folder view.

Mailbox now showing the correct name

Concluding

And that is it – you can now access IMAP email on an Amiga in 2018!

SimpleMail is constantly being worked on, so if you are reading this in the future there may well be a better version out with even more features.

I have only given you the bare minimum instructions here to get you started with accessing your email. There are plenty of other things this software can offer. Mail sorting rules, signatures, integrated address book and so on. You can also resize each of the viewing panes or remove them completely. Have a play around with it all and enjoy.

Gmail!

I run my own mail server but this should work for any IMAP email out there. I have personally tested it with Gmail and it works perfectly. Here’s a screenshot of the configuration screen so you can see what settings I used.

Gmail configuration

Some extra info about system requirements

For the record I got this running on an Amiga 500 with a Vampire V500 V2+ accelerator card. The biggest advantage this offers is speed – up to 12 times faster than a stock A500! You certainly don’t need a Vampire to run SimpleMail though. What you will need is Workbench running off a hard drive or CF card solution, a TCP/IP stack and SSL software. I’m pretty sure you would also need at least an 68020 CPU or suitable accelerator card to get any of this running at all.

Of course this isn’t just limited to Amiga 500 computers, that just happens to be what I use. It should work just as well on the big box Amiga’s and of course the A1200 too.

Anyway, I really hope you found this article on how to access IMAP email on an Amiga both interesting and useful – if you did please let me know! If you have any questions or requests then drop me a message and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Adding an SD Card Slot and HDMI port to an Amiga 500

31st March 2018

Steven

Amiga, How to's

2 Comments

SD Card Slot and HDMI port to an Amiga 500

So you may be aware that the Vampire V500 V2+ Card gives your vintage Amiga 500 both a MicroSD card slot and an HDMI port for hooking up to a modern display. Trouble is the ports are on the board itself which is rather inconvenient if you don’t want to leave the top of your Amiga’s case off. After doing a little research and searching around I discovered that you can get some nifty little extension cables for both ports which will allow you to ‘move’ them to the exterior of the Amiga’s case. This post will explain how to add both an SD Card Slot and HDMI port to an Amiga 500 computer.

Location of the HDMI and MicroSD ports on the Vampire card. Not exactly easily accessible once the lid is back on!

Purchasing the right cables for the job

The HDMI cable was a little tricky to locate at first as there are just so many options. Once I got the search term correct I stumbled into the right cable for the job. The cable I bought (below) was an Adafruit Panel mount HDMI Cable – 40 cm which you can pick up from Amazon. It’s just the perfect length and almost seems tailor made for the Amiga!

40cm HDMI extension cable

The MicroSD slot extender was a much easier product to locate. This Micro SD to SD Card Extension Cable I picked up from Amazon is perfect. You will find that you can actually get both MicroSD to MicroSD and also MicroSD to SD extender cables. I decided to chose the MicroSD to SD option as I thought it would allow a little extra flexibility in terms of what cards I can use with it. With it I have a choice of using both regular SD cards or MicroSD cards now with the use of a MicroSD adapter card.

MicroSD Extension Cable

Deciding where to locate the ports

I decided the HDMI port needed to be at the back of my A500 but that the SD card would be much more useful if it was located somewhere along the side. There is quite a lot of free space underneath the floppy drive, ample to accommodate the HDMI socket. However because the SD Card Slot is housed in quite a chunky plastic case there wasn’t room for it under the floppy, plus I already have my floppy boot selector switch there anyway. So, I chose a spot that sits just under the keyboard where there is plenty of space and it’s also super convenient for me to pop cards in and out.

Final Cable Routes

HDMI Socket secured with hot glue. It ain’t pretty but it’s very secure.

Plenty of clearance around floppy drive

SD Card Slot Hot Glued in position

Creating the SD Card and HDMI cut-outs in the Amiga case and securing the new ports

The slots for both ports were cut out using a Dremel tool (if you have one you should know instinctively how to do this!). Take care to use a low speed otherwise you risk melting the plastic. The ports themselves are held in place with some hot glue, perfect for this sort of project as it flows freely around things before setting hard. I used a few blobs of hot glue to keep the SD extension ribbon cable out of harms way too as it’s quite fragile. It could easily become trapped and get damaged by the A500 keyboard when it is replaced if it was left unchecked.

Top view of HDMI Socket with floppy drive back in place

Finished HDMI Port

Finished SD Card Slot with MicroSD adapter sticking out

End Result

I’m pretty pleased with the end result, with hindsight I probably should have tidied up the HDMI cut-out a little with a file as there are a few rough bits left… but it’s around the back of the case and out of sight so no biggie. The HDMI port is rock solid and should have no problem with me plugging and unplugging a cable in and out. Likewise the SD card slot is nice and secure and more than up to the task of dealing with regular card swaps. Perhaps a version in white (or off-white LOL) would have been better but I just couldn’t find one for sale anywhere.

Improvements?

Only other thing I might do in future is add an RJ45 extender when the Apollo Vampire team make the Ethernet port expansion option a reality. Although I already have Ethernet through the use of the fantastic little plipbox device this is currently hogging my parallel port so I cannot print without first unplugging it – hardly ideal.

Formatting the SD Card

Incidentally, if you’d like to know how to go about formatting your SD Card check out my post – How to Format an SD Card for Amiga to PC File Transfer.

Fitting an SD Card Slot and HDMI port to an Amiga 500.

Installing the Vampire V500 V2+ in my Amiga 500

24th March 2018

Steven

Amiga, Gaming, How to's, Retro

86 Comments

With the arrival of the weekend it was the perfect time to give my A500 the Vampire V500 V2 treatment!

Getting started – removing chips

First off I needed to remove the original Motorola 68000 CPU and the Kickstart chip.

Amiga 500 motherboard with empty 68000 CPU socket

Removing the Kickstart chip with a chip puller

Installing the card

The next step involved carefully inserting the Vampire board connector pins into the empty CPU socket. This actually took a hell of a lot more force than I thought it would. I’ll admit I was scared of damaging the CPU socket or the motherboard itself with the amount of pressure I had to exert. Anyway it eventually slotted in all the way and no harm was done. Please do make sure you remove both the CPU AND the Kickstart chip though – this wasn’t mentioned in my instructions (but they’ve been updated since I got mine to mention this). If you don’t remove the Kickstart chip then the Vampire board won’t sit flat and the CPU connections may be unreliable. Thanks to Igor Majstorovic for taking the time out to let me know about this!

Vampire V500 V2+ fitted to A500 CPU socket

Cables & CF Card setup

The next step was to hook up an HDMI cable to the socket on the board and fit a Compact Flash ‘hard drive’ to the Vampire’s 44 pin IDE header. I opted for a 32Gb CF card as this is the size of the Apollo OS (Coffin) image. (This is a pre-configured Workbench 3.9 system that you can download and use with your Vampirised A500.

Imaging the card was simply a matter of downloading the Apollo OS image from here and using Win32 Disk Imager in Windows 10 to write that image to my Compact Flash card.

Vampire V500 V2+ with CF Card and HDMI connected up

For once in my life everything went as it should and when I powered up my Amiga 500 it worked! As Hannibal would say; ‘I love it when a plan comes together!’ I was greeted with a really cool Vampire logo boot screen after which the Workbench loaded just a few seconds later.

Vampire V500 V2 Boot Screen

Vampire V500 V2 ‘Insert Floppy’ Screen that appears if no bootable device is present

Fitting an External, Boot – selectable Gotek Drive to an A500

6th March 2018

Steven

Amiga, How to's, Retro

21 Comments

I wanted to avoid having to have one of these hanging off the back of my A500.

I wouldn’t really call this an upgrade as such, more taking advantage of the latest developments in the Amiga scene. In case you’ve never heard of it, the ‘Gotek’ drive is basically a 3.5″ Floppy Drive emulator. Instead of putting floppy disks in it you plug in a USB flash drive that can contain up to a thousands Amiga Disk Files or ‘ADF’s’ (floppy disk images).

There are quite a few versions of these floating around on eBay, internal and external. I decided pretty early on that I wanted mine external so I could keep my A500’s DF0 as a real floppy drive so I opted for an external drive. I wanted to have the install look as authentic and neat as possible so I opted to install my Gotek inside an old external floppy disk drive that I picked up off eBay for spares/repairs. If you want to do the same just be careful to pick one that houses a regular sized floppy drive and not a reduced height, slim one as the Gotek won’t fit. You can see what I mean from the photo below which shows my finished Gotek drive underneath a couple of Roctec slim drives – it should be pretty obvious that the slim drives don’t have the necessary height to accommodate the Gotek drive.

The other choices available now include the option to have an OLED screen that can display the name of the ADF file you select and the track info and also a built in speaker that can simulate the noises of the real thing. It’s more of a buzzer than anything else but it’s pretty effective and much better than sitting in silence waiting for Cannon Fodder to load!

Finished Gotek Drive under my two Roctec slim external floppy drives

Close-up of Gotek Drive with OLED Screen

Boot Selector Installed in Even CIA Socket

Mounting of Selector Switch

DF0 / DF1 selector switch