Gotek vs Amiga 500

The Girlfriend 500 - sounds like a cheesy advertisement in one of those weird TV shows, right? - is a beautiful computer of its time and nowadays it still has the charm. I remember, I was around 14-15 years old when one of my mates bought an A500 and we played games, watched demoscene productions all weekend long without pause. I had a C64 back then, we used 386 PC's in school and the difference between the computers were remarkable. While I was still in love with the C64, the PC's were kinda soulless, or how to describe it. The Commodore computers definitely had somekind of charm and personality. Not just because the audio-video capabilities but... I don't have words to describe it. They were just simply better :)

So, I have an A500. Cleaned it from top to bottom, from inside to outside and... It doesn't load any software from any disk, while the same disks work without problem in my A1200.
Captain Obvious here, the A500's floppy drive is broken.

I've read a few articles about fixing it, but I decided to order a Gotek drive with the Cortex Amiga Firmware. It's a clever device and a clever new firmware that might not work with the A500' without further modification. There can be an issue with older Kickstart and/or using the Gotek as additional (DF1) floopy and not primary (DF0).

I simply replaced the broken floppy drive with the Gotek:

And it works. Just, simply works. It's sooooo comfortable to copy .ADF (Amiga Disk Format) files to the USB stick and switch whenever it's needed.

However, the first setup of the USB stick wasn't obvious on the first look but fortunately I was able to gather all the required information from various forums.

The Gotek with Cortex Amiga firmware is not enough on its own, the USB stick needs a file called SELECTOR.ADF.

You can download it from Cortex' page, don't forget to rename the extension to .ZIP: cortexamigafloppyemulator_v105a.docx

The SELECTOR.ADF can be found in \cortexamigafloppyemulator_v105a.zip\CortexAmigaFloppyEmulator\Bootdisk\ folder.
By default it is an empty disk file.

Next step is to download games, demos, whatever you want to run on the A500. One of the best source of demoscene productions is http://pouet.net
Use the "Search Box" feature on the top-right corner of the page.

I downloaded ~100 demos for the A500 (OCS/ECS), but oh noes, a lot of them were .DMS and not .ADF files. This is a compressed Amiga Disk Format, WinUAE can read it without any problem but the Gotek can't. It works with .ADF files only.

Don't worry, there is a solution for that!
ADF Opus and its batch convert option did the job and converted the DMS files to ADF in a few seconds.

Now we need to create a "tracklist" that the Gotek and its SELECTOR.ADF would use for listing/tracking of the .ADF files on the USB stick.

There is a tool called Amiga Gotek Cortex SELECTOR.ADF Edit (pretty long title but it perfectly describes the tool).

• install SELECTOR.ADF Edit
• copy .ADF files, including SELECTOR.ADF to USB stick
• run SELECTOR Edit
• quit SELECTOR.Edit
• pause Kaspersky and/or any other virus scanner
• run SELECTOR Edit again

The tool scans and lists all the .ADF files on the USB stick, now you can move the files from the right-side to the left-side, then click SAVE. This will be your "playlist" and you can select the disk image files with the small buttons on the Gotek drive.

Insert the USB stick to the Gotek, boot up the Amiga. The SELECTOR.ADF will start automatically and you can browse the list and run any of the .ADF files. Yaaaaay, happiness, flawless victory.

I've spent the whole night with watching some neat demoscene stuff and enjoyed the same goosebumps as I had X years ago.

Sushi Boyz by Ghostown:

Rink a Dink Redux by Lemon:

And a lot more of course :)

Now the next step is to mount the Gotek drive into the A500 without drilling, without destroying the plastic case. That's the story of the future, I'll share it with you once it's done.



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Today's classic A500 demo: Enigma by Phenomena

C64 G - Black screen :(

I got my hands on a C64 G, a nice and beautiful one. Warranty seal was untouched so I had high hopes when I turned it on... then nothing happened.

Ok, that's bad.
I quickly plugged in another PSU and voila, the machine was... almost alive.
Black screen, nothing else.

That means, I had to remove the warranty seal and check what's going on inside the C64.
The memory chips were heating up very quickly, so it seemed obvious they were defective.

Others were fine, no presence of overheating so I thought the solution will be simple.
I started to search for replacement chips and sockets immediately.

Ordered a pack of sockets (sidenote: it's much cheaper if you order 20+ pieces than order only 2...) and finally found XX464 memory chips as well for a good price. So, I removed the defective chips and soldered the sockets.

And...
After memory replacement it still doesn't work :(
Black screen.
So I have to dig deeper and find out what might be the problem.

I even tried to touch the G-spot but didn't help :(
 

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Today's music: X Marks The Spot - 64k Intro by Portal Process

Amiga mouse

There were some pictures about an Amiga mouse in the previous post(s), now it's time to share the complete story.

I received the mouse with an Amiga 500, the seller mentioned yellowed parts and a partly-broken mouse. Well, it looked like I'm going to have some fun with using H2O2 again and practice with soldering some electronics. You can guess, I don't have photos about the original condition of the mouse...

Anyway, I connected the A500 to the tv and *boom* the magic boot screen appeared immediately and the Amiga loaded Workbench from a floppy disk in a minute. That was quite painless so far.

I had a testrun with the mouse to check its condition, well, the buttons were unstable and their clicking sounded broken. As an additional defect the left mouse button didn't work.

I was thinking, would an old but still working PC mouse be a good replacement? Let's ask the internet.
This was the best answer to my question, thanks to a user called Aidan on a random forum:

"Basically the problem is that a PC mouse has all the smarts inside. An Amiga mouse has all the smarts in the Amiga, and the mouse is dumb. You can either build the interface listed, or try and extract the quadrature signals from the mouse and push them down to the amiga."

Okay, then I need new knobs, and after a quick search I found them at AmigaKit.

 C64 C motherboard, Amiga mouse board, 2 C64 power switch and 2 mouse replacement buttons 

I used a basic 40W Weller and a desoldering pump to remove the broken buttons. As this part contains relatively small amount of tin the part were removed quickly and clean. The next picture shows and empty slot and the already inserted new button:

This one shows the replaced buttons together with the old stuff:

Almost ready:

Clean mouse case, right after 3 days of H2O2 and UV light treatment:

I had to cheat a bit with the case because the new buttons are higher and stiffer than the originals and the mouse case became too tight. Used a small plastic piece, cut from the external part of a cable, glued them to the bottom part. Looks like somebody is mad, right? :)

This was just enough to lift the upper part a bit and the buttons can *click*.

There is a small crack on the left button but overall the mouse is nice, clean, white and everything functions as it should. This is the last photo, taken right after reassembly:

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Today's music: Amiga demoscene compilation

Super Nintendo - part 1.

I was happy for the SNES, it's a beautiful and massive console, built for eternity. And it came with Street Fighter 2! One of the games I loved when I was a kid, we spent our pocket money in the arcade with friends, playing it all day long.

My favourite character is Guille, you can guess why. Yes, it's because of Jean Claude van Damme.

While the Street Fighter movie wasn't really great I still liked it because of the characters.

Sidenote: the first Mortal Kombat movie is awesome, don't try to convince me that it s*cks.

So, here is this SNES with 5 games, let's switch it on. Oh, wait. I don't have cable to connect with TV.

AV cable ordered. Now we wait.

Cable arrived! We happy, Vincent.

First, it looked like... "no games today...":

Thanks to Jay @ArgysAttic and his instructions, I was able to quickfix it:

While the SNES is nearly unbreakable, looks like it is very sensitive to dust, even if the cartridge and slot look clean. They need a bit more cleaning than I expected and using earbuds and compressed air helped.

Now I can enjoy some good ol' games until the special screwdriver set arrives and I can disassemble the SNES for a deeper cleaning.


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Today's music: Mortal Kombat soundtrack