A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000

That was beautiful. Nicely done, and congratulations on your restomod A1000!

I’ve heard people describe it as a 16 bit computer a few times lately though and it always catches me off guard. It was usually referred to as a 32 bit computer at the time, and defensibly so.

Some of its implementation details were 16 bit, like the data bus and ALU, but they were largely invisible to users and programmers. Assembly code used 32 bit math instructions, even if the CPU executed them in 2 steps. It had a flat 32 bit address space, although only 24 address lines were implemented (kind of like how not all 64 address lines are available on a 64 bit CPU today). Registers were 32 bits wide. And later 68K CPUs could run A1000 software on pure 32 bit CPUs natively with no emulation or trickery.

Credit it with those extra 16 bits. It earned them.

My father bought me an Amiga 1000 at a Federated Group store in late 1985.

Coming from a C64, my mind was blown by the Amiga's graphics and the multi-tasking. I could run the amazing RoboCity animation demo and then drag it down half way and see my Workbench.

Marble Madness on the Amiga looked and sounded just like the arcade.

1985 was a magical year in general for me, but a big part of that magic was conjured by the Amiga.

One of my absolute favorite series of YouTube videos is "Building a new Amiga" from RMC, where he basically builds a new Amiga 500 with as many new parts as possible.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECu6i6WR7mo

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87q-TTG48Ew

3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va91bISkpKI

4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EsRI-5fblM

My career path was pretty much set in stone when I was introduced to an Amiga2000 with a Video Toaster. I watched so many different pieces of equipment get replaced by that one card inside this computer. The replaced equipment dollar value dwarfed the price of the Amiga + Toaster setup. Eventually, we upgraded the CPU from the stock 68010 to a 68040 with another expansion card which was an incredible difference.

This happened the summer between my junior and senior year in high school, and I spent every day that summer learning everything about what I could do with that Toaster. By the time I graduated, I was a pretty decent technical director being able to handle the lower 3rds, camera switching, and running tape playback (and rarely used those skills later).

The Amiga will always hold a special place for me. Any post like this will also keep me from doing work for longer time than it takes to read as I always go down a bit of nostalgia rabbit hole after reading.

Nice restoration and article, thanks!

I bought my Amiga 1000 in 1986. I loved it. I was learning animation using Hash Inc's Animation:Master. People get impatient with web page loads today, but boy, waiting for a low-res animation to render could teach you patience!

I had started in 1977 with a Commodore PET 2001, and was a Commodore person until I bought an Apple PowerPC and loaded MkLinux with the Mach microkernel on it. Later Minix was my choice. I always rooted for Minix over Linux years later, and I still think a microkernel is better than a monolithic one.

Sadly, my Amiga 1000 was stolen from my NYC apartment in 1988, while I was at work.They left the HP laser printer which was more valuable at the time. I learned animation, kept up with programming from my PET days, and got into music trackers. I never bought an A2000 or A3000 or had a VideoToaster, although I really wanted one. Apple one the print/graphics market and Commodore lost its multimedia market with it.

The Amiga will always be my favorite Commodore. I had a Vic-20 and a C-128 at one point too.

As a keyboard enthusiast, I'll add that the commadore Amiga 1000 keyboard contains the fairly uncommon Mitsumi Standard Mechanical Type II tactile switch. The mechanism uses a horizontally placed spring, which gives it a unique feeling, in my opinion, comparable to a nice rubber dome keyboard but with a hard bottom out.

[1] https://deskthority.net/wiki/Mitsumi_standard_mechanical

Excellent and quite nostalgia-inducing story, thanks!

One thing caught my eye:

> The PAL Amiga 1000 came later, and WCS was finally part of the motherboard with Kickstart on an actual ROM chip.

I'm fairly sure that no stock A1000 ever came with ROM chips, so Kickstart always had to be loaded from disk. Happy to learn otherwise if I'm wrong!

> I’ll never forget that useless Ñ key.

That was uncalled for. You had your Ç too. I mean, it was the perfect Iberian keyboard.

In a similar vein, I love this blog: https://linuxjedi.co.uk/

He fixes Amigas, BBC Micros, Archimedes etc...

I still have my A500 (with a 1084s), it has a failed floppy drive, but it still works otherwise as far as I can tell.

I want to spend some time restoring it.

Great Portuguese computer stories ;)

I have 4 of these sitting at my house. I should either do this sort of project or sell them off.

What a delightful piece - thank you.

My C64 has a USB interface!