Another X1000 and 1541 Ultimate II

Recently I was given the opportunity to purchase another X1000 in Australia second hand for a good price. With what happened to me earlier this year, I decided it was a good idea to have a backup X1000 system, especially now they are sold out. I bought it and it arrived here last week!

What surprised me when it arrived is the much larger (wider) size of the R4 case, compared to the R3 case of my original X1000.

Closeup view of the back of the "new" X1000:

The next shot shows inside my "new" X1000 - unlike my original X1000, this system has 2GB of memory instead of 4GB, and the standard Radeon HD card (non-Warp3D capable).

I needed to check all the cables and cards where pushed in correctly - some had moved a bit in transport like the network card, and needed a push in to be firmly seated before powering on for the first time.

This system has a 1TB SATA hard disk in it, installed with AmigaOS 4.1.6 and almost stock condition - very clean inside and out. Here it is below, once powered on to check it is working ok after transport - All good!

I quickly set to work to upgrade this system to AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition. The previous owner had purchased Final Edition for the X1000, but never installed it. I quickly set about that task:

I have covered in a lot of detail previously how to prepare and install AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition on the X1000 - to save covering old ground again, if you are interested in how I did this then please check the two part blog posts where I cover it step by step - Part 1 and Part 2.

Once the installation of Final Edition was completed, I then set about getting it configured to my liking and transferring my X1000 data across so I have a full backup X1000 system:

Have to admit that fitting the X1000 into the location where the Sam460 was before is quite a squeeze and doesn't really work well with the C64 blocking the front door. Not sure if it will stay here permanently, but for now this is where it lives! I put the Sam 460 away in storage for now.

I might have a go at putting Linux onto this X1000 in the future, but for now I am glad to have the backup X1000 system running AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition!

On the subject of the C64 in the photo above (a bit off topic but still Commodore related!), this week I received my 1541 Ultimate II, which is a C64 cartridge that allows me to run tape and disk games as image files from MicroSD card, in a similar way that the sd2iec and Chameleon64 add-on's I covered in my earlier blog post here do. You can order it from this website, but I believe the next batch of units might be a while.

The 1541 Ultimate II seems to provide better compatibility to C64 software in the testing I have done so far than the Chameleon64. I include some photos here of the 1541 Ultimate II for those curious...

The guide was very useful to get up and running with the 1541 Ultimate II and is a definite read first!

For the unit I bought, I opted to have the optional tape connector fitted, which allows the 1541 Ultimate II to feed tape image files through the tape interface, just like a real tape drive would do:

The tape connector had a pass through connector as well, in case you still want to connect a real tape drive unit to it:

The USB to network connection option I also purchased, although at the time of writing this functionality is not enabled yet.

Once the 1541 Ultimate II is plugged into to the C64 cartridge port, the 1541 disk cable (included) connected to the disk drive port, and tape adapter into the tape port we are ready to power on.

On power on I got the Retro Replay boot screen, which allows you to preload a cartridge image containing the Fastload cartridge functionality before loading any disk or tape images:

By pressing the middle button on the 1541 Ultimate II, I get to see the SD Card, which I have already put all my disk images on, ready to try out:

Apparently you can connect usb sticks to the usb port on the 1541 Ultimate II to load image files from too, although I didn't try this yet.

It is simple to select the disk image (or tape image) on the SD card using the menus via keyboard on the C64, and then mount the disk image, ready to load a program from it:

A slight complication for my C64 setup though is the need to set up the 1541 Ultimate II to use device #9 rather than the usual #8. This is because the sd2iec is installed internally and already has that drive designation. Fortunately changing this configuration is easy enough in the settings:

Once mounted, from the standard C64 prompt I type in LOAD "*",9,1 and then RUN to run the disk I have mounted.

Here is Wizball, running as a d64 image file on the 1541 Ultimate II:

Impossible Mission II as well:

I know this is a bit off topic (sorry!), but I wanted to show the 1541 Ultimate II device on the Commodore 64 as it is a neat device! I purposely do not have a disk drive or tape drive with my C64, and I rely on the image loading functionality of these modern add-ons to provide the ability to load games and demos on the real C64! The retro fun without the large disk & tape collection and associated long disk/tape loading times from real drive hardware! :-)

My Amiga 1000 has arrived!

Today I received my Amiga 1000!

Ever since I attended the local Adelaide Amiga Meeting in January this year, I wanted to get an Amiga 1000 again. I used to have one until about 10 years ago, when I sold it (along with a lot of other Amiga and various retro computer stuff) to fund my purchase of an Amiga 4000T (which I still have!).

The Amiga 1000 was the very first Amiga released, back in the mid 1980's.

This particular Amiga 1000 came up on Ebay recently, and it was a fair price so I got it. It is a bit yellowed on the keyboard especially, but fully functional - all the keys work:

The view of the rear ports on the Amiga 1000 - note the serial and parallel ports use opposite connector types to every other Amiga released - care needs to be taken here to avoid damaging the Amiga 1000 motherboard. The keyboard connector is a telephone connector type - also unique to this Amiga only:

The Amiga 1000 was made in Japan, unlike most of the Amiga models that followed (with the exception of the CDTV which was also made in Japan):

The back of the Amiga 1000 keyboard:

By default the Amiga 1000 comes with just 256k of memory! The memory expansion slot on the front of the Amiga 1000 allows an additional 256k expansion to be installed to being the total to 512k memory. As you can see, this Amiga 1000 has this expansion installed:

I connected it all up to make sure it works (with a RGB to SVGA Scan doubler attached externally), and sure enough, I soon got the Kickstart Disk prompt:

View of the Amiga 1000 setup and running on my desk - the keyboard can slide underneath the Amiga 1000 case when not in use:

The person I bought this from said that the Kickstart and Workbench disks worked fine, but none of the game disks worked. The reason for the game issue became clear to me when I noted that the only kickstart disk included was a v1.1 kickstart!

Most games needed v1.2 kickstart minimum to work properly, which explains why the seller couldn't boot the game disks he sold with it. I will sort this out a bit further down this blog entry.

Unlike all other Amigas, the Amiga 1000 does not have a kickstart ROM included on the motherboard. Instead, the kickstart is loaded from disk on each power on. There were Kickstart disks for v1.1, v1.2 and v1.3, with a few rare and older variants as well.

For now, the v1.1 Kickstart disk included does boot fine on the Amiga 1000, and soon I got the familiar Workbench disk prompt:

I then booted the V1.1 Workbench disk. Have to admit it has been a very long time since I have seen a V1.1 Workbench!

Close up view (sorry for crappy iPhone screen photo quality):

Having determined the Amiga 1000 worked, the next priority was to make a v1.3 Kickstart disk. When I sold my Amiga 1000 ten years ago, I included all the Kickstart disks with it since I assumed I wouldn't need them anymore. Heh, feeling stupid now.

So now I needed to create a new kickstart disk. Fortunately there is an easy way to do this via a program called WriteKickDisk (available on AmiNet here). This needs a Classic Amiga and does not work on the X1000 (I did try it though).

Using my Amiga 4000T, I then ran WriteKickDisk to transfer a Kickstart 1.3 ROM file (copied from my A2000 using a program called GrabKick) to a floppy disk:

So now I am ready to try my new Kickstart 1.3 disk on the Amiga 1000. I power off the Amiga 1000 so it prompts to load the Kickstart disk again:

..and Voila! It works. Kickstart 1.3 now up and running on the Amiga 1000:

Now I can load up the various game disks included with the Amiga 1000 which the previous owner couldn't get to work - Ghouls N Ghosts is shown below - works fine now:

As most Classic Amiga fans would know, it is very desirable to have 1MB memory in an Amiga - 512k is a bit limiting and many games don't run on less than 1MB.

Accordingly I have found and purchased a 512k memory expansion module for the Amiga 1000 that plugs into it on the right hand side connector. This will then give the system 1MB of memory. This right hand side connector is the same as the Amiga 500 Expansion connector, except that it is flipped around as it is on the right side (on the A1000) versus the left hand side (on the A500).

So expansion cards intended for the Amiga 500 can in theory be used in the Amiga 1000 by flipping them around - but there are many exceptions to this rule and physical restrictions depending on the expansion casing used!

I haven't received the 512k expansion module yet, and look forward to trying it out when it arrives!

I am also keen to see if Individual Computers releases the promised ACA1000 expansion to allow A1200 accelerators and Hard disk CF cards on the Amiga 1000, like the ACA500 does for the Amiga 500. That would be awesome!

I will clean up the Amiga 1000, and then take a peek inside the case another time as well to see what version of the motherboard is inside this Amiga 1000.

Potentially this Amiga 1000 system is a good candidate for a Gotek or HxC USB/SD floppy controller in place of the normal floppy drive to load games on it, in the absence of a hard disk or other accelerators to run hard disk based games. It would also make booting the kickstart disk each power on much less tedious. I even may try this out next!