Retro: Reviving Amiga

21/10/2025

Have you ever heard about old Amiga computers? They were pretty cool! And my brothers had two of those, which I later got from them.

Recently I've got inspired to bring them from my parent's attic and restore. Past me turned out to be smart enough to pack them up in a box and hide deep behind other stuff, so it would not get thrown out as junk.

So let's see what we have here!

Let's start with the good stuff! My favourite Amiga 600 that I used most of my childhood. Here it's all cleaned up and prepared to be sent out for a recap. There is an old ball mouse, floppy drive and 1MB of RAM is removed. I've got a new SD card to IDE adapter that will replace it's 3.5" hard drive. Hopefully I will be able to recover data from it. There is a PCMCIA CF card reader, as well as a CF card and drivers. In the back there is a brand new power supply - I would not trust the old one to not destroy the computer.

The monitor is a Commodore 1802. I have cleaned it up as well, both in and out. Have not tried turning it on yet, as I don't know if it requires a recap or not. My layman inspection of caps tells me it's fine, but we will see. The flap on the bottom is missing in the photo, but I found it later and will re-attach it.

This is the insides of the Amiga 600 before cleaning, with all stuff attached. The 1MB RAM extension is installed, as well as the floppy drive. In the middle is an accelerator card with Motorolla 68030 CPU (I think) hidden below the glued fan, some Fast RAM, and a co-processor.

The hand-modified ATA cable was used to connect the 3.5" hard drive and a CD-ROM drive. You can actually see the hard drive on the right.

The Amiga 1200 had a much more colorful life. It was transplanted into an old PC AT case and expanded with a PPC CPU and a graphics card. These upgrades were later sold off, so nothing but a plain A1200 motherboard remains. I am yet to extract it from the case, nothing is cleaned.

The only remaining part of the original A1200 case is a cut-down top attached to the remains of it's keyboard. I count this as a total loss, new case will be bought if the motherboard works fine.

The underside reveals that the keyboard has been completely remade by hand so that it could be attached with a ribbon cable to the external keyboard port on the computer. It probably still works, but there is no way to put it back inside the case.

Partial look at the A1200 motherboard - it seems to be in fine condition. It will require a recap either way.

Hand-made extensions of the ports so that they could be moved to the back of the case.

A look at the extended ports on the back of the PC case. It was also powered by an PC AT power supply with amiga square connector soldered in to some lines. I still have it, but don't trust it.

Here we can see some old, mostly broken extra pieces of hardware. Buttons on the mouse broke, then were hand-remade with keyboard switches, then broke again. It is possible that the electronics still work and could be used again, if the buttons are somehow fixed.

There is also an old 2.5" 40MB hard drive attached to a frame. It used to be screwed to the back of the A600, but it is possible that the frame is an original used to fit it inside the computer. It has been moved to the back because space was needed for the accelerator. Later replaced with the 3.5" 300MB drive, it is possible that it works, but who knows. A custom 2.5"-to-3.5" IDE adapter is visible.

Drive is a Seagate ST9051A, not much information though.

Time for other goodies that were hidden. This is a binder full of pages torn out of old magazines containing various tips, tricks and cheat codes for games.

Some pages from Gambler magazine issue 4/95 with a Frontier Club article containing various tips for the game, as well as a list of requirements to achieve all ranks. Useful!

An Amiga 500 user manual. Not sure why we had it, since we never owned an Amiga 500. But it's still neat!

A box of treasures! CDs from old Amiga magazines, floppies with games and utilities, and some CDs compiled by my brother - I don't even remember what's there!

I don't have any CD-ROM drive anymore, so I have to get one. I will try to archive all this stuff if it's still possible.

A collection of Amiga Computer Studio CDs, and one Amiga Games.

More ACS, plus some Amiga Magazine.

Various magazine CDs, some private collection ones. Three issues of MACD - don't remember what that was, but there is "Zdrajca" on it! And "Bolo Mrówkojad".

More Amiga magazine CDs, and half of the Aminet Set 2. A couple of burnt ones with no labels.

The other half of Aminet Set. The numbered ones are private collections of files - no idea what's there.

There were also floppies - most of this is probably not exactly legal. Set of installation disks for Workbench 3.1 with an Install disk missing. It has CD-ROM drivers though. Suprisingly legal copy of Workbench 2.1 disk. Some other random utilities and games. A disk with famous State of the Art demoscene demo!

Some disks with games, not even sure if the labels are in any way correct. Franko and Frontier should be what they say though!

More games with dubious labels. Chaos Engine should be what it says. Of note is a full set of original disks with a polish game "W Potrzasku".

A collection of various utility programs, including Deluxe Paint V, AMOS PRO, original AMILAB and some PPC drivers.

A collection of unlabeled or unclear disks. Have to check all of these once I have a working drive.

And last but not least - polish edition of Legends of Valour for Amiga. It's almost complete - Disk 1 is missing, which is a huge shame. I should have this game installed on the hard drive - if it still lives, so there is a chance to recover the data from the missing disk.

All goodies are there, and in good condition - except for the heavily used map and the box itself.

Hopefully my efforts to restore these computers result in me having two cool Amigas. I'll write another blog post once things move forward.