Amiga 300 (!) - Repairs & restoration (Part 1)

Inviere

Next up on 'the bench' was my Amiga 600. Probably my favourite form factor of all the Amiga range, it's so nice, neat and compact, while still offering enough upgradability to turn it into a small powerhouse if needed. Upgrades for this one will be down a the road a few weeks, for now, all that's happening are the usual capacitor replacement, and the floppy drive isn't working (it's not detecting when a disk is inserted) so that needs to be looked at.

^^ The box is in decent condition, apart from the tear, but it's really nice to have it boxed regardless. As can be seen, it is powering on in its current state, so I'll know if it doesn't power on after the cap change, it'll be my fault! No expansion ram installed at this time either, that'll be in a small suite of upgrades I have planned for the machine next.

^^ Strip down complete, the board is in immaculate condition, factory new almost barring the odd dust bunny. It's also a revision 1 board, meaning it carries the bizarre Amiga 300 name, revealing what Commodore truly intended the 600 to be originally - a cut down/affordable 500. Luckily it included some modern niceties like the IDE controller and so forth, meaning it never really became the "poor man's" Amiga 500, and could, with some help, stand above the 500.

^^ If you're going to pick a console to live and retire in, this 600 really was a nice choice. I wonder how long this moth survived in here, and if she/he had a happy life? 🧐

^^ There's a number of parts/components that need to be either removed, or protected for this job. The coil shown above, and the keyboard connector are very close to the existing caps, meaning they could easily be damaged/burned by the hot air gun that's used to remove the smd caps. Some kapton tape can be used to provide a basic heat shield also. You can use tin foil too, but some of the spaces are so small to work in, foil can get in the way in places.

^^ Decapped, cleaned down with IPA, and ready for new capacitors.

I bought the cap kit from Sordan, as it IS advertised tobe compatible with the Revision 1 board. Sadly, I don't know where that info came from because several of the caps from the Sordan kit are FAR too big for a couple of locations on the Rev 1 board. The two caps shown above are placed on by hand, but you can clearly see the one on the left is nowhere near where it's supposed to be soldered. That's as far to the right as it can possibly go, and the solder pads are not even close to lining up with the leg to solder to.

^^ Recapped now, thanks to a more competent seller on eBay. Board has been cleaned down with IPA again, just to remove any oils/flux/contaminants after the job is complete. All removed components also soldered back into place, and it's ready for testing.

^^ Before testing though, I wanted to open the floppy drive to have a look at why it's not detecting discs and reading them. I knew it wasn't dirty heads etc, because there was no attempt to spin the drive up, so it had to be either a dead motor or something wrong with the detection switch mechanism.

^^ This spring/tensioner had two problems, 1) it was not sitting in its retaining holes at the side of the drive, and 2), bizarrely, it was upside down. So there was no spring pressure being applied on disc insertion.

^^ Tensioner flipped to its correct orientation, and aligned with its retention holes now. I also cleaned the heads with IPA while I had it open.

^^ Reassembly for testing. I wasn't the one who pierced the warranty sticker btw!

^^ Huzzah! It works, powers on, and reads discs! ( I actually DO own this game disc with manual, it can be seen above in the box - I must have forgotten to get a gameplay picture!)

That's all I can do here for now. There's some upgrades needed next, to bring the machine up to WHDload spec, and some nice speed boosts, which I'll order in the coming weeks. Once I have the parts, I'll make a follow up thread demonstrating them.

Andrew76

Lovely work as always chief but what's with the clickbait title forcing me to see what an Amiga 300 was? 😋

Agreed though, the 600 has a lovely form factor, much more desk friendly than the 500/1200. Man that last screenshot brings back memories - loved Grand Prix back in the day, you should chuck up some gameplay pics if you take them.

Steve X2

Very nice indeed. I'm a big fan of the A600 myself. It got a lot of hate in the old days, but with modern upgrades a lot of people are coming around to it.

CathalDublin

Picked up an a600, haven’t used an Amiga since bitd. I won’t have it in my hand for a couple of weeks, but is there anyway to get a sata SSD working with it?

Inviere

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119313032#Comment_119313032

There's an internal IDE header, so any sata on that bus would be wasted/bottlenecked. You can use solid state compact flash cards though, or even ide2sd if you like. There could be a way to add sata drives, but I don't think the Amiga has any bus that'd be able to take advantage of them?

CathalDublin

I’ve a few spare 128 and 256 drives. But all ssd sata

maybe an ide to add adapter but if sata will run at same speed I’ve drives gathering dust

lmimmfn

I've only seen mSATA or PATA compatible SSDs being used with Amigas.

However it's kinda pointless, an unexploded Amiga with 68000 will only manage a transfer rate of just over 1MB over second, with a Vampire using on board SD this would get 10-12MB per second.

Also a 32Gig CF card with the IDE adapter is only 41 euro https://amigastore.eu/en/132-cf-hard-disk-kit-25.html

Or 20euro for a 4Gig CF card. Also, the default Amiga filesystem can only address 4GB, so if you don't want the hassle it's best to just get a 4GB one, or partition a larger card into 4GB partitions, otherwise you would need to use SFS.

On my 1200 before I added a vampire with 32GB CF card and 256Gig SD card I used 3 4GB cards, one internally and one in the PCMCIA slot( swapping between the CF cards whenever necessary, had 1 for games and 1 for apps like dpaint etc.), for most use I.e. games 8GB total is plenty for workbench bootup and whdload.

Also using WHDLoad you would need a min of 4 meg ram in the Amiga and ideally a 68030 accelerator.

CathalDublin

Amiga overload, I’ll pickup one of those 32gb CF cards, thanks for the link

lmimmfn

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119376545#Comment_119376545

No probs,just make sure you format the card as multiple 4GB partitions.

You'll need some kind of accelerator(at least 4 meg ram, 020 or 030 cpu) to be able to have all the games you want to play through workbench(ideally this is the best Amiga setup), otherwise use a gotek(disk drive emulator) to use disk images directly(cheaper but more hassle), gotek wouldn't use the CF card, it uses its own USB stick.

Colonel Panic

Question on the cap removal, @Inviere, are you having good success with hot air still? Have any popped on you yet?

I’ve got a Saturn recap coming up and finally have a hot air rework station!

Inviere

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119387810#Comment_119387810

I can't remember which Amiga I was doing, possibly the CD32, but one cap popped on me yeah....got a fright from that! The hot air in general is successful yeah, you just need to dial in the temp (so it's not too hot to burn the pcb but hot enough to flow the solder), the distance to the cap itself (too close and they'll pop, too far away the solder won't flow), and the movement pattern (to evenly heat both sides of the cap and KEEP the heat there.) After you do a few you get better at it.

That said, I'm strongly thinking of buying a Hot Tweezers for this type of job...they make it look SO much easier, faster, and much easier on the pads.