Back in December 2018, I installed a RapidRoad USB expansion in my Amiga 1200. I only had limited time to test the setup at the time, everything seemed to work great, and I was happy.
When I finally wanted to use the USB ports for real about half a year later, though, the USB expansion suddenly stopped working, its power LED would not even turn on anymore. In a discussion with Jens Schönfeld, the designer of the USB expansion, I learned that my RapidRoad board probably died due to voltage/power fluctuations. After over two decades, not only do the capacitors on the mainboard need capacitor replacing but also the power supply’s components are deteriorated.
Thankfully, although entirely not his fault, Jens Schönfeld offered to repair my RapidRoad board for free. He insisted, though, that I get a new power supply for my Amiga in order to avoid running into the same problem again.
When I asked him at the time, Jens Schönfeld did not want to suggest a replacement power supply for me. So I turned to Stefan Schakow for help. He suggested to use a regular ATX power supply that only needs slight modification for use with an Amiga. The power supply he modified for me arrived back in September 2019:
Again, I only had limited time available for testing when the power supply arrived. It was only over the last couple of days that I powered my Amiga 1200 up again. Both the power supply and the USB expansion work like a charm.
In his seminar at Revision 2020, Jens Schönfeld revealed that he is working on a new Amiga power supply. And while my current setup works, I sure look forward to a modern power supply that is explicitly designed for the Amiga.
At Evoke 2019 last week, Bartman/Abyss presented a seminar on “Modern Amiga 500 Demo Development” where he showed off a “new open-source and easy-to-use toolchain and extension for Visual Studio Code you can harness the power and speed of GCC 8 code generation, full syntax highlighting and code completion, as well as source-level debugging” that he developed.
This toolchain is now available on GitHub and I just played with it a bit:
It is really convenient to use a modern code editor and then just hit “F5” and have Bartman’s toolchain take over to compile the code with a modern compiler (that can perform optimizations not available back in the day) to an Amiga binary that then gets automatically executed in an emulated Amiga.
Today the Kipper2k External Compact Flash Adapter that I ordered in December of last year finally arrived. After a quick and painless installation I can now replace my Amiga 1200’s internal “hard disk drive” without opening the computer’s case.
Yesterday I finally found the time to migrate my Amiga 1200 from its original case to the new case.
Preparing the new case for the migration was rather annoying: it took a couple of hours (and quite some scalpel blades) to cut out the marked recesses for the USB ports and the external CompactFlash adapter.
While I was at it, I also replaced the original keyboard with the one from the repair bundle.
The designers of the Amiga were far-sighted. The Amiga 1200, for instance, does not only have an expansion port for processor cards but also a slot for PCMCIA cards as well as a so-called clock port.
In the Amiga 1200’s day, there was not a lot of hardware available that could be connected using PCMCIA. Nowadays the PCMCIA slot can be used for network and CompactFlash adapters, for instance.
The “clock port” was originally only intended for attaching a real-time clock for time keeping. However, it can be used as a general purpose expansion port.
Recently I bought a RapidRoad USB expansion and today I finally found the time to install it. Connected to my Amiga 1200’s “clock port”, it provides two USB 2.0 ports. Installation of the Poseidon USB software stack was as easy as installing the hardware and now I can, for instance, use USB sticks to transfer data from my PC to my Amiga 1200.
As you can see in the photo above, the inside of my Amiga 1200 is rather messy at the moment. This will change once I find the time for the move to the new case.
