Amiga : Converting to full ECS

Now that the best Agnus available is installed, we just need the best Denise. Denise is pin compatible, so we won’t need an adapter.

 

Here’s OCS Denise (8362r8):

 

Since I don’t know how this really shuld be done, I just put the tiniest flathead screwdriver i have under the chip, and carefully forced it up. Extreme care should be taken as not to bend the chip’s pins!

And here’s HiRes Denise (8373r4) in her place:

 

And here you can see that she’s located at the upper left portion of the motherboard:

You can even see the edge of the Agnus adapter card in the bottom right corner 🙂

 

If this A500 had a Kickstart 1.4, and a new clock battery on the RAM expansion board, she would now be a fully functional A500+ 🙂

Amiga : ChipRAM expansion

A while ago I recieved some chips for my A500, They’ve just been lying around waiting for me to get some free time.

 

For now I’ll do the Motherboard SlowRAM to ChipRAM mod, and Install the DKB MegAChip. Since the tutorial i link to contains pictures of the mod, I’ll just add pictures of the Agnus swap & MegAChip adapter.

 

Here’s the Socket on the Motherboard with the original (1MB) 8372A:

 

 

 

 

Here I didn’t want to risk destroying the chip or socket, so I got a PLCC extractor to remove the chip.

 

Here’s a pic of the adapter installed in the Agnus slot, and the Super Agnus (8375) installed in the adapter.

 

Then I added the lead to pin 36 on Gary.

This is what that looks like:

 

So now I’m at 2MB ChipRAM.

512k @ MB

512k @ Trapdoor

1024k @ DKB MegAChip

Modding my Amiga 500: The surprise

When i inspected the A500, I saw something that’s not good 😦

The battery for the Amiga’s clock had started leaking. The stuff that leaks from these batteries is very corrosive
, so this is really not good!

The first I did was check to see if the motherboard had started corroding. At that point I got lucky. The only thing affected was the RAM expansion.

I forgot to take pictures before removing battery and cleaning, but here you can see the expansion with battery removed:

The red arrows point to the corrosion.
The blue rectangle is approximately where the battery was.

 

Here is a zoomed view:

 

 

I used a pair of small pliers and snipped the leads to the battery, and then ripped it off the board.

I cleaned the residue, and the corrosion with rubbing alcohol and a toothbrush.

Then i rinsed it well with clean water and set it to dry.

 

RAM expansion is dried and tested. A500 boots without a hitch, and RAM is detected in Workbench 🙂

Yay!

Modding my Amiga 500: The Plan

The plan so far:

* Get 2MB Chip RAM
* Get full ECS (Enhanced Chip Set)
* Floppy Emulation
* Get the Zeus68k (Accelerator, IDE controller, Kickstart switcher, Fast RAM expansion, Freezer e.t.c) (http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=65047) or feasible alternative.