This journey started with a defective AMIGA 2000 mainboard that I got for very cheap as it had suffered from some battery leakage. Although the battery had been removed and some cleanup was attempted by the previous owner, the board showed no signs of live whatsoever. The battery juice had eaten through several traces which had to be fixed. Also, somebody had installed custom chips in the wrong orientation – see if you can spot them on the photo below.
Board repair
The damage affected the area between the CPU slot and the ROM socket each of which had to come off to clean up the corrosion and to fix the traces.
After trace repair and adding fresh sockets and making sure all ICs were correctly installed, the thing sprung to life! Couldn’t believe it, the repairs were successful!
Polishing things
To complete the mainboard side of things, I added back the removed CPU slot, replaced the keyboard and mouse/joystick ports with fresh ones and added a coin cell battery to where the infamous VARTA had been.
Completing the build
Now that the mainboard was fixed, what should I do with it? I thought about selling it on, but since I had an A2000 back in the 90s, I decided to restore it to full glory.
So I got a very nice AMIGA 2000 case to be the new home for the mainboard and I made an adapter bracket for an ATX PSU that I had kicking around. I bought the wiring harness to adapt ATX to AMIGA from AmigaKit.
For this build, I decided not to go for period accuracy and use the original Zorro cards. I wanted to give the PiStorm a try which is available with a A2000 CPU slot adapter as well.
The PiStorm is a phenomenal package we would have dreamed of back in the day. It packs an accelerator, memory expansion, storage, networking and a graphics card into a Raspberry PI bare-metal firmware. The Raspberry PI is connected by some adaptation logic to the AMIGA bus and emulates the add-on devices as configured. At the same time, the AMIGA custom chips are being used for their intended purposes.
There is some philosophical discussion on the respective forums on whether the PiStorm approach is right or wrong, and some argue that with the level of emulation used, the original hardware gets redundant, and you could simply run everything off the Raspberry. Others say it’s a practical way to get all the expansion devices at a very attractive price, whereas acquiring them individually costs a fortune and adds the risk of incompatibility or sudden failure due to age. At the same time, the original custom chips are still being used natively, meaning that demos and games that depend on their complexities work as they should, which is difficult to achieve on software-based emulation.
I lean towards the second group and believe there is nothing wrong with using the PiStorm. After all, if I want to go full retro, I can always deactivate emulated parts or pull the PiStorm altogether (which I will do if I find interesting old parts – feel free to donate).
To get the most out of the PiStorm, I upgraded to Kickstart 3.2.2 and installed Amiga OS 3.2 on the machine.
Rounding it off
An easy and by many software titles required upgrade is the 1MB chip ram mod to the early Amiga models. It involves swapping the 8371 Agnus chip to an 8372 or 8375 one, switching jumper J101 (by the power connector) and cutting open J500 (above gary) and J102 (above Agnus and the crystal). Be careful not to damage nearby traces and use the proper tool for the chip swap.
If done right, the onboard memory will be treated as chip RAM and should show up as such on the Workbench.
I wanted a CD drive in the AMIGA, to install the OS properly from the CD-ROM but also to have the option of using old public domain CDs or maybe more recently published games released on physical media.
The Amiga got an “AT Bus Clone”, a Zorro-II card which is a clone of a clone of a 1994 AT-Bus adapter from bsc / ALFA Data. It allows to connect common 40-Pin AT Bus and ATAPI devices and it also has a autoboot capability.
Being careful to install it the right way since it does not have a slot bracket (the front and back are labelled on the PCB), it goes into the AMIGA 2000 together with a DVD RW drive that I found in my stash. The driver is in the ROM and with the IDEfix package allows to read ISO-9660 CD-Roms. Finally, I could install the Amiga OS 3.2.1 update 🙂
Using the AMIGA 2000 in 2024
Firing up the Amiga brings back memories of the war of the system in the 90s – Amiga vs ATARI vs PC vs Mac. Those conversations were had with lots of dedication and passion for each system by their owners. It was a time of diversity in the computer industry, with many vendors going different routes regarding hardware and software to pursue what they were best at.
The Amiga was a great machine back then, very much ahead of its competition due to the multitude of custom chips that offloaded the CPU from tedious tasks. At the same time, its specialised hardware design did not age well. The PCs’ open design allowed improved hardware to be added when it became available, eventually pushing the limits beyond what the Amiga could do.
Today, the PiStorm is an essential package to add newer technology to the Amiga and allow it to use the internet via Wifi, adding enough RAM and CPU power for demanding applications and providing high-resolution graphics over HDMI.
With WHDLoad, enjoying a rich library of games is possible without swapping physical, error-prone and slow 3.5″ disks.
However, even with all the upgrades, the Amiga is not what I would use as a daily driver beyond the occasional round of Silkworm. The OS is too limited, and modern systems have evolved significantly since the days of Workbench. However, none of my retro machines qualifies as such, but they are great for tinkering and exploring how computing was back in the day.
Technical Details
| This Amiga 2000 | Original A2000 Spec | ||
| CPU | 68040 (emulated) | 68000 @ 7.14MHz | |
| FPU | 68881 (emulated) | – | |
| Memory | 1MB Chip Ram, 256MB FastRam | 0.5 MB Chip Ram, 0.5 MB FastRam | |
| Harddisk | 64GB Solid State (emulated) | – | |
| Removable Media | GoTek virtual floppy | 3.5″ 880kb Floppy Drive | |
| Video | Amiga OCS w. ECS Agnus Picasso IV RTG Graphics (emulated) | Amiga OCS | |
| Sound | Amiga Chipset | Amiga Chipset | |
| Other | Wifi Networking (emulated) | ||
| Manufactured | 2024 | 1987 | |
| Release Price | n/a | USD $1,495 USD $4,150 in 2024 inflation-adjusted |
Sources
- The PiStorm project on Github
- The Emu68 project as an alternative firmware for PiStorm
- Alfa Data AT Bus 2008 on the Amiga Hardware Database
- 1 Meg ChipRam and ECS conversion by Jan Beta on youtube
- Official Amiga OS 3.2 from Hyperion
- Amiga 2000 on Wikipedia
