Amiga 1000

From: Ethan Dicks <erd_6502_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Sun Jul 7 15:08:08 2002

> > Well, I held off for a year and a half, but when the A1000 hit $5 I
> > couldn't help it. I bought it.

Nice find.

> > Now all I need is a keyboard, joystick, and a clue, none of which
> > were available at Goodwill.

Keyboards for A1000s are in short supply, especially compared to CPU units.
Commodore had a trade-in deal at one point where you traded-in your A1000
on an A2000 by taking the keyboard to the dealer.

It is possible to fashion an RJ11<->DIN5 adapter to use an A2000/A3000
keyboard with an A1000, and the A4000 keyboard works if you add a PS/2-
DIN5 converter in the chain. There are also commercial products and
freeware projects to adapt an AT keyboard to the Amiga.

As for Joysticks, any Atari 2600-compatible joystick will do - get one
from a C-64 or wherever. If you are *lucky*, you can find a real C=
joystick, or if even luckier, an Amiga joystick. They weren't common
even when available new.

> > Will a 1541 or 1571 external floppy be a good addition? Which?

There _was_ a box to adapt the 1541 to the parallel port, but just for
reading C-64 disks. Natively, you need a 23-pin external floppy, either
the A1010 or a third-party drive. In any case, it's a "1MB" (raw) floppy,
giving you 880KB on the Amiga. And get real low-density media - don't
just tape over the hole on a high-density disk.
 
> > ISTR that there's no reasonable hope of genning up a boot floppy on a
> > PC or Mac, right?

Exactly so. The Amiga reads and writes an entire track at a time, giving
11 sectors of 512 bytes by skimping on the inter-sector gap. In case
you didn't know, the graphics chips are used to transform the MFM data
from the diskette to binary data buffers. There is no one dedicated floppy
chip as in a PeeCee.

> So I need to find someone to dupe disks to get started? Or <shudder> pay
> for them?

You'll need someone to dup them for you. I don't think there's anywhere
to buy them from anymore.

What you probably want is KS1.2 or KS1.3 (little difference to an A1000).
2.04 was too large (512K) to fit in the WCS board on the A1000 (256K).

You probably have the 256KB memory upgrade behind the plastic panel next
to the internal floppy. Given that, you'll find little to run on a 512KB
Amiga these days. Some old stuff that also runs on an unexpanded A500
is about all you'll have. c. 1986, when I had a 512KB A1000 with a single
floppy drive, I remember playing Larn, Silent Service, Halley Project
and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Other than that, I used it as an 80-col
terminal with VT100. It wasn't until I got another 1.5MB of RAM and a 20MB
disk (c. 1987) that the Amiga became a programming tool for me.


-ethan


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Received on Sun Jul 07 2002 - 15:08:08 BST

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