> I think it's a mistake to apply power to them in their current state since that could cause damage.
One big issue is that these old electrolytic caps can leak and damage the motherboard and this is a common fail state for both the A1200 and CD32, as Commodore used some particularly low quality caps in the 1992-1994 era.
Even if you don't replace the caps they should be removed from the board before they go in to long term storage.
Powering up is unlikely to damage the machines. If the caps have already failed powering up won't cause any additional failure. A cap that hasn't been powered in a long time and is on the very edge of failure can be caused to fail by passing power in to it but that is a vanishingly rare edge case. The most likely issue for the caps, if they aren't working, is that they have already leaked.
It wasnt that old when they started in 1985. Then they did it again selecting lowest cheapest EC020 model in 1992, sadly I couldnt find any info/leaks about the price of that contract, official 1992 price for cost reduced 4mips 68EC020-16 was $24.
FWIW when wire wrapping you can get handy little hollow tools. You feed the wire in to a hole in the tool, drop the tool over the pin and just spin the tool to wrap the wire round the pin. It's all very neat and tidy and requires pretty minimal hand-eye-coordination to get it looking nice.
I bought a tiny little one of the tools a while ago when doing some raspberry pi prototyping. Makes it easy to attach a wire to the GPIO header if it's not a dupont lead/wire
To be honest there's lots of little factual inaccuracies in that piece. The notion that the A600 was "fully software-compatible with the A500" just isn't true.
Similarly, claiming that the SoundBlaster had "22 voice sound" vs the Amiga's 4 voices. Yes, later SBs had a 22 channel FM synth chip, but that's not remotely the same thing!
It would have been more accurate to say that as PCs became faster they became capable of mixing multiple audio samples together before playing them through a stereo (ie. "2 voice") DSP - using the greater CPU power to match (and, eventually, exceed) the Amiga's sound capabilities.
In general, I suspect the author is misunderstanding secondary sources, rather than misremembering first-hand experience.
The Amiga's audio reproduction is an odd beast. Incredibly sophisticated one hand then completely hamstrung by the fact that stereo planning has to be done in software. So you either run it as 4 independent mono channels, or you devote lots of CPU time to software panning, which rules doing that if anything else CPU intensive is going on. So you basically can't have stereophonic audio in games.
> * The A600 was squeezed in between the A500+ and the A1200, which means that in 1993, you could buy an A500+ for £199, an A600 for £199 or an A1200 for £299 - all of them supposed entry-level machines. Very confusing for consumers.
If commodore loved anything it was to release products designed to compete with themselves.
Having different products for different market segments is often a good idea. But in many cases Commodore released simultaneous products to compete for the same market segment.
I honestly can't tell if it was stupid or genius of them, on a corporate level, to sell cheap PC:s that directly competed with Amigas in the home segment. On the one hand, they helped usher in the demise of their own cash cow. On the other hand, there was no shortage of competition from other home PC manufacturers.
I think this the best analysis of the Vampire. To my mind it is more of an Amiga-compatible computer (with some odd graphics and CPU incompatibilities) than it is an actual extension of any Amiga platform ideas or plans.
Their odd instance on sticking with the "chipset architecture" also ensures it'll never be anything other than a niche device within a retro-computing niche.
I agree that it would indeed be more interesting if their 68080 actually extended the 68060 rather than branching off from the 68000. And their sAGA/Maggie architecture is a real deadend for programmers if, as they claim, they want to reignite Amiga's popularity. Commodore themselves understood that OCS/AGA was a deadend and designed their Hombre specification to replace it. If they implemented a 64bit version of Hombre than would be an intriguing thing I think.
Though frankly why you wouldn't just design for PCI based GPUs is anyone's guess but then you kind of have to admit your whole platform would just be better off being a PC
It isn't true though. C64 PSUs would fail high and fry downstream chips and passives. Amiga PSUs are designed to fail low, and with the exception of some exceptionally rare faults, they won't fry your computer if the capacitors fail
It fried mine, twice in a row. Lost the A600, which came with A1200 PSU, and then an A500 to a different PSU. Additionally, the second(ary) issue with A1200 PSU is it's barely strong enough to support the base hardware configuration and will make expanded systems unstable.
One big issue is that these old electrolytic caps can leak and damage the motherboard and this is a common fail state for both the A1200 and CD32, as Commodore used some particularly low quality caps in the 1992-1994 era.
Even if you don't replace the caps they should be removed from the board before they go in to long term storage.
Powering up is unlikely to damage the machines. If the caps have already failed powering up won't cause any additional failure. A cap that hasn't been powered in a long time and is on the very edge of failure can be caused to fail by passing power in to it but that is a vanishingly rare edge case. The most likely issue for the caps, if they aren't working, is that they have already leaked.