Hello and welcome back to The 8-Bit Guy. So, quick little backstory here. I’m starting to work on
that Amiga documentary that like everybody keeps pestering me about for like the lsat two years.
And one of the things I needed was a stock Amiga 1000. Now, I already had an Amiga 1000,
but mine is heavily modified and I wanted to be able to show a stock,
original Amiga 1000 because its a pretty important part of the history. Well,
so I didn’t have one. And this one was donated to me about a year and a half ago by Dan Merwin
and I’m just now getting around to doing something with it. I actually plugged it in yesterday and it
actually does work, but its very yellowed and very dirty and so it needs the usual 8-Bit Guy
restoration. I actually thought about doing this behind the scenes because I could probably get it
done in 3 or 4 days. But I put a poll on Patreon and it seemed like the overwhelming majority
wanted me to actually do a dedicated video to the restoration, so that’s what we’re going to do.
I’ll start by letting you have a look at the current condition. From this distance,
the computer looks to be in good shape, albeit a bit yellowed. The keyboard, on the other hand, is
pretty disgusting if you have a close look at it. Looking at the Amiga badge, it appears to have
retained the correct color of the machine, where the plastics around it have yellowed. However,
one of the most disgusting parts of this computer is the mouse. Sure it’s yellowed and all, but the
cable is extremely sticky and covered in melted styrofoam. If you look at the box it came in,
you can see where the cable was melted into the styrofoam. This is probably a result of a chemical
reaction between the plasticizer in the cable and the styrofoam. The rear of the computer is also
pretty badly yellowed. Oh, and last thing is, I’m missing the cable that goes from here to here. So
I’ll have to make one. Fortunately it’s just an RJ11 connector, so that shouldn’t be too hard.
All right, so let’s get to work. I’ll start with Windex as usual, just to get all of the dirt off.
There are some minor scuffs on the top, so I’ll scrub those with alcohol.
And now, it’s time to start disassembly. There are 2 snaps on each side of the case, so I’ll take
care not to break those. And here we go. The Amiga has a very thick RF shield. But I’m amazed how
good of shape its in. No corrosion on it at all. Now we’ll get our first look inside the computer.
And I’m breathing a sigh of relief because it is in pretty much perfect condition here.
I don’t foresee needing to do any cleanup, or recapping, or anything like that.
Now I’ll remove the expansion RAM module in the front. And get everything else taken apart.
I don’t actually need to remove the daughterboard here for the restoration,
but while I have it apart, I needed to get some nice still
pictures of the motherboard that I’ll use later in the documentary.
Well, the weather is total overcast and will be for a while. So I’m going to have
to do this indoors under UV light. I want to get as many things as I can
in the bucket here. Since the middle of the front bezel isn’t yellowed,
it should be okay to lay them out like this. I’ve setup my indoor retrobriting contraption again.
On fascinating thing I noticed is that under UV light,
the stuff that was most yellowed was also, ironically,
the brightest and most fluorescent. I had trouble really capturing the contrast on camera compared
to how it looked to the naked eye. I tried a few other cameras with interesting results.
Anyway, so here we are almost 51 hours later and I’m ready to remove these from the bucket. I mean,
I think they are done. Well, the rear piece still has some yellowing as you can see
the original color in this ring around the edge that was normally covered up.
But I think the other two pieces are done. So I’m going to get these rinsed off.
I thought I’d put the front cover up the top case and see how they compare now.
Well, time to do that top piece. That’s just too darned big to submerge. So I’m
going to have to use the plastic wrap method. However, I’ve had good luck with this method,
especially under UV lights because it is much gentler than sunlight. Of course,
it takes a lot longer. Of course, that extra time means I can come out every few hours and
massage the cream around to prevent any splotches.
OK, so while we’re waiting on that, I’ll get to work on this keyboard.
Here’s something I’ve not seen before. There are little covers over the screws on the keyboard.
And now you can see the nightmare that was underneath all of those keys.
I’m going to take this outside and hit it with some compressed air.
That actually got rid of about 90% of it right there. I’ll follow that up with some windex.
There we go, that doesn’t look too bad.
I will say, this keyboard is made much higher quality
than anything else from Commodore. It uses individual switches for each key,
and the thing is heavy with a lot of metal. I’m actually sort of surprised.
OK, now time to clean up these keyboard case pieces. And get them ready for retrobrite.
And now the fun part. Cleaning 89 individual keys.
I’ve never found a better way to do this than to do each by hand.
As you can see the results are worth it. I think the way I’m going to retrobrite these
is by submerging them in peroxide inside of a ziplock bag. I tried this before with
decent success. I’m just going to put these down next to the case. And every hour or so,
I’ll come out here and flip the bags over to make sure everything gets proper exposure.
And now I’ll turn my attention to this mouse. Cleaning it and retrobriting it should be easy. My
real concern is with this gnarly cable. It feels horrible. It’s sticky, rough feeling, and stiff.
I actually worked on this cable for nearly an hour, scrubbing small sections with alcohol.
You can see its working, as here’s a section I’ve cleaned, and here’s
the next gnarly section to move to next. But, after about an hour it came out pretty good.
The cable is clean, it actually feels smooth and soft to the touch, and is very flexible now.
Now back to our keys. It looks like they are done. They still need to dry off, though. So we’ll come
back to that. In the meantime, we’ll take apart this mouse so that it can start retrobriting. And
I’m going to use the same method for this, just a couple of zlplock bags. While waiting on that,
I’ll clean the ball, and then the more important parts, these gunked up rollers. Seriously,
cleaning the ball is pointless if you don’t get this crud off the rollers. And I’ve found no
better way than mechanically scraping it off. Then following that up with alcohol on a cotton swab.
Speaking of cotton swabs, I’ll also take this opportunity to clean the heads of the
disk drive with some alcohol and re-lubricate all of the moving parts with lithium grease.
Oh, and I threw the little disk drive button in with the keys to be retrobritbed. So it’s all done
now and I’ll put that back on. And might as well test it with a disk. I think we’re good there!
Now that the keys are dried off, I’ll start reassembling those.
I’ll start with the hard ones, these are the ones with the little metal cross bars.
And of course, I’ll re-lubricate those sections. And now the rest of the keys.
Well, this looks a million times better than it did a few days ago!
One issue I wanted to point out was the over brightened badges. These are brighter
than their original factory color. I’ve seen this happen before, and in most cases it will
return to the factor color after a few days or weeks. But, if it doesn’t, then I can always
swap badges with my other Amiga 1000 so that I have a perfect computer for the documentary.
All right, let’s pull of the plastic from this top case. This is the piece I’m most concerned
about. Since it is large and flat, any marbling or splotches will be most visible on this piece.
Fortunately, I think I’m in luck. I don’t see any signs of marbling. It looks great!
And now to retrobrite the keyboard. I’m actually going to keep the two pieces
together for this. I’t mostly the top and sides of the keyboard that need help anyway.
And I’m also going to do the same treatment to this rear piece since it is still a bit yellow.
And I’ll let these go for 24 hours or so under the UV lights. This has been the real bottleneck
of this project. So many pieces to treat and I only have so much UV light available.
OK, the next day has arrived. The mouse is looking good, so I’ll go ahead and rinse it off.
And then I can re-assemble it. Yeah, I’m pretty happy with how the mouse has turned
out. And now I’ll dry off the keyboard piece and start re-assembling that.
By the way. Since this keyboard did not come with a cable. I decided to just order a standard
telephone handset cable from amazon. Actually I got two different colors so I could see which
one matched the color the best. I think I’ll go with this one. Yeah, I think it matches
pretty well. I’ll just plug that right in there. I think that will work fine. So,
I’m now finished with the keyboard and mouse. If only I had the computer done!
Time for the bottom case. This is a really irritating shape to deal with. Too big to
submerge, but also not well suited to plastic wrap either. But its mostly the
sides that need treatment, so I have a plan. I put my UV lights on the ground
and arranged them so they’d shine right where I need them. Let’s hope this works!
And here we are 24 hours later. It seems to have
worked pretty well. So at this point I’ll start reassembling the computer.
There are 14 screws for this RF shield. And I thought,
before I screw all of those in, maybe I should do a quick test of the computer to make sure it is
working. I just grabbed a little TV and connected it to the composite output. Should
be good enough for a test. And yep.. Boots all the way up to workbench. I think we’re good.
So, for dramatic effect, let’s go back and look at how it looked originally. And here we go now,
all finished. This computer now looks good enough to appear in my Amiga documentary.
I suppose we should connect up a monitor and make sure everything is working.
It boots up to workbench fine. The mouse seems to be working perfectly.
I’ll even open a notepad here and test out the keyboard. And yep, that’s working
perfectly too. I suppose there’s only one more test we need, which is playing a game.
And I can’t think of anything better to show than the new Amiga version of Petscii Robots.
I’ll use the CD32 controller, as it is the best option for playing this game at the moment.
I will mention that there is no music because this Amiga only has 512K of RAM,
even with the expansion module it has. But the game requires more RAM than that
for music. So the game just disables music on 512K systems, but at least it does work!
And if you are interested, this port of the game is complete and available for sale at this point.
OK, so now that we’re finished with the Amiga restoration, I have a little bit of bad news.
And it revolves around this guy. So this is my Mac mini that I’ve been using for like 10
years. Because this is a 2011 model. And this is what I do all of my video editing on. I actually
have newer computers around the house, but because this one has always been setup with Final Cut Pro,
it’s got the RAM I need, and all of that kind of stuff, I’ve just, it always works, I just used it.
And unfortunately, when I was in the middle of editing, actually not in the middle,
almost completely finished editing this video, the hard drive died. Like, just froze up right in
the middle of using it, computer wouldn’t reboot anymore and I’m just pulling my hair out because
I was like 95% done editing this video. I spent like 2 days trying to recover any information
off of the hard drive. Now, I’m not the kind of person that keeps a lot of information on a
desktop computer because I have my NAS drives for that. So, in fact all of the source files for this
video of course backed up on the NAS drives. So, I was able to recover all of the source files,
but I could never recover the final cut project files. So, I ended up having to re-edit this video
from scratch. And it took about 8 hours to redo it. So I finished editing up the video using my
MacBook Air, which is also several years old. But I took this opportunity to order one of those new
Mac minis with the M1 processor in it. Now, I’m not going to have it until Mid January based on
Apple’s estimated shipping date, but I’ll get to find out what all of the hype is about on that.
But anyway, it’s done. I did want to mention though, unfortunately, I did lose some stuff
for the upcoming Amiga documentary. Nothing super critical. Like,
for example, one of the things I lost was the script, which I had been writing in a
notepad on the hard drive here. So, I’m going to have to start over with that. But nevertheless,
I do expect that Amiga documentary to come out some time in the early part of 2022. So keep your
eye out for that. I guess that wraps it up for this episode. So as always, thanks for watching!