I happened across a crazy deal that resulted in me being the proud owner of an Amiga 4000 once again 🙂 It was probably the mid 90’s that I’ve last owned an Amiga computer so with all the emulation testing I’ve done, I apparently caught the “Amiga” bug again.
A4000/40 @ 25Mhz, 16 MB fast ram, 2 MB chip ram. I’ve added 3.1 Kickstart Roms, a 250 GB IDE drive I had lying around, a SATA DVDRW/CDRW I had lying around with a SATA -> IDE converter. The floppy drive sounded horrible and failed to boot off the 3.1 Install disk, luckily WinUAE came to the rescue. Using an IDE to USB cable I was able to attach the 250 GB IDE drive to my Windows 10 PC and then use WinUAE to partition/format and install Workbench 3.9 to the A4000. Removed from WinUAE and insert in the A4000 and boot……and Workbench eventually displays (Using DblNTSC screen mode as my monitor will not sync to the low 15 Khz frequency of the native Amiga screen modes.
To add, I have a Video Toaster 4000 and…..(drum roll)…..the card I dreamed of owning during my earlier Amiga 4000 days……the Video Flyer! I can’t wait to start playing around with this. I have an external dual TBC so I can correct timing and/or genlock the signals to match on digital cameras to feed the Toaster’s switcher which then feeds the Flyer card.
I’ll have to do some basic comparisons between Amithlon hardware and Amiga 4000 hardware….so far, of course, the Amithlon blows away the older A4000 (CPU performance, RTG video modes, newer mice/keyboards, etc..).
I was able to acquire an X-Surf 100 network card for the A4000. Installed and tested, though I am having a few issues with it. Large data transfers seem to cause a reboot, either downloading from the web or transferring from my NAS box via SMBFS. It’s very possible it is due to the Super Buster revision 9 in the system. I’m needing a little work done so I’ll probably prep for a one time shot at everything (re-cap, new memory sockets, add socket in place of Super Buster to upgrade to revision 11, etc..).