I'm finally moving on from Amiga for serious work (music composition & recording, graphic art, etc.).
My main Amiga finally gave up the ghost with a fried SCSI card that actually destroyed a CD-ROM drive in the process.
Bought my first PC today (well, I've used other people's before lots). Looking forward to the amazing audio software available.
I have lots of other Amigas, but none I can tweak to the point of replicating the setup I once had, or relying on them as a serious work computer.
I will be keeping one A2000 just in case I want to fall back on the Amiga as a MIDI composition tool again, and I have a few A500s to use as game machines. But I really need something a little more reliable, and cheaper to find replacement parts, for creative projects.
It's not the Amiga's fault, really. I'd say that 20 years of service without failure is a really great record!
The VIC is kind of nice in comparison. Very simple. Very easy to repair. My tweaked A2000 was lovely while it worked, but it was a mish-mash of exotic and hard to find hardware that I knew would be difficult to replace once any part of it failed.
Yes, I am going to continue to use my hordes of Amiga applications and other software through emulation on the PC. So in a way, the Amiga lives on in a new body.
Here's a toast to my A2000!
Toast to my A2000 (R.I.P.).
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Re: Toast to my A2000 (R.I.P.).
What kind of exotic hardware? Was it just the SCSI controller and CD-ROM that went? Replacing a SCSI controller shouldn't be too difficult.ral-clan wrote:My tweaked A2000 was lovely while it worked, but it was a mish-mash of exotic and hard to find hardware that I knew would be difficult to replace once any part of it failed.
In the end it will be as if nothing ever happened.
Well, the SCSI was an A2091 card. Common enough. But then you need to buy three replacement chips. These are a bit of a pain in the arse to track down and are generally $25 each: the Western Digital upgrade chip, another chip which I forget the name of, and the ROM chips (I had an expensive and irreplacable GURU-ROM chip in there). I think at least the GURU ROM was fried when the board failed.
But I also used a Repulse audio board for all my music work. It's awesome on playback but for some reason it's picky about recording. With the A2091 it was just fine, silent. With an 060 accelerator board with built in SCSI and in an A3000 with onboard SCSI it picked up digital noise bursts during recording (even through the optical SPDIF input). This is just plain unacceptable for serious audio work.
The Plextor SCSI CD burner was also fried (with a popping sound and burning smell). It was one of the few burners that could handle 2X burning on this card.
Not to mention the SCSI board on the A2000 was always a real bottleneck for audio and CD burning. It always took about 2-3 minutes to load a 3 minute song for editing. Then there were the occassional SCSI Checksum errors despite very carefully checking for termination, etc.
Overall, the system worked well enough for me to deal with its quirks while it all functioned. But to have to spend a lot of money to replace it all, just to get it back to the quirky state it was once at isn't worth it. It'll basically put me back at the cutting edge for audio recording technology for about 1996. Time to move on to faster, cheaper hardware.
I'll be keeping one A2000 in reserve, just in case I get the desire to to MIDI only work (no audio this time) on the Amiga again. It was always great for that (when it worked).
Plus, I have a few A500s I'll be keeping for retro-gaming. That should be fun whenever I get the room to set them up (not in this house, though!).
I have already ordered Cloanto's "Amiga Forever" so I can run most of my Amiga apps on the new PC, so I won't really be giving up on Amiga, just running my stuff on hardware that is newer and cheaper to replace.
But I also used a Repulse audio board for all my music work. It's awesome on playback but for some reason it's picky about recording. With the A2091 it was just fine, silent. With an 060 accelerator board with built in SCSI and in an A3000 with onboard SCSI it picked up digital noise bursts during recording (even through the optical SPDIF input). This is just plain unacceptable for serious audio work.
The Plextor SCSI CD burner was also fried (with a popping sound and burning smell). It was one of the few burners that could handle 2X burning on this card.
Not to mention the SCSI board on the A2000 was always a real bottleneck for audio and CD burning. It always took about 2-3 minutes to load a 3 minute song for editing. Then there were the occassional SCSI Checksum errors despite very carefully checking for termination, etc.
Overall, the system worked well enough for me to deal with its quirks while it all functioned. But to have to spend a lot of money to replace it all, just to get it back to the quirky state it was once at isn't worth it. It'll basically put me back at the cutting edge for audio recording technology for about 1996. Time to move on to faster, cheaper hardware.
I'll be keeping one A2000 in reserve, just in case I get the desire to to MIDI only work (no audio this time) on the Amiga again. It was always great for that (when it worked).
Plus, I have a few A500s I'll be keeping for retro-gaming. That should be fun whenever I get the room to set them up (not in this house, though!).
I have already ordered Cloanto's "Amiga Forever" so I can run most of my Amiga apps on the new PC, so I won't really be giving up on Amiga, just running my stuff on hardware that is newer and cheaper to replace.
1000DigitalQuirk wrote:I wonder if you could install the components of a modern PC inside your Amiga 2000? I think that would be neat.
http://techrepublic.com.com/2346-10877_11-4604.html
You couldn't just replace the 2091? I'm not saying it isn't time to upgrade or move on, I'm just wondering why you couldn't get the 2000 back on its feet. As it happens, I got rid of two Amiga 2000s at the last TPUG meeting and I know for sure that one had a 2091A and I think the other did too. Oh well.ral-clan wrote:Well, the SCSI was an A2091 card. Common enough. But then you need to buy three replacement chips.
In the end it will be as if nothing ever happened.