Back in July, 2017, I picked up my first Amiga 1000. It was in pretty fine shape although it had some yellowing on the right side of its case and the keyboard was super nasty. It's mouse was also mostly useless as its y-axis didn't work. And its fan would make the occasional soft "clunk" sound, which informed me that the bearings were in the early stages of being worn out.
I took care of the keyboard thoroughly and cleaned out the case. Other than killing several dust bunnies, mechanically speaking the machine has proven to be very sound.
Last week I picked up a second Amiga 1000 off of Craigslist in the Washington state area an hour south of Seattle. It was known that this Amiga would not boot up. From the description it sounded like the on-board RAM had gone bad (which is soldered on and a total pain to replace). But the machine looked pretty decent in the pictures. And, it came with a 1080 Amiga monitor, a real-time clock (status unknown), keyboard, mouse, 1010 external drive and some books and software. All-in-all, quite a haul. The caveat being I had no idea if any of it worked.
After meeting the owner in a Starbucks parking lot and seeing the hardware, my heart skipped a beat as the 1000's case looked absolutely pristine - like, it had never seen the light of day!
After getting everything home I turned on the power. The machine started flashing a green screen repeatedly as I expected it to. That night I took the machine completely apart and in a total whim swapped out the CIA chips. I'd seen a video where this actually fixed a green screen once and hoped there might be a chance it would fix mine. No such luck, unfortunately. The on-board RAM really is bad.
So, I decided to move my working machine's motherboard over to the pretty 1000's case. I started pulling the new case off and, to my astonishment, the new motherboard looked like it had been stored in a vacuum. I couldn't believe that the RAM was bad as the machine looked literally brand new. Even the floppy drive practically glimmered in the light.
After disassembling both, I moved the working motherboard over and buttoned everything back up again. I flicked on the switch and ... I noticed the new machine's fan was clunking even worst than my daily driver had been! Oh man what a bummer that was. But then the Kickstart screen flicked onto my new 1080's monitor, and I breathed a sigh of relief. That's when I noticed that the new 1080 monitor (which also looked new and has not a single scratch) was displaying some mild ghosting on high-contrast screens like the Kickstart. Another bummer. Oh well.
I grabbed my Kickstart disk and... that's when I realized that the new looking drive had gummed up internals! I could barely eject the disk after I put it in the drive (it did read the disk at least).
At this stage I unbuttoned the machine all over again and removed both the disk drive and power supply. Luckily, before ever buying the Craigslist haul I had purchased a refurbished power supply off Ebay. I had hoped to save it, but ultimately wound up putting it in the new case. I then replaced the gummy disk drive with the one from my daily driver. So now the yellowed case was in pieces and in a crate, along with the dead motherboard, gummy drive and two power supplies with aging fans.
I buttoned the new machine up again and flicked on the power switch once more. The new fan purred like a kitten. I put in my Kickstarter disk and it snapped into position perfectly, as I knew it would. Excited, I loaded my terminal software to tell some of my online friends on my favorite BBS about my long day and success story.
I pressed Return on my new, sparkling keyboard and... the Return key stayed glued to the keyboard ad never came back up again! Was my new machine fresh from a glue factory?! What a drag. It looks brand new, but I need to pull it apart and give it a deep clean, too. After shutting down, I plugged in my old (clean and near-pristine) keyboard in and finally went to Particles BBS.
It's worth noting that the new L-connectored mouse is perfect.
I had to transplant a lot more things than I originally planned, but I can say with confidence that I'm now the happy owner of a gorgeous Amiga 1000 with very solid guts that should last many years, knock on wood. And if something does go wonky, I've got a good set of backups for several systems.