Hi, welcome to tear down Tuesday Now I actually asked on Twitter what I should actually tear down today because well I do actually do the tear down on Tuesday here in Australia not Austria now I Had the overwhelming response said to the Amiga 500. here it is the Amiga 500. In all, its uh, bromide. uh yellowed Glory about 25 years old? uh nine.

I'm not sure of the exact vintage of this one, but the Amiga Uh 500 Commodore Amiga 500 was came out in 1987, discontinued in 1991. So let's round it to uh, 25 year old vintage computer technology. Oh hope it's better inside than it smells. Let's go.

and yes, unfortunately it does have that old garage smell because that's exactly where I got this sucker from. In fact I got uh two of them. They look up very similar except one's got a key missing and uh, one that supposedly works and one doesn't go figure. Anyway, we'll open this one which has all the keys intact and yes, that it is turning that classic uh yellow color as a lot of these old computers did.

As I've mentioned before, due to the uh fire flame retardant, uh bromide used in the Plastics, you can actually get a chemical and a process to get rid of that if you want. But here it is folks. state of the art from 25 years ago. Very popular, incredibly popular uh personal computer.

one of the most popular of all time, the Amiga 500. Many millions of these suckers sold 512k a ram which was a pretty huge back then. This is almost a follow-up to essentially the Commodore 64, although there was an Amiga 1000 a couple of years before this. but really, that was like a big box you know, type one.

so this all in one keyboard unit. Very, you know, kind of reminiscent of the Commodore 64. So it is a bit of a successor in that respect. So uh, 68 000 Processor: Very common processor used back in those days just to shade over seven megahertz or so.

Of course came in Pal in Ntsc standards as all computers of the day did. This one's obviously comes from Australia so it's going to be a power one. We have built-in floppy disk drive which uh, is actually uh, completely the three and a half inch floppy disk drive. by the way, folks.

uh, not that five and a quarter rubbish. This is state of the art of course for 1987 and it can read and write IBM disks and Mac disks and all sorts of stuff because it's fully programmable apparently so the control isn't fixed to one particular type of format disk. And of course it had the separate numeric keypad, separate cursor keys. That was a huge thing back in those days, Actually, to you know, very professional if you had a separate numeric keypad.

Wow. a little nice. separate cursor keys. well playing with the Big Fellas the IBM.

Now we've got two, uh, nine pin, uh joystick interfaces left and right. Audio: It actually had a four Channel audio um 8-bit audio at I think 20 something kilohertz sample rate. So it had four independent Pwm channels so quite Advanced Audio capability for its day disk drive interface serial Port interface yeah, the big 25 way one and a parallel port as well. The power unfortunately I don't have the power adapters for it, but maybe we'll be able to power it up with a bench Supply see if it works RGB video output and also a composite uh mono monochrome output as well.

On the bottom though, we have an expansion slot down here um, affectionately known as the Trapdoor I Believe by the Amiga 500 aficionados and let's take a look. cut this sucker here. it's the Commodore And there you go: 500 Serial Number: 72 Double Nine seven I Have no idea if that one's uh, what date or uh, you know, if that's uh, fairly old or whatever. But there you go.

Attempted repair by unauthorized persons voids warranty. We're gonna screw that, that's for sure. and I think there is a screw under there. it's gone ski.

Oh, I thought that was a screw under there I don't think it is. No, it's not. Ah, and on the opposite side of the floppy under this, uh, little cover here, we've got a big expansion header and I believe. Uh, you could get uh, processor expansions and all sorts of uh stuff for this one.

So what quite a flexible expansion slot. And if we lift up the trap door as they call it that folks is incredibly disappointing. We have what looks like she, oh no, it is a module. Look at that I thought it was a how does that come out I Don't know.

It looks like there's a pin header down this side. Oh, all the Amiga 500 aficionados are probably screaming at me. It does slide out folks. There you go.

What's under there I wonder I Don't know. Let's crack that open first. it's actually soldered. Is that salt? Yeah, it's salted completely through.

Hmm. trying to stoke up the iron so we'll just rip this open. They're pretty serious about shielding on this, so let's just oh yeah. it's got that old smell.

You better believe it. There we go. we're up smoking. I Hope that doesn't set off the building.

uh, smoke alarm? That'd be embarrassing. this old soda smell. Ah, classic. my.

uh JBC iron has no problems with thermal capacity on that huge bit of metal shield in, by the way, Not a problem whatsoever. I've only got my iron set for like 300 there and it's just ripping through that. Not a problem. Oh look at that.

We have some dip packages and uh I wonder what it is sure or your Mega 500 aficionados? no instantly. but I don't is it? Ram Expansion probably. and well, no surprises whatsoever. It is a memory expansion card 512k.

Ram So this Is a one Meg Amiga 500. Whoa. And we've got ourselves a real-time clock down here. There we go.

It's an Oaky part. There's our 32.768 Kilohertz watch crystal as a little tweaking cap there and our backup battery has I don't know. starting to get a bit crusty and there's the money shot for you retro fans haha Texas Instruments Tms4256 150 nanosecond. Uh dram.

Woohoo! 256k bit Unbelievable. So obviously we need 16 of these chips to give us 512 megabytes and that's exactly what we get. And check out the date code: 33 First week 1987. So yeah, um, this could be one of the very early units.

Will I be able to see this a bit more when we open the main board. Uh, see what all the date codes on there? it could have been? you know, Old Stock uh RAM or something like that when they assembled it. But you know, back in the day I don't know these things were. you know, usually pretty high turnovers.

So yep, we might have a 1987 vintage first year unit here folks. And we have ourselves a REV 5 board though. So yep, your guess is as good as mine. and yes, assembled in Hong Kong as were all uh, low priced dubious products back in the mid 80s.

And as everyone knows, what are you talking about Doc: all the best stuffs made in Japan And we have a confirmation date on the PCB as well 29th Week 87 that would have been the uh bear board PCB manufacturer putting that date on there most likely now. As for the main unit, we have a combination of talks, bits and Phillips So I'm not sure what's going on here. There's a couple missing, so someone's had a someone's probably had a hack at this. Not sure if all of them have to come out.

I'm assuming I mean this is holding down some sort of no that seems to be holding down some sort of Extra metal thing in there. This is a much deeper screw here, so I'm going to assume they only have one over there. It's kind of weird. Ah, and there's a couple of talks along the top here, so I'm not.

Yeah, they all look matched so they're probably original. so maybe these Phillips ones actually are holding down something else in there. which will we might find out? Yeah, Okay, yep, looks like that top cover is probably going to lift off I think yes. Oh, it's a bit crusty.

look at that. And here's our keyboard controller. Check it out! We've got a 6570-036 from Moss that is um I Googled it quickly Amiga 500 Keyboard Controller Yeah, thanks for that. Woohoo folks! Seven, Triple five timer Awesome Old school brilliant 74 LS uh, 123 and a 74 LS 27.

And then we've got our two LEDs over here which are quite an unusual package actually. Oh man. check out the PCB folks. Look at this double-sided board but non-plated through to save cost.

look. so they've got the jumper links on here like this and then uh, soldered on the top side where it needs to be. Oh man, Really? crusty? Hong Kong 80s technology stuff. Yeah, this thing really is crusty like it.

Uh, did come out of garage from uh, some 40 year old guy who's still living with his parents. That's the kind of uh yeah, you know what I'm talking about and it looks like Shield here. a few looks like the screws are missing so looks like we've got a tab under there. Let's lift that up.

but I reckon somebody's had a crack at this and they haven't. Bastards haven't replaced the screws. How dare they? Another one There we go. Our Shield should now, hopefully lift up.

Come on, Tada got it. We're in and here we go. Single board construction all through-hole of course. all the main chips are socketed all around here and uh, of course they have the famous uh names on them.

We've got a fat Agnes we've got a Paula We've got a Gary We've got a Denise up here. they're the uh custom uh Amiga Asic chips which were given uh, these names. they stand for various things all done by Moss technology as well. Uh, same as before 68 000 processor.

We've got 512k of Ram uh down here and uh, we've got some audio filter stuff around here. We've got all sorts of Emi stuff up the top which would take a look at Power in. there's really nothing, uh in the power side of things that come straight from the external power adapter. like straight in there.

There's no switch mode stuff, no nothing. So the external linear power supply makes it all easy and got an interesting looking hybrid up there and our floppy. Maybe there's some extra circuitry under there as well. We'll whip the floppy out and we'll take a look at some of this in more detail.

Check it out folks! That uh, 40 year old guy in his parents garage? really? yeah is a bit of a doofus because look what he's done when he's put the floppy cable back in here. He's uh, missed a couple of the pins on there. Oops, Maybe that's why one of these units doesn't work. We've got ourselves a REV 5 board here.

silk screen date code by the looks of it, uh, 13th week 88. Um, so there you go. That one could actually date it to early 88. and of course, uh, the famous, uh, internal code name for the Amiga 500 is the Rock Lobster.

And of course B-52's you young whipper snappers. wouldn't know who the B-52s are or uh, how? Rock Lobster Associates to them I will leave that up to you to Google it and woohoo some really. Advanced Audio Filter in here folks. Tl084 quad Op amp and some RCS And yes folks, we have genuine Fox kind of connectors and yes, that is the same Foxconn you've heard of these days in association with Apple Slave and Suicides if you believe all the stories.

Hmm. so they started out manufacturing nut components, most notably connectors. No wonder the thing was sold as not working or for these Asics here mounted in the sockets upside down, all the electrons are going to fall out. Jeez! And here's our first: uh, Asic we'll take a look at which is Denise and the first Asic we'll look at here is Denise and Denise actually stands for display enabler and this is actually the display Asic Controller: uh capable of um, famously, uh, locking onto uh and sink into external video signals so you could buy an external Gen lock adapter to Overlay video on an external signal.

Very popular use for the Amiga 500 back in its day and Denise actually does. A whole bunch of you know all the video timing, all the uh, planes and bit planes and stuff like that, and all the uh, the ham, the hold and modify operations which all the Amiga 500 people will know all what I'm talking about if you don't Ah, there's plenty of info out there on it, but there you go full. Asic Manufactured by Moss technology and we have a date code there of 0688 and there it is the right way up so the electrons don't fall out and we've got ourselves an interest in uh, single in line package or Sip packager ceramic hybrid here. and that would be, um, a whiter ceramic substrate on there and it looks like they've got a whole bunch of uh, passives or chips or something on there.

It's um, of course, like a conformally type coated with this, uh, black stuff to actually, uh, protect it. but yeah, some sort of ceramic hybrid. Not sure why they needed to go to that effort. If anyone knows, Ah, post it in the comments.

And of course, this thing handed our state-of-the-art graphics for its day. normally uh, 640 by 320. uh Graphics if you didn't over scan the thing, there were various Uh techniques available to actually get higher in interlaced mode, and things to get a higher resolution on this thing. And it could have up to 4096 colors if you used up various special modes and things.

but usually you couldn't believe that in. you know, fast moving graphics and games, but pretty. Advanced Video technology for its day. Let me tell you, and I have no idea what this means Feb Three, one, two, five, twelve, or 512 obviously 512k Amiga I'm assuming, but uh, some sort of Fab plant, uh, fabrication number? I Don't know.

Anyway, here we have Paula which is our audio controller and Paula stands for well Ports, Audio and uart. and uh, by coincidence, apparently it was also the uh girl name of the chip designer's girlfriend. go figure. Wonder if they're still together? Does anyone know the gossip? Come on, we need it.

And this actually contains uh, four 8-bit Pwm channels up to 29 kilohertz uh sample frequency so you know, quite versatile uh for its time really and also handles the uart interface and stuff like that. hence its location here. Like if you if it was just purely dedicated to the audio, you would think, well, why is it sort of? You know here, why isn't it sort of over here, right over near the audio and the audio output stuff over here? Well, it also controls the uart stuff up here. so I guess it wasn't really needed to put it right over there.

And also, of course, when you're talking about laying out a board like this by the way, which is a two layer board, I Mean you know we've got our processor down here which we'll look at, but you can see all the tracks snaking around and then these ones from Fat Agnes here up to Paula And really, you know you can't just whack this chip all the way over there. get those big 8-bit or 16-bit uh data buses all the way over here and stuff like that, and back here. and ah, it's just not going to happen. so there's certainly a bit of art to sort of laying out a double-sided uh board like this.

Really? because you know all the memory of course has to be in line. You can't just whack the chips anywhere you like. of course, near the I O here we've got our output um, so 74f series chips I'm not sure latching or whatever buffering or whatever they're doing right near there. We've got our data flowing out from these Uh 244 latches uh, buffers right down into here Ls373s and it all, just, you know, flows nicely.

It comes from the processor over to the the ROM is of course linked very close to the processor. Fat Agnes here one of the main controls sort of right in the guts of that going down, controlling the memory and all that sort of stuff going, and of course interfacing to uh, the sound and uart. Chip Paula going over to Gary here and it all just flows nicely. There's a lot of art to get in a layer double-sided layout like this.

Anyway, getting back to Paula here: Paula not only handles the four Channel Pwm audio as I said, handles the uarts, handles interrupts, handles the joysticks, um, all that sort of uh, you know, external I O stuff. Now all these Asics here are originally stemmed from what What's called the OCS or original Amiga chipset, but this one is actually the Uh I Believe it's the enhanced Art chipset because down here we have Fat Agnes instead of regular Agnes used in their original chipset. And here's Fat Agnes in an 84 pin Plcc. The original version of Agnes was in a 48 pin dip package, but the later versions, the Fat Ones big chunky 84 pin Plcc.

The biggest pin count device on this board by far, and it handles all of the memory interface in hand, Those up to this one handles up to one Meg So hence you can see it's coupled down here into the dram. so effectively this is the Dma the direct memory Access Controller down here. it also contains some of the video stuff like the blitter interface and things like that so really critical chip in the entire Amiga 500 design and one of the main things responsible for its excellent performance for the day. and all of the timing in this thing was actually um, all built around essentially the video mode you're in and the essential video timings.

Because back then you know, video dictated. um, you know pretty much everything in terms of the uh, the way these computers were designed and operated from our Hardware architecture point of view. So effectively what the video blitter inside this thing can do was transfer stuff in memory without hogging up the CPU Basically, so it sort of, you know, took a lot of the the video processing away from the main CPU And really, even though this is a pretty powerful you know 68 000 processor for its day, you know seven megahertz. And if you want a lot of high-end Graphics, you can just bog the whole thing down.

Just bloody refreshing stuff. So really, um, that's what this, uh, direct memory Access Controller and the blitter engine inside this thing was able to do offload a lot of the grunt work from the main processor and it could also do things like uh, draw lines as well. So effectively a very you know, and very early uh version of the uh, You know, the real high-end video processors that you get these days, which can you know decode video in real time without any CPU and all that sort of stuff. This one could draw lines and hence it could use a few tricks to draw polygons and stuff like that, all without the CPU.

All of that complexity and those algorithms would be handled inside the video Pro processor essentially. Now another sub component in this makes for interesting reading. It's called Copper and it's basically a Um essentially an independent, finite State machine inside this thing that allows you to change video modes and all sorts of stuff on any point on the screen at any time. So really, the Amigo 500? very flexible in terms of uh, you know, just displaying pretty much essentially anything you wanted on the screen, including different resolutions in different modes on the one screen at once.

It's crazy, but very Advanced Video technology for the day. And of course here we have the classic Uh 68 000 processor manufactured by Signetix go figure date code 8745. but some of the chips on here, of course some 88. So this unit appears to be a sort of early 1988 vintage machine anyway.

and um, and we have our ROM of course, which is a mask ROM and it's you know, Commodore uh, labeled. None of this Eprom rubbish. No mask all the way. We've got one.

Yes folks, a triple five timer brings a tear to the eye. Ah, and he's the only guy in the group we have Gary G'day Gary How you doing mate? No worries. and Gary stands for Gatorade and it there's just uh, glue logic and uh, bus control and uh, stuff like that. So and floppy disk control things like that.

just some general housekeeping stuff. It is not considered part of the Amiga chipset and there's an 8520, CIA or complex interface adapter. this one's called the even CA and uh, this one handles uh, floppy control, serial, and uh, some of the parallel stuff and the other one over here, the odd CIA that handles the parallel port, the keyboard, and some of the floppy and Mouse stuff. And as far as the power supply goes, as I said at the start, um, all I got is a common mode choke.

Here it's an external linear Supply Plus 5 volts and plus and minus 12 volts and that's it. So there's no switching circuitry, no other stuff doesn't look like there's any uh, fuse protection or anything in here. So yeah, that's what you get when you use external linear supplies. Easy and you'll notice quite a bit of Emi stuff around here.

on the external porch. you'll notice all those uh, ceramic caps there and over here you'll start noticing some ferrite beads There we go, or for uh, external Emi Even at you know, back in the old days, still important even at those low frequencies. and I just peeled off a label there. And here we have our artwork: number uh, three, one two five one three which we saw on the silk screen uh, back over there and assembly number Three One Two Five one.

Oh so there you go: Rev: Five board and it's been burned in and somebody's left their little Mark I burnt that in in the Hong Kong Factory Back in 1988. claim to fame and here we have our main processor and that's uh, 28.37516 megahertz. Of course you divide that by four Bingo We get our processor clock a 7.09379 megahertz Raymond but you can see a budge resistor down in the corner down there There we go. Lovely little bodge.

We've got a uh, insulating sheet on here of course just to uh, make sure nothing shorts out. but apart from that, I can't see any other bodges on the bottom of this board. And check out the solder mask back in the day, folks. I Mean, here's the fiberglass down here.

Nice and smooth. And of course we've got our copper. This is, uh, our gold-plated pins on our Edge connector here. But look at that solder mask.

it's really is quite rough. Have a listen to that and if you rub your fingers over that, you can really feel how incredibly rough it is. If you know what, uh, type of solder mask sort of or coating they were using back in those days, please let us all know. Fascinating stuff.

Really different. You don't see it these days. I've actually decided to take the complete board out here so I could solder some wires onto that DIN connector on the back. Make sure I get a good connection and you can see, uh, some of the layout here.

It really is quite nice. Of course, being a double-sided uh layout, they've got predominantly the bottom side of the board of course running horizontal like this and the top side of the board running traces, uh, vertically. That's how they've done most of it. You can see quite some beautiful layout work down in here, over to the connector flowing through and down to the main Asic chip.

Here, the processor tied very uh, coupled very directly into the expansion bus over here with no no protection resistors, nothing just bang straight onto the processor. And of course further down here you don't have much such a space to, especially when you put in a couple of big fat power traces down in here to run these uh traces between all of your 40 big 40 pin dip chips down in here. So you know it really is. that's just like completely devoted to horizontal layout.

there almost no vertical and the exception to this bottom horizontal rule. they've done that up here. on the memory chips, you can see that it's effectively are just ground and a couple of vertical traces running through here. whereas most of the other processor down in here is all horizontal and all the Asic stuff and then on the top side there instead of vertical for most of the other stuff on the board here.

or your RAM runs horizontal. and check this out, folks. look at that. broken joints on the DIN connector down here.

look at that. see those just popping straight through. So even if I did have the power adapter would have been completely intermittent operation. Ah, classic.

look at that. Just too much stress on that DIN connector there. I'm just wiggling it with my finger there. You can see those joints just popped straight out of that sucker Gonski.

Maybe that's why this one doesn't work. And of course, that's a classic case of what happens when you get a connector like this. And yeah, there's effectively. well, very little uh, strain relief on it.

There's one it looks like Shield Um, pad down in here for that. but it's not taking any of the weight whatsoever. So all of you know every time you plug in that cable, someone's putting a lot of pressure on that to plug in the power cable on this thing and pull it back out by the cable and wiggle it around and it's putting all the stress on those solder joints and that's what happens. So there you have it.

No. Real Surprises on this thing. Really, it leveraged uh, existing Amiga technology they developed for the Amiga 1000 In terms of all of the chipset. Uh, Asics they alone would have taken a, you know, a hell of a lot of work.

So if you've got any info on who worked on it, how many people worked on these Asic chipsets of the day, process technology, all that sort of thing. um, by all means, uh, leave a note in the comments or discuss it on the EV blog. Forum So there you. Go 25 year old, state-of-the-art technology smells 25 years old too.

Let Me Tell You Folks So there's only one thing left to do, uh, try and power. This turned up well. I Don't have the original adapter so I will just, uh, shove a couple of prongs up its backside and see what happens. No wait, we have a bonus.

Amiga 500 Mouse Beautiful made in Malaysia Oh, not in Hong Kong What a letdown! the old-fashioned ball type Beauty Check it out folks, All we have is a Hitachi Um, well, it's got Ha17339 but that's actually just an Lm339 quad comparator. That's it. It's just getting the optical Uh outputs and feeding them uh, you know, through the comparators directly back to the uh, well, the uh, not the processor, but the Uh controller which handles the mouse and that's it man. Ancient manufactured by Mitsumi.

There we have our diet and photo transistor combo and our wheel of course with the obligatory Uh slots cut in there to uh, get a pulse every time it moves and the obligatory hair still in there 1988 vintage hair. All right. let's power this turd up. I've got uh, the four wires running out ground uh, five volts and plus minus 12 volts I've hooked them up to my Uh A10 power supply.

and yes, everyone keeps asking yes, I will do a uh review and a tear down of this thing. um, really annoying user interface by the way. but it does seem to actually work anyway. Um, yeah, I got five volts and plus minus 12 volts out of this sucker.

So programmed in. So let's Power It Up shall we? We can turn on all the outputs at uh once by or you can turn them on individually by around with the user interface. Really annoying, but power on and there we go. We're drawing Uh one amp just over an amp on the 5 volt rail, uh 0.7 ounce on the plus 12 and the positive and the top one is actually -12 I've got it configured for minus.

Here is drawing nothing bugger all because that's uh, just for the serial interface I'm sure and our red Power LED over here is on. So I assume those are normal power consumption figures. but unfortunately I get nothing on the monitor actually I am getting something on the monitor here. This is just a really old crusty Digi Tour uh brand? uh, you know, re-badged crappy Ola uh TV and I can actually see the shape of a disc on there.

Um I don't think it's anything to do with the uh Amiga I Think this piece of crap has, uh, failed on me. So let me dig around for a bit. Yeah, it's gone. ski folks.

I Uh, like I call up the mount like it's not just a video I disconnect the video and everything and the menu. Nothing's showing up so it looks like the backlight on the thing has died and watch this. I think I can get it to briefly it should it does briefly come up. Watch this.

and there we go. You saw it briefly. Uh, there we go. It briefly popped up.

So yeah, piece of crap. Well, let's not muck around. This monitor will surely work. And it does.

There we go, we have some sort of boot screen Version 1.2 Amiga workbench. so presumably we need the Amiga workbench disc. Um I Thought it'd be built into ROM but hmm. well thankfully it did come with a huge bunch of discs and I do have the Amiga 500 workbench International and the extras and basic disc for the 500 slash 2000.

Let's give it a try. Well, no, that's a fail I'm afraid. uh, it's not doing anything and I don't hear any floppy Drive noises. Bummer.

All right. I've taken the other Amiga 500 apart that I've got and as you can see, the main board is actually um, like a gold, uh colored or a clear uh solder mask so you can see the uh copper through it. now. it's different to the slightly green tinge we had on the other board.

Now it's exactly the same about Web 5 board though. a few uh component differences like uh, if you were capacitor brand differences and stuff like that. and um, we have a different uh board in here. It looks like we have a small memory board with a real-time uh clock in it.

So I'm not sure about the capacity of that one. It's not uh marked at all, but the floppy Drive it is different. It's only got a Uh two-way cable on it. Here's the one out of the other one.

It's actually got a four-way cable here, whereas this one's only got a two-way cable. So anyway, I'm just going to whip the floppy drive out of this one, put it into the other working machine, and hopefully, uh, we can get it to boot. Yes folks. I think we're in I put it in Floppy drives.

Sound good. it's loading Sam's workbench disc. Somebody's uh, personalized at Release 1.3 Super Version 34.4 Copyright 85 86 Amiga Corp There we go. So yeah, there was something wrong with the floppy drive and it seems to be loading this original disc.

No problems at all. Sam's workbench disc. He's uh, whoever Sam is I don't know, is this normal? Um? has he modified it for his own use? There we go. Mouse works.

Not a problem. It's taken a while to boot, but uh, this thing works absolutely perfectly. Even after what? uh, 25 years, the floppy Drive still works and the disc still works. Workbench Release 1.2 297 360 Free memory because I haven't installed the memory module.

Um, and we're in Sam's workbench. That's pretty bland. So here we go: I Have no idea how to use this thing. but let's click on Sam's workbench.

Can we no? Left, Right? No single click. Oh there we go, where we've opened Sam Shell Utilities Preferences System Trash Can Man, it's a really really clunky. All the Amiga people are probably screaming at me because I have no idea what I'm doing. Can we drag the window? No.

Here we go. Can we drag that? Yes, we can. Oh, look at this state of the art folks. Absolutely state-of-the-art stuff.

Titles, Preferences System: Let's go into system Little drawer opens there. How do I open that? Yeah, thanks. Uh. double click.

okay Format: CLI Net Printer Disc Copy fast mem. First, we've got the command line in the face. Sorry folks. I Don't know any of the command line stuff.

What do we got in the utilities? It's really. ah, it's quite quirky to open this thing. Can't open utilities? No idea what's working. Okay, now let's see what happens to the current draw when I insert a disc I assume it will auto detect and here we go.

Yeah, oh, there we go. Yeah, the Five Volt Rail. It looks like it's only using. Well, it's it.

is only using the five Volt rail. I Can see because it only had those two wires the uh, red and the black coming from the 5 volt there. So yep, it just jumped up when it uh, spun up the motor there. But apart from that, it just drops back.

All right. let's try and run 688 Attack Sub. Yeah, and it turns out, if you right, click on the mouse here. it gives you uh, these menus here for disk and workbench open.

There we go. All right though. the files on the disk and I'm running now. 688 Attack Sub Z It's sleeping.

No. Here we go. we're going to run it. Unfortunately, it's only in mono.

Hey I can see myself. It's only in mono folks. so uh, we would need. whoa, look at that.

Come On load up. load up the power leads flashing. Is that normal? Ah, software fire press left Mouse button to continue Guru meditation I Love it. press left Mouse button to continue.

All right. Well, something something happened there folks I'm not sure what still executing. Maybe at uh, there was a read error on that disc or something like that. Yeah, that five up rail draws just over two amps 2.1 amps when it's uh, reading from the disk.

there we go. No, we're in 688 attack sub. put on your John W Ratcliffe I wonder what he's doing these days? If anyone knows, leave a comment. Press the key to begin Mission Selection I Just pressed a key.

Oh there we go. All right. Torp X 89 Work, you bastard. No.

Oh, you got to put it right. You can't use a mouse I Think you have to press the number Keys Oh how archaic. There we go. Number one and enter begin game.

Yes please. Wow. So archaic. Oh, look at this.

We're on the sub folks. Fantastic Look at the graphics. What's that? 320 by 200? Oh well, that was so exciting. I'm going internally berserk I Don't know about you but I Really, don't miss the uh days of these old.

uh PCS really, they're just pretty awful I mean yeah. Nostalgia value. but apart from that anyway, it's amazing that this thing still worked. There you go I had to.

uh, you don't know what's wrong with the floppy. Drive I Don't think I'm going to bother. um at least I do have one working uh machine here and I can't believe it. Read those three and a half inch floppy drives after you know, 25 years.

Amazing. You know, not a single bite out of order. it loaded up the workbench. don't know how to use this bloody thing, but it worked.

Amazing. So I hope you enjoyed that uh trip down at Memory Vintage Retro Lane there and if you want to discuss it, jump on over to the Eev blog forum. And if you like tear down Tuesday and these vintage teardowns, please give it a big thumbs up. Catch you next time Foreign.