Last year, early 2013, I had the opportunity to pick up 3 of the most elusive Amiga Models ever made: The Amiga 4000T. This was the last model put out by Commodore before bankruptcy took them off the market in 1994.
Escom bought the company and sold them under the name Amiga Technologies, Inc. The A1200 and A4000T were reintroduced for a few more years. The labels changed to remove Commodore and had the new Amiga logo (tilted red sqaure over the letter “i” in Amiga):
Well, I found THREE of them for less than the price of one. The seller bought them from a warehouse liquidation sale. He wasn’t too familiar with the Amiga but was able to get one of them fully working with OS 3.1 and another partially working. The 3rd was tossed in as a parts machine and a 1084S monitor was included.
Machine #1 (the one working fully) had no yellowing on the plastic and only 1 scuff on the case paint. The other two were yellowing badly. I learned about something called retr0brite, which can be made and used by anyone. I gave the plastic parts a retr0brite bath and sunbathing session and they were looking much better just after one use.
Each came with a 68040 CPU board (Commodore A3640 rev3.1), and had GVP I/O Extender boards for more ports. I maxed out the motherboard RAM to 16MB and put in RTG graphics cards (GVP Spectrum, Picasso II and CyberVision64), and in machine #1, which I kept the longest, I put in a Thylacine USB ZorroII card. It was slow but it worked. Machines #2 and #3 had OS 3.9 and all 4 Boing Bag expansions. MAchine #1 had OS 3.5 installed and CyberGraphX 3.
Boy, those were fun to rebuild but working on old hardware can be frustrating. All 3 had Compact Flash cards in place of IDE cards.
More thoughts about these computers coming soon…
Mambo's Amiga Blog 