One of the more difficult parts to find for the Amiga 500, 600 and 1200 (and Commodore 128) is the square power supply connectors.

Power Socket Power Plug

In my browsing on the Internet, I’ve found the power sockets are available from Vesalia Online for €9.90, and power plugs from a few online re-sellers like The Future Was 8-bit for £13.99. Unfortunately I had no success finding a re-seller in North America. So it got me wondering if I could find an alternative.

Reference

For reference sake, the Amiga power socket and plug was made by Power Dynamics . The power socket is a DS-215 and the power plug is a DP-215.

Alternative?

In the Power Dynamics catalog for DIN connectors I noticed that the DS-108 8-pin round DIN socket has many of the same measurements as the Amiga square socket.

My thought was that if I could cut or remove some of the pins that are not used on the Amiga that this could be a potential alternative socket. And if so, finding round DIN plugs would be relatively easy.

I reached out to Power Dynamics to see who would be the nearest re-seller so I could order a couple to play around with. Alas, they never responded. So I went looking on eBay to see if I could find something close. I found some inexpensive 8-pin round DINS sockets and plugs.

Socket Plug

Assembly

What was great was these particular sockets could be disassembled and the unused pins could be removed.

The only thing I had to modify was the shield connection at the front of the socket. The shield pins were too wide. So with a bit of snipping and soldering I modified the shield pins.

Original Shield Modified Shield

This left me with a perfect slot-in replacement socket for the Amiga power connector!

The pins slotted right into the PCB locations on the motherboard and I soldered it in without any problems. I then put the case back together in order to see how it looked.

So after installing the new socket, my focus changed to the plug. First I needed to know what socket positions were for which voltages since some pins were removed. I came up with this little reference.

So knowing this, I soldered the 8-pin DIN plug onto a length of 5 conductor cable paying special attention to align the proper pins to the correct voltages.

Results

I then wired the cable up to a T-60B AC/DC power supply I had from an earlier project (see A1200 Power Supply Option) and was eager to give it a try.

Survey says!

It worked!

I didn’t have a monitor handy so I just routed the video into a laptop I had nearby with a cheap USB capture device and used OBS.

Please excuse the mess.

Conclusion

Overall I’m very happy how this turned out. Based on the results I feel that the round 8-pin DIN sockets and plugs are definitely a viable alternative to the square DIN connectors. So to all my Amiga and C128 friends: no more hacking up dead power supplies to harvest parts! And no more paying huge costs for square DIN connectors. We’re free! Finally free!!!! Muahahaha!!

Seriously, I hope you find this helpful. All the best everyone!