A few months ago I was fortunate enough to acquire an Amiga 2000. This Commodore computer is a real powerhouse of a machine (or was, at the time, anyways). Unlike its smaller siblings — the Commodore 64, Amiga 500, etc — the A2000, as it’s colloquially called, does not have a built-in keyboard and instead is similar in size to the original IBM PC.

Overall the machine appeared to be in good shape. It has two floppy drives, and although it’s missing a hard drive it at least has an expansion card with a SCSI controller built in (as well as extra RAM). It was working, both when the store owner demonstrated it, as well as after I had taken it home (phew!). It even came with a cardboard box full of diskettes containing loads of software (no doubt all of which was legally obtained back in the day…).

The glorious Amiga 2000, along with some other random goodies I picked up on this particular vintage computing shopping run. Note the white cardboard box of diskettes at the top that came with it!

When I acquire an old computer, I first try to make it work. In cases like the A2000, where the machine is already working, the challenge is then to make it useful. That generally means getting it hooked up to a modern screen, and getting software working on it.

The A2000 is relatively easy to hook up to a modern screen, at least if you don’t care about colour. It has a composite output — the kind that usually feeds into a TV input labeled “AV” with a yellow plug — but the output from that port is entirely monochrome. Most TVs still have such inputs, and adapters that accept composite and deliver HDMI are easy and cheap to get.

For full colour display, the A2000 has a proprietary output connector often called an “RGB” connector (because it provides separate red, green, and blue signals). Unless you happen to have a Commodore monitor from the Amiga era, you need an adapter to something more modern (or at least something that’s survived the test of time better). The common adapters out there appear to convert to VGA — the longtime favourite connector of the PC era until DVI, DisplayPort and HDMI replaced it — or to SCART, a particularly odd-looking connector that was especially common in Europe in the 80s and 90s. Once again, if you don’t have a (likely European) TV that accepts SCART, or a computer monitor that still accepts VGA, you’ll then need yet another adapter. In my case, I managed to find someone locally selling a SCART to HDMI adapter, and have an RGB to SCART adapter on order from the UK. Let’s hope that combination works!

A jury-rigged Amiga RGB (the connector closest to the person’s pinky) to SCART connector. Image courtesy of Blake Patterson (Flickr user blakespot, CC BY 2.0 license).

In the meantime, I’m simply making do with the monochrome output that’s readily available. I own a relatively portable LCD TV that appears to accept just about any kind of composite signal (naturally there are many “standard” variations of it) as well as a composite-to-HDMI “upscaler” that lets me use any modern TV or display. Both work fine with the Amiga.

That leaves us with the challenge of getting some software on the Amiga. As I mentioned, the computer came with a bunch of floppy disks, including some classics like Lemmings and Dune. So far the floppies I’ve tested have worked fine. But, floppies are a tedious medium. While not as slow as tape cassettes, they do deteriorate over time, and switching between multiple floppies can be a real slog.

Luckily, modern solutions to this problem exist. I’m amazed by the ingenuity and dedication demonstrated by modern accessories to decades-old hardware. For starters, there’s a range of hardware out on the internet based on a “Gotek” floppy emulator. Really not much more than an ARM processor, some simple electronics, and a USB adapter, this gadget lets you connect a USB thumb drive (or any other USB storage medium) to the floppy port of an Amiga (as well as just about any other computer expecting 3.5" floppy disks). The USB drive you attach can contain files representing disks — you’re still limited to a megabyte or two per “disk” — which you can switch between using buttons on the device, or sometimes using fancy software menus.

Naturally such images of disks with classic software abound on the internet, with varying degrees of legality. With a second, real, floppy drive you can also image disks yourself, and there’s a healthy community of people doing just that to preserve our virtual heritage. Of note, for example, is the preservationist a2_4am. The amount of Apple II floppies he archives on a weekly basis is unreal, mostly owing to him, with the help of others, automating the process to run like a finely tuned machine.

Certain I would not be satisfied dealing with physical 3.5" disks while exploring the A2000 I ordered myself one of these USB-to-floppy emulators. Unfortunately the device seemed to come with minimal documentation, that is, none at all. Plugged into the floppy connector of the Amiga, not much seemed to be happening.

Scouring the Internet, I soon found two sets of firmware for the device. One is specific to the Amiga, and lets you select software from a convenient menu of whatever images you have on your USB drive. The other is more generic and relies on the two buttons on the device to cycle between disk images. To load new firmware onto the seemingly non-functional device, I would have to connect it to a USB-to-serial connector. The connection from that device to the floppy emulator is simple TTL — basically a bunch of pins on the circuit board of the emulator that you just connect transmit and receive wires to directly.

Some of the pins for this connection were already soldered and connected with wire to one another in a slightly confusing fashion. I had to desolder them and put in some nice “jumper” pins that I could easily connect to. I think the original intent might have been to allow updating the device firmware over USB, but it’s not really clear to me. Anyways, I wasn’t going to waste too much time trying to reverse engineer something that could be made generic with very little effort.

A closeup of the pins post desoldering and soldering. Doing this was so very much worthwhile, as I could simply plug in the necessary wires (the vertical orange and brown ones) whenever I needed to update the firmware.

After a quick trip to Sim Lim Tower, the local electronics supply market here in Singapore, I acquired said USB-to-serial adapter (originally from Adafruit no less!). When I got home I realized that the adapter’s connectors were “female,” and all I had in terms of suitable wires were also “female” on both ends, meaning I could connect the cables to the jumpers on the circuit board easily but not to the serial adapter. After a moment’s cursing I decided to just cut the end off a bunch of the cables and tinned them to keep the separate strands of wires together. That resulted in a pretty flimsy connection to the adapter, but I was pleasantly surprised to have the transfer work right away!

The glorious mess of tinned cables … hey, if it works!

Although the initial firmware upload seemed to work, I still wasn’t having much luck actually getting the floppy adapter to do anything. After one or two more tries, I leapt up in joy as the first virtual floppy booted up on the A2000! Unfortunately my excitement was short-lived. The floppy no longer booted after I restarted the Amiga to try some different disk images. Worse, even, shortly after that the USB thumb drive I had used to store the disk images wasn’t even being recognized by my computers anymore! The device had somehow destroyed the thumb drive, seemingly irreparably!

The virtual floppy drive (the green circuit board) connected to the USB-serial adapter (the glowing red thing plugged into my laptop) and chugging away updating firmware at 115,200 bits per second.

Later on I figured out that I had probably connected the floppy emulator’s power cable (a standard floppy power cable inside the Amiga) backwards. Due to the pinout of the cable, I fed the emulator -12V DC instead of +5V DC! It seems likely that this extra voltage (and reversed polarity) got passed right through to the USB thumb drive (which usually gets +5V DC from whatever it’s connected to). I destroyed two drives this way; luckily neither contained anything important.

I was out of USB thumb drives at this point. Conveniently, Singapore has Amazon Prime Now, meaning I could order a set of new (and cheap) ones and have them delivered about two hours later. I set aside the project, had dinner, and did a bunch of research on the Internet while I waited for them to arrive.

At this point I figured I should give the other firmware option, FlashFloppy, a go. I was initially skeptical since it didn’t seem nearly as convenient as the one that would let me select from a menu. However, it did have one feature that immediately appealed to me: it would actually provide error codes on the three-digit 7-segment display connected to the floppy adapter. Maybe with that I could figure out what’s going wrong.

It turns out I didn’t really need the error code feature, as the drive simply started working! I don’t think I’ll ever know what the problem with the first firmware was — especially as that one is closed-source — but I was jubilant to see the floppy drive in action, working even after one, two, three reboots! And it no longer destroyed the USB sticks either. The biggest problem I had now is that I ordered way too many USB sticks from Amazon!

The floppy adapter, gloriously working as indicated by the “000” on the seven-segment display. In this case the three zeroes means the first disk image on the thumb drive is being used. You can see the SanDisk thumb drive at the bottom-left, with 3 megabytes short of 8 GB still ready to be filled with Amiga disk images!

I also tried the disk drive with an Amiga 1200 that I had acquired recently and it worked there too. Glorious. Now I just need to find some software. I’m pretty pumped to try some of the early 90s Amiga games, as well as apps like DeluxePaint that made PCs at the time look like boring old Business Machines.

Buoyed by my success I decided to try one final quick hardware hack suggested on the FlashFloppy Wiki — attaching a little piezo buzzer to the device such that it makes a buzzing sound whenever something is being read from the (otherwise totally silent) USB drive. That was remarkably easy, and made using the virtual floppy drive much more nostalgically joyful.

Attaching the piezo buzzer (bottom left) with some jumper wire and crocodile clips. I like this so much, I think I’m going to have to make it permanent!

I’m stoked to go try out some more of the software images available on the Internet. The next major hardware project for the A2000 is going to be adding a hard drive in the form of an SD-card-to-SCSI adapter. I’m still waiting on some cables to get that going, at which point I’ll be able to install software on the Amiga without having to swap (virtual) disks. And then, who knows, maybe I’ll finally discover my visually artistic talents with Deluxe Paint, or find the occasional unpreserved Amiga disk. The future (of the past) is exciting!