Well, Friday evening, after returning from work and Happy Hour I had a quiet evening in, just me and my Amiga, playing with the Workbench 3.1 disks and seeing what programs on the ST/Amiga Format cover disks either still worked or worked with the A1200. I also did a little bidding on eBay for a monitor which should work with all my older computers, unlike the Microvitec CUB which can’t handle separate sync video.
Actually, I did do other things on Friday night, such as talking to Leila on MSN. OK, still geeky/spoddy, but hey!
Saturday I had planned to go to Witney and get my hair cut. However, due to not sleeping well overnight I decided to give it a miss and have a lay in. So, I got up at about 10ish, had a lazy breakfast before popping into Sainsbury’s for the weekly shop reurning in time for “The Sky at Night” on BBC 2. Following lunch I wandered into town via a local garage where I got my car washed. OK, it was a car wash but I don’t see the weather being good enough for a proper hand wash for a while yet so it’s better than nothing. The only real reason for going into the city centre was a desparate need for paracetamol tablets as I failed to get any a fornight ago in Reading. However, even Oxford’s Superdrug only had a couple of packets left. It must be something to do with the epidemic of colds going around at the moment or something.
The evening was again spent playing with the Amiga, finding out about the ways to get old games to run on the newer hardware and hence discovering how to get Starglider 2 to run. (Starglider 2 was one of the few games which came out which had both Atari ST and Amiga versions on the same disk.) There was nothing on the telly so i didn’t bother turning it on all evening.
Today’s been quite productive, really. After listening to Broadcasting House and then talking to my parents on the phone I got up at about a quarter to eleven. I immediately got to work pulling apart the Amiga so as to give it a good clean and also so that I could prepare it for the hard disk and new Kickstart ROMs which I should find in my pigeonhole at work in the morning. The hard drive mounting bracket needed modification because, for some reason, 2.5″ hard disk drives have changed their mounting screw positions. So, it was out with the workmate, drill and so on. While this was happening, the case was sitting in a nice bubble bath, soaking away the years of grime. With some good scrubbling with a nail brush the dirt of the years fell away. It was obvious that this particular A1200 had had a hard life. Its internal sheilding was mottled with rust and the sides of the keys of the keyboard were spattered with water colour paints. In all it looks as though whoever had it had abused it in their bedroom and afterward left it to rot in a shed. Amazingly, however, it survived and is now recieving some well deserved TLC. I even managed to get the floppy disk light to work which it hadn’t before I started. (Though I don’t know why it didn’t work in the first place.)
Subsiquently, I packed up the QL and other stuff and put it up in the loft, ready for setting up the Amiga up stairs and done various housework. That’s about it, really, so far.