Hi, I’m Lee. I make awesome retro geeky things out of wood, electronics and patience.
I’ve also recently decided to regress to my teenage self. Much less squeezing spots and sleeping till the afternoon and much more obsessing over retro 8 and 16bit computers and consoles. My latest videos are much more about this new passion, but I’ll certainly be returning to woodwork soon!
You can find all of my builds here, the whole journey, including mistakes, awesome bits, mistakes, and the occasional stumble into success!
Playing on the finished products is so satisfying, but really, it’s more fun making it.
I built this mini PET for the charity auctions happening in a few weeks time. It was a great fun kit to put together. You can watch every step of the build in this video!
Join me in this epic journey as I build two custom Commodore 64s to raise money for the Befriending Scheme Miniature Donkey fund. From unboxing rare components to soldering delicate circuits, I’ll take you through every step of this exciting project. Watch as I transform vintage C64s into modern marvels, featuring custom cases, keyboards, and even LED lighting. Discover the incredible stories behind the donations and learn about the amazing work of the Befriending Scheme.
Build a Piece of History: The KIM-1 Replica Build! Join me on a nostalgic journey as I build a replica of the iconic KIM-1, a single-board computer that paved the way for the Commodore line. Discover the history of the KIM-1 and the 6502 CPU while following me through the entire soldering process. This amazing replica will be auctioned off on October 19th to raise money for the Befriending Scheme. The auction will also include a ton of other Commodore computers, peripherals, and more. There will even be a 12-hour live stream with special guests!
I’m in the incredibly fortunate position to be offered some very generous donations. Part of being a big deal Youtuber with over ten thousand subscribers maybe? I don’t know how to put this, but. I’m kind of a big deal. One of these incredible donations came from the lovely Andrew Searle, who contacted me to offer an Amiga 1200 for this years charity fundraising project. (much more on this machine in an upcoming episode! Its going to be very interesting! Andrew popped over from somewhere on the other side of the country and delivered, in person, a veritable pile of cool stuff. This mini amiga for instance. Will be in the auctions too! (October 19th, put it in your diary. 12 hour live stream, special guests, charity fundraising to help buy miniature donkeys! Details about the charity event at the end of this video)) As well as the Amiga 1200 Andrew handed over a working Amiga 600. He also gave me this! Now this was actually for me. Well as much as I like getting free stuff I already have an Amiga 600 and it would be very greedy of me to accept another one. So this one is going into the charity auctions to raise money to help buy those tiny donkeys for the Befriending Scheme. As you can see here, it’s quite yellowed. I’ll try to do something about that. Inside is a fully equipped Amiga 600, with compact flash hard drive storage, a 4mb fast ram expansion sitting on the 68000 CPU, and a 1mb chip ram expansion in the trap door with a battery for presumably the real time clock. It’s a cracking machine and worthy of a good home. But it also seems to work just fine, so why are we here today? Well how about a little bit of restoration? This A600 was donated by Colcuz Colin. The insides were restored by the brilliant Retro Passion, who, by the way, offer a great service if you don’t want to do it yourself, and quality parts if you do fancy having a crack at retro repairs. You can find a link to their website in the description. No affiliation! I just like them. The outside of this Amiga was restored by Colcuz himself. I believe he used peroxide creme, something I have dabbled with in the past with a Super Nintendo case, but it’s not something I trust completely, having seen mixed results on other youtube channels. If you compare these cases you can see Colcuz managed to get the case right back to the original off white colour. This other one though is decidedly yellowed. With all the keys being a quite uniform colour. So what’s the plan here? Well first of all I’ll strip this keyboard down and give everything a good clean. Then I think I’ll use the submersion method with keys to bring those back to a better shade, and the case I’m going to try just plonking it out in the sun for a couple of days and see what happens. It’s low risk and I think the end result I am going for with this one is just to look a bit better. It doesn’t matter too much to me if it’s still a bit off colour at the end, I’m just looking for improvement here, a bit of patina can also be a good thing. Keen followers of my content will remember I used the submersion method on the keys from the purple and gold Amiga 500, and had problems with the keys floating. In the comments of that video I was advised by a viewer to put the keys into a plastic bag and get rid of all the air, that would mean they were all immersed and there would be no marking from the puddles on the keys. Let’s see how that pans out shall we? After a thorough wash and rinse I’m ready to pour the peroxide into the bag… Gloves are essential for this. And a steady hand! The plastic tub has hot water inside which I hope will help speed up the process, it’s not too hot but cold water would slow things down. All the air is now out of the bag and its double sealed. And off it goes out into the bright sunshine, right next to the sunbathing top case. I left the keys out there for about 6 hours, occasionally giving them a stir. And good thing too! Hydrogen peroxide is an unstable liquid, when heated it breaks down into water and oxygen. The first time I gave the bag a check I found it had blown up like a balloon! This kinda made the bag a bit of a waste of time, but I persevered and deflated the bag each time it inflated throughout the 6 hours. In the end the keys do look marvellous. Probably the best results I’ve had with retrobriting so far. As you can see, two days in the sun has certainly taken the yellow tone down quite a few levels. It still isn’t even close to the original colour, like the other Colcuz one. But I think it’s good enough for me. If the person that wins it wants to go that extra mile they can do that too! I will give this a treatment of 303 UV protectant (thank you Life Size Teddy Bear) which will hopefully slow down the inevitable re-yellowing. The hard drive in here is chock full of software. I’m quite tempted to image this for my own 600. And as you can see it seems to work well. It does take quite a long time to boot, but that might be the way the hard drive has been set up. I honestly don’t know what exactly has been installed on here at this point. But just in case there is a problem I gave the insides an inspection to make sure everything is as it should be. And at first glance I couldn’t see too much wrong. With the naked eye there were only a few points around the caps that showed signs of leakage. Nothing was gloopy or burnt so that was a good sign. And then I looked a little closer. Ah yes, these caps need to be changed. Now, I must admit, at this stage I switched off the cameras, heated up the soldering iron and just got on with it. I’ve recently recapped an Amiga 600 on camera so I didn’t think it would be a good idea to do it again. It’s just a recap. What could go wrong? Yeah, that’s what went wrong. Well one of the things. It seems the caps were hiding a lot of problems. My usual method for removing caps is to use two soldering irons and just lift them off that way. It’s not the easiest thing to do in certain positions on an A600. These ones next to the modulator, or these 2 near the coil are very difficult to get to one side. In the past I have resorted to snipping the ones next to the coil. It’s a little lazy as removing the coil is not beyond my toolset and abilities, but so far I’ve not had an issue removing caps this way. Well. Until now. One of the pads just lifted right off the board. Oh dear I thought to myself! That’s a problem! OK, let’s not panic. How about going back to the 2 iron method. That’s not going to let me down. Is it? Now it’s worth mentioning that everyone has an opinion on what the best method is for removing SMD electrolytic capacitors. And everyone is right. Kinda. If you find a way that works for you that’s great. I have even tried twisting caps off, just to see what happened, and it was totally fine. But, for me, I like to use two soldering irons because in most instances I feel it’s the safest way to get the job done without too much risk. And that’s the key here. Whichever way you do this there is risk. Mechanically twisting, no matter how much you push down, is putting force across the pads in a direction where they have little strength. Healthy pads that are well attached to a board will usually be fine with this, especially if the legs have had a nice bath in electrolyte for a few decades to weaken them. Hot air is great. Many swear by it. But you have the downside of heating not just the component pads you want to melt. And heat is heat. If those pads are damaged they have a good chance of taking the pads off this way too. Two irons, or tweezers, to me sound like the best compromise. But they’re not perfect. You’re putting a lot of heat into a small area with double the power. It’s easy to slip and damage something else, and hard to judge if one side is melted sometimes. And it’s very easy to rush and push the cap with a bit too much force. And this is what happened on one of the following caps. Both of these pads just lifted up with the cap. There was little I could do. The damage had already been done. I then set about experimenting with different methods on the rest of them. Some of the caps were almost falling off the board and I managed to get these two here off just by wiggling them a bit to weaken the legs. And the horror underneath really showed what the problem was. On this side of the board the corrosion was not too bad, it hasn’t affected the pads or surrounding traces and components. I cleaned it up and installed some new caps. Not a problem. The next area was the reset circuit. This is often an area of concern, so I took the time to remove the ceramic capacitors on either side of the electrolytic, just to be safe. In the event there wasn’t much goo under those components. But it was definitely a good idea to clean under there. At this point I took a look at the caps adjacent to the audio jacks, which I’d already removed along with the keyboard connector for ease of access. And here, after a clean up, I spotted a problem. I decided I needed to record this and switched on my microscope to take a closer look. Right underneath C334 is a trace that has a complete break. I spent a few minutes with some magnet wire, flux and patience, and this is now a complete circuit again. I’ve not yet had an excuse to use my new uv curable solder mask and UV light up till now. Again thank you to my super supporter Life Size Teddy Bear who bought these. With that protected I can get these caps back on the board and then it’s time to try pad replacement. Another new skill to learn! This area is under the caps right next to the modulator. The solder mask on these traces looks weird. What concerns me here is that the electrolytic cap juice could have worked its way under the solder mask and might be eating into the traces. I’m not sure why else it would only be flaking off on the traces and not on the surrounding areas of the solder mask that doesn’t cover copper? To be safe I am scraping all of it away. I don’t want this to be going bad a year down the line. The trace running under this large resistor is a worry. It has corroded above and below here, and there’s plenty of corrosion on the solder too. This was in the area where the two pads lifted where the corrosion is worst. I wonder what’s underneath this resistor then? Could it have shielded the trace below? It checks out with continuity, so it’s not broken. Oh. Well then. That answers that question! Glad I took this off now! Just cleaning the gunk away with IPA and a cotton bud reveals the trace has lost its solder mask. It still seems to be intact, so I just got here in time. I’m running a piece of braid with a small amount of solder on it to give the trace a little more mass. And then covering it up with a thick coat of solder mask. Along with all the other exposed copper. My UV lamp isn’t big enough to cure all of this area at once, so I take advantage of all the free UV outside during the day. Whilst the board is sunbathing the resistor I removed gets a bath and a scrub. And then it’s replaced. The solder doesn’t look very pretty but I tested it and it’s well attached. I’ve been putting it off, but now it’s time to tackle the missing pads. Another thing I’m still learning about. I’ve seen other youtubers use all kinds of methods for this job, from pieces of solder braid to bits of wire. My first instinct was to try attaching the cap directly to this nearby via and the leg of the chip below. Which would have worked just fine, but the cap to the right then doesn’t fit. So that idea was scrapped. My next idea was to use copper tape. This is slug tape and useful for all kinds of repairs, also for discouraging slugs from eating your potted plants. The adhesive on this is not heat resistant, I know it’s possible to buy some that is, and I will try to source some of that, but for now I’m hoping this will do. I just need to get the pads in the right place Add some flux Drop the cap in place and solder it to the pads. Of course it’s not actually attached to anything so now it’s in place and reasonably solid, I can add bodge wires and get it connected that way. That looks good on that side, I’m happy with that. For the other side I need to remove some of the UV solder mask I applied. It’s much harder than I expected! And I just spotted I’d missed soldering this side of the neighbouring cap. Oops! Shaping the bodge wire is a strangely satisfying process. Ok, that’s all attached, how does it feel? Is it stable? Well that seems good to me. What do you think? I might, once everything is finished and working, add a dab of hot glue to stop it moving about. This other missing pad is a bit more straightforward. I could just solder to the top side to this scraped off area, but that would look terrible with the cap at an angle. So I’m going with another copper tape replacement pad. This time a bit wider so it reaches the connection on the right side. Flux And some solder. Ah, well it really didn’t stick as well this time. But as long as I can get it flat, attached and stable I think this will still be the way to go. I’m attaching the bottom side to hold it in place. Yup, I think that’s a decent fix. A little ugly up close but I can live with it. And it looks even better with the caps in the right alignment. Now I just need to replace all of the other caps. Starting with these ones under the modulator. For these I’ve switched my soldering iron tip to the witches nose one. It’s a bit better at this kind of work and easier to get into these tight spaces. And all that’s left now are the through hole caps. All of these were removed without damage. On the ones with heavy ground planes I preheated the area with hot air first and they desoldered perfectly. I didn’t show it earlier but I did remove the keyboard connector and the audio jacks. I have an Amiga 1200 to recap in an upcoming episode, and I’ll show in more detail how I got these out without any damage in that video. Soldering this back in I like to move around to different points to stop heat building up too much. You can’t be too careful with plastic parts. And lastly, after removing the remaining solder from the holes and the parts, the audio jacks are replaced. It’s time to test. There we go! Working great. Just need to put it all back together, connect it back up, and test it out with all the bits inside. To be thorough I ran through all of the tests in the Amiga test kit, including testing all the onboard and addon memory. All the sound tests. All the video tests. And the joystick and mouse tests. Everything passed with flying colours. I better play something! This computer, along with another Amiga 600, lots of Amiga 500’s, and many other computers (at the last count there are around 20 Commodore micros going in the auctions) will be yours to buy on October the 19th. On that day I will be hosting a 12 hour live stream where you can watch me gradually deteriorate into a tired old shell of a man trying to remember how words work. To help me through this marathon I will be joined by special guests from all around the world. This time there will be loads more than last year, with multiple people on during each slot and people coming and going throughout the day. And all the time the auctions here in the UK and around the world will be ending and we can watch and see if we can get close to the fifteen thousand pounds the Befriending Scheme needs to buy some miniature donkeys. And it won’t just be computers and high ticket items up for sale. I have a stack of other smaller things to suit all budgets. Mugs, books, all kinds of bits and pieces I need to sort through and get ready for October. And if you would just like to make a donation to help us reach that huge and very scary target, you can do so at the just giving page which you can find in the description of this video and pinned as a comment. You’ll also soon be able to find all of the charity event details, including all the items being added to the huge list, on my own website more fun making it .co.uk Thank you for watching and I will see you in the next one!
Is it possible to turn THIS battery acid destroyed Amiga 500 plus into £1000? For charity.
A while ago my friend Paul Universal retro boss gave me a couple of Amiga 500 plusses that were beyond simple and economical repair. And for quite a while they’ve lived in a plastic box in my workshop waiting for attention. Earlier this year, on a visit to the RMC cave, I ran into Rob “Peepo” Taylor of the Board Folk, and we briefly discussed his Amiga 500++ project. I expressed an interest and Rob offered to sell me a board at a super reasonable price. When he later learned the Amiga I was going to be building on his board would be sold to raise money for charity, Rob sent me an extra board, and then donated the money I’d paid him to the charity I was raising money for! What a nice guy! This October 19th will be the final day of this year’s charity fundraising for the amazing Befriending Scheme, you can find details in the description, and I would like to build a special machine to sell on that day. I think with the right parts inside and out this computer could raise a serious amount of money, in fact I think it could raise over a thousand pounds. That’s about $1300 US, or about 3 million Australian Dolleroos. I’ll be using as many parts as I can from the two donor machines, and scrabbling around for the rest in my workshop, and also receiving some pretty spectacular donations along the way. So let’s get building! Both these boards are definitely repairable. I’ve seen the likes of GadgetUK Chris and Glen from CRG bring back boards in far worse condition than this. But the idea here is to make something I can sell for a lot of money. And selling a motherboard covered in bodge wires and nail varnish is not going to get the job done. There are certainly some good parts on here, but I think all of the sockets will be heading to the bin. Many of them are single wipe, which is no good at all, and it doesn’t help that the Gary socket is missing a few teeth. The battery goop managed to get into all areas inside this machine, but the other one isn’t quite as bad, and I’m hopeful I’ll get one working set of components from both of these. Today I will be using this beautiful purple and gold board. Long time viewers might remember one of the centrepieces of last year’s auctions was a ZX Spectrum with a purple motherboard and a smoked crystal case. Well this purple motherboard thing has started a bit of a trend! It helps that it looks absolutely stunning. And when I show you the case a bit later I think you will be very pleased to see that what we came up with for this build is not only in keeping with the theme started last year, it’s also drop dead gorgeous.
To maximise the amount of profit I can make when we auction this computer I’ll be salvaging as many components as possible. Right down to some of the passives. These ceramic caps are axial types of all different values. It’s perfectly possible to buy these new, but that would waste precious charity money, so I’m removing them one at a time from the old board, testing them in my component tester, straightening the legs, and then soldering them into the new board. It doesn’t take too long and it really helps that all of the values for all of the components are printed on the silkscreen of the new 500++ boards. I think that’s a lovely touch. There are a couple around the damaged area that are too far gone, in those cases I took the correct values from elsewhere on the second donor board. After the caps I need to move onto the resistors. Now resistors are very cheap, and I should have everything I need in my highly organised stash. These are really not worth taking the time to salvage so I quickly work through the list, ticking them off the interactive bill of materials as I go. It’s slow, methodical work, and I enjoyed every minute of it. After the resistors I worked my way through all the other components I could salvage, including the so-called Vidiot, or “Video Hybrid” board. I’ve heard this can be difficult to salvage and is easily damaged during removal. But I managed to get both of these removed from the two boards without visible damage. These are filter capacitors. They were fun to remove, burning my fingers on just about every one of them. Resistor arrays, ferrite beads, and diodes all followed. Which just left a few transistors to solder in place. And that was all of the passive components installed. I next installed sockets. Everywhere. And due to some of the legs being trimmed very short, where I had stock I installed turned pin type sockets. More on that later… Miscellaneous components like pin headers, the coil and crystal were all safely transplanted. Interestingly this weird diode configuration here is not needed on the new board. Rob fixed the bodge that these were fixing on his revision. So the new diodes could just be installed as originally intended. And then all of the connectors along the back edge were removed from the better scrap board and installed on the new one. I took some time to polish any metal parts that needed attention. These RCA audio jacks are looking a bit tired. I might swap them out later if I can find some nicer ones, but again, cost is a ruling factor here. I’m also a bit surprised they are both red! Would it have really cost you that much to put a red and white one in here Commodore? Anyway, it’s now looking almost complete and I’m really happy with how it’s coming along. The donor board is now looking pretty empty! Just the memory and some logic chips near the battery damage. The 244’s already removed from this position were both destroyed by the battery leak. I have dim hopes for these 373’s. Removing one of them reveals tide marks from the corrosive gloop. I popped the 373’s into my lovely Retro Chip Tester Pro. Here I am testing all of the memory and logic chips. It’s possible to test logic chips in one of the cheap minipro, tl866 type programmers, but I’ve found those can be unreliable. I’m hoping the retro chip tester pro does a more thorough bout of tests, and while the interface can be a little bit clunky, compared to typing the chip into a search box, you quickly get used to how it works. I tested the memory off camera and was very disappointed to discover that every single chip was faulty. Which seemed kind of unlikely. How could all of them be faulty? They weren’t fake too were they?! And then I remembered! Along this side of the retro chip tester pro are some jumpers that need to be set when testing certain types of memory. I’d recently run into this whilst testing some 4164 drams from a commodore 64. Without the right jumper set the tests were unreliable. I’ll probably continue to forget about this and have the same facepalm moment every time it happens. But that’s definitely user error, the tester is brilliant. With the jumper in place all the RAM tested good. Once I remembered where I’d stored all the custom chips I got those installed. It looks great, but I’m not 100 percent happy with the sockets. The chips with short legs are not very securely held in place. The worst of them is this clock chip. I can just lift it out of the socket without any pressure at all. I really don’t want these to work their way loose in the post, so I think once this is tested and working I’ll remove all of the turned pin sockets and solder those chips directly to the board. It’s time to switch it on and hope for an absence of magic smoke. And would you just look at that! It works! Well that’s not quite the actual sequence of events. What actually happened was I turned it on with the original 2.04 kickstart installed and it worked great. Then I upgraded the kickstart to a 3.1 version and it refused to boot. I checked everything. Swapped every custom chip on the board with known working ones, examined every solder joint, and in the end asked for help. I had lots of useful suggestions from the more fun making it discord members, link in the description, but the one that solved the problem was the person I really should have asked first. Rob Taylor recreated this board so he really should know a thing or two about it, and when I told him the symptoms he pointed me to a forum which explained the problem. This isn’t a fault in Rob’s design, it’s actually something missing from the original revision 8a motherboards. Possibly others too. Over here there are a couple of spaces for resistor arrays marked RP106 and RP107. These pullup resistors for some of the address lines are not populated by default. Using the larger eprom for kickstart 3.1 means these address lines are required and so without these resistor packs the computer wont boot kickstart 3.1 I sourced a couple of these 4k7 packs and installed them, turned it on and it worked flawlessly. It would be easy to stick this in its original case, give it a wipe down and then sell it on for charity. But that would be boring and a bit too easy. So instead… I asked for some help from my amazing supporters to buy a few items to make these charity computers really special. There are quite a few of these new shiny things to see over the coming weeks, but the first one that I want to show you is this amazing crystal case bought by the group using my Kofi donations page. During this charity event all of the money donated there will be used to fund the builds. You might remember the crystal ZX Spectrum with purple motherboard from last year’s event. Well my friend Fuzzy Lee suggested we should do the same this year. Without spoiling future videos too much, this won’t be the only computer in these auctions with this colour scheme! I have a few choices to make about what goes inside this machine. And the first is this metal shield. This one here is way beyond cleaning, probably not even painting could bring it back. But the other one isn’t too bad, and I spent a while polishing it to a shine. There are still splotches where corrosion ate into the surface, but it looks pretty decent. I took it along with me to show off at the Amiga Kickstart event in Nottingham earlier this year and there was quite a lot of interest. But a few people suggested the metal shield would be better off gone. And I have to agree. We want to see what’s inside this machine after all. Ahh yes, the special edition yellow snow keyboard. As you can see here it works perfectly well. All I need to do is restore the colour with a spot of peroxide retrobriting. The sun is out and its ideal weather here in the UK for this. I don’t very often retrobrite things. For my own collection I don’t really mind if it has a bit of patina. But this machine needs to be good looking so I invested in a big tub of 12% food grade peroxide and decided to try the submersion method. Now these keys were seriously yellowed and I wasn’t expecting miracles. And this is my first time using this method so I was kind of expecting it to go horribly wrong. And if you look at this picture of the keys in their bleach bath you can see there is an issue. The keys are floating. And if you look at some of them they have a pool of liquid on their surface. If left like that there would be a different colour patch at the end. Fortunately I regularly gave them a good stir with a stick, and managed to avoid catastrophe. But there are one or two slight marks that you can see if you look really close. But given that the keys look a million times better I think this is actually a win if you compare the end result to how they looked before. If I get time I might swap these out with a set of keys from one of my own machines if they’re in better condition. Another conversation I had at Kickstart was with the lovely Chris “Cathers”. You will be hearing more about him in an upcoming episode as he donated something amazing for a very special project. No spoilers! If you want to see the huge list of amazing machines and other smaller items we will be selling for charity on October the 19th keep an eye on this and my second channel as I will be giving regular updates. Chris and I were chatting about the colour scheme of this Amiga, and especially about the keyboard. Most of this discussion was around the keyboard PCB which as you can see is nasty green, which doesn’t really go well with all the rest of the colour scheme. Chris pointed out that Dominik from The Digital Retro Bay (link in the description) had created a new keyboard controller PCB and that he had one on display in the next room in purple. Of course I rushed right over and was soon enquiring about it. Dominik explained he was still working out the wrinkles and it would be available in a couple of weeks. And it’s now available and would be perfect for this build. But part 1 I’ve decided I can’t go with this option. It’s a great board, and even includes built in hard drive activity with the original floppy LED doing double duty. But this is a bespoke item and a bit too expensive for the purposes of raising money for charity. I think something like this is for a money no object type of build. But part 2 Rob Taylor has come to the rescue. It turns out that another thing Rob has recreated is the original PCB from a Mitsumi type Amiga 500 keyboard. And he just so happens to have one in purple! This is a recent development so if Rob manages to send that over in time I will show it at the end of this video. But all I will need to do is move all the components from this green board to the new one. Simple! But the third. This is a good one though. While I was talking to Cathers Chris at Kickstart. Ooh a tongue twister. An idea formed. This grotty metal plate on the keyboard. I really should do something about that. And what I decided to do was paint it. A few coats of grey primer, and then a bunch of coats of gold. It looks really good, I’m very happy with the finish so far. I need to give it another couple of coats and then a coat or three of clear to protect it. I also went a bit mad and sprayed the case for the floppy drive too. How cool is that with its crystal button!? This is now looking amazing. But how can we make it better? Well one of the big donations I recently received for this charity event was an Amiga 500 Terrible Fire TF536 from friend of the channel Colcuz Colin. Colin sent a whole heap of things including an Amiga 600 and Vic20 to sell in the auctions. You can see the unboxing of a frankly obscene amount of goodies over on my second channel, link up there in the corner. Thank you again Colin. A TF536 is an Amiga 500 accelerator with a Motorola 68030 clocked at 50mhz. Making this a machine I would have personally traded body parts for back in the late 80’s. It also has 64mb of RAM onboard and an IDE hard drive connector. It’s a marvellous addition to this machine and my only problem with it? It’s green. But that’s ok, you can’t have everything can you? Or can you. Well no. You can’t, but you can get some of the way there. Another friend of the channel Andi, over at the Hack Build Restore youtube channel, offered to swap his own TF536 with this green one. Andi’s TF536 is black. Which isn’t purple, but it’s also not green and there are enough black things inside this machine that it doesn’t stand out like a hammered thumb. So let’s put all of these pieces together now and marvel at what a beautiful machine it turned out to be. And in a few short weeks you will be able to bid on this special Amiga 500 Plus, and a bunch of other machines, and maybe we can see it go for the £1000 estimate I plucked out of the air at the start. For more details check for links in the description or my website morefunmakingit.co.uk where you can find the latest details. Also if you would like to make a donation to the Just Giving page you can find a link to that near the top of the description and a pinned comment. Thank you to everyone that contributed to this project. I hope this raises a huge amount of money for the Befriending Scheme.
The wonderful Bob Brenchley sent a big box of stuff for the charity event. Including a C64 with 1541 disc drive, a big heap of computer books, and a unique Timex 2068 that has a special story. More will follow on that machine at a later date, but for now enjoy the unboxing!