When you find a machine which has been stricken by leaking capacitors or batteries, it's not the desoldering which leads to a world of pain. It's having to repair all the tracks and plated through holes on the PCB which have been dissolved by the leaking electrolyte.

Thankfully, most old kit has a PCB with only two layers - tracks on the top and bottom of the board, making repair possible if you know that you're doing. More modern kit, with four or more layers is a much, much more difficult repair. In fact, once you have buried layers, a repair may not even be possible.

The comment about RIFAs might be somewhat obscure for non-electronics nerds. It refers to a type of capacitor which is normally placed over the mains inputs to a power supply for noise suppression. Unfortunately, the plastic case of these particular capacitors develops cracks over time. These cracks allow moisture to seep in to the capacitor and once it has been damaged this way, can turn into a very smelly fire as soon as you plug the equipment in.

...but it's mine, all MINE!

I've only got the CDROM add on unit - A570 - which made my A500+ closer to a CDTV unit.

I literally have no idea what I did with mine. Probably sold it in the classified ads and now it's hanging on a wall behind some youtuber.

For some reason I thought a CD32 + SX1 expansion + keyboard + mouse was a buy than an A1200 because the A1200 didn't have a CD-ROM drive (Commodore went bust before the CD1200 got out of the prototype stage).

I had one but swapped it for a 10GB hard drive nearly 30 years ago. Whoops.

Wow - another thing to make me feel old! Hundreds of hours playing Gunship, and many more than that playing Lords of Midnight & Doomdark's Revenge by the late, great, Mike Singleton (fantastic ports from Chris Wild still keeping them alive on mobile as well)

I'm honestly having trouble remembering all what I used to play on the Amiga. Dune 2, Civilization, A Train and Sim City 2000 for sure took care of many, many hours. Oh, and Syndicate. And I used to do a full length race in Microprose Grand Prix before every actual Grand Prix. Oh yeah, Sensible Soccer, Alien Breed, Speedball 2. Good times.

And the countless hours of pinball dream, pinball illusion and pinball fantasy. Ohh and Wings a disturbingly good game!

edit: forgot all the hours I spent with harpoon and red storm rising.

I was a big fan of the Cinemaware games - Defender of the Crown, Rocker Ranger, TV Sports Football along with other titles such as Lemmings, Operation Wolf and SimCity. Lots of lost hours playing these but none of them wasted.

dont forget FA/18 Hornet with that little mission code wheel to prevent cracks. It was way more advanced that the other simulators which were still on wire frame graphics.. pfft babies in comparison.

I miss my old 1000 as well as my VIC20 and C64

Good days freee from the Internet, loved the less toxic BBS'

I was rather hoping El Reg might have mentioned the [1]3rd Spectrum Next Kickstarter with a Doomdark's Revenge port as one of the goals and ZX81, QL, Sam Coupé, C64, and CPC cores, but it went unreported.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spectrumnext/zx-spectrum-next-issue-3-0/description

I have a dragon32 I have to get running, I'll be sure replace the capacitors first. I too loved LOM and played that on the spectrum mostly, though there was a android version that Mike published that i have somewhere. I did get two military victories with LOM, after that I then extracted the map at the end of the RAM, I also found I could poke values to get 255 magic swords and riders, fun times.

I am surprised that a place like that doesn't have a CD32, yet they have surplus of things like the PET which they sold the other week.

All of these "YouToobers" who paint themselves as historians or vanguards for the retro gaming scene - why are you hoarding a CD32 in your flat when it could be somewhere for others to enjoy?

and CDTV!

I found a very grubby beige keyboard once, and decided to spruce it up by cleaning with a mixture of ammonia and weak alcohol*. This worked a treat taking off all that finger grease and bringing up the keys a respectable off white. For a few days. A week later it had gone a decidedly MAGA shade of orange.

* Don't do this at home, kids. Not in an enclosed space anyway.

I still have my A1200 which was rehoused in a Eytech tower case. But it needs recapping and i don't have the soldering skills to do it myself, so its either pay to have it done by someone or in reality I probably should i just sell it on to someone else who wants to put the time and effort into it. As its been sat collecting dust for years now and my laptop is able to emulate an Amiga vastly more powerful than what my A1200 would be even if i spent 1000s getting every upgrade i possibly could.

And I am not someone who believe that you HAVE to run it on true hardware, I also have a PS2 but play those games through emulation on my laptop as this gives me higher resolutions, better frame rates and other QOL improvements such as save states, bug fixes and the ability to play games on the go.

https://www.sabrina-online.com/archive.html

The very first strip (September 1996!) featured Eric Schwartz's obsessions with Amigas and skunks. He is still obsessed with both. Dangerously obsessed.

Sold oodles of A500s and Atari STs in my first proper part time job at a computer shop in Edinburgh. To memory upgrade the early Atari units you had to solder the RAM onto the board :) Happy times though, crazy amount of software on those platforms in their heyday.

& both utterly urinated over the PCs of the day

I had an A500 and then an A4000. Great machines.

I spent a lot of time with DPaint 3, Harpoon, lots of Fred Fish disks and then got into 3D with Aladdin 4D and Imagine and eventually LightWave.

Computing was actually fun back then.

Finding random addresses in magazines, sending empty floppies, stamps and cash hoping to get something cool back.

Finally started archiving all of my old discs, having recently reorganised the garden shed and found which of the myriad of almost identical looking storage crates actually contained them, and some of the names on said discs bring back some happy memories of doing exactly that. It appears I spent quite a considerable sum on PD discs from Start Computer Systems just down the road from where I used to live at the time, and amongst the mix of discs from other libraries were a few from 17-Bit Software in the days before they became better known under their later Team 17 moniker for stuff like Alien Breed, Project X etc...

Even some of the discs I used for my own stuff bring back happy memories too, either because they've got branded labels from the local computer store where I got them from, or because the box they're in is sufficiently unique to trigger memories of picking it up off the shelf back in the day.

That said, my earliest memory of taking a gamble with a random ad like that was back in my days as a Spectrum owner, when I saw a tiny ad for a tactical turn by turn wargame, which turned out to be Laser Squad... It's crazy to think now, given just how readily available it soon became once word started to spread as to just how epic a game it was, that it started off being sold in such a nondescript manner.

Ah, yes, the memories! But... it was the Amiga, so you always got something cool back.

For me, it was Pinball Dreams, Pinball Fantasies, PageSetter, Professional Page, PageStream, KindWords, MED, OctaMED, Fred Fish disks, AmiNet CDs, demos, music, graphics, cartoons... heck, now that I think about it, it was everything.

And money, money, money!

A500, external disk drive, A501 additional RAM, OS upgrades ( many OS and ROM upgrades!), handheld scanner, A1500, GVP SCSI hard drive and memory card, GVP accelerator card, graphics card, serial card, CD-ROM drive... endless money.

Amiga Format, Amiga Computing, CU Amiga, Amiga Shopper, Amiga Power and, on a personal level most importantly, JAM (Just Amiga Monthly) - huge thanks to Jeff Walker for launching my writing career.

But endless hours of fun and excitement!

Only Amiga Makes It Possible

P.S. I still use an Amiga regularly under emulation.

Same here hardware wise, and that 4000 ended up having more (relatively speaking) money thrown at it than I've spent on any other system I've owned - by the time I was finished there wasn't a single expansion slot left unused, nor much space at all left within the rather cramped confines of the 4000D case, to the point where in order to get the CDROM to sit flush against the front panel, I had to remove the retaining screws from the rear drive bay assembly so it could slide as far back into the case as possible and provide *just* enough clearance to avoid the power connector on the CDROM from clashing with the connector on one of the drives in said bay.

Was still using that 4000 as a day to day machine up until around 20 years ago when we moved, and it never quite managed to get unpacked again from its storage crate, other than a couple of rare outings to fire it up and pull some files off the HDs for transferring into WInUAE. More recently though I got myself a USB Zip drive and a Greaseweazle-modified floppy drive, and have been slowly going through a couple of crates-worth of discs to archive as many of those as are a) not already available elsewhere (no point in archiving game/application discs, for example, but that still leaves a huge pile of discs containing stuff I'd created myself over the years) and b) still readable after having been stored in what can charitably be described as less than ideal conditions. Given the latter, I've actually been pleasantly surprised at just how few of the floppies have had any level of read errors, and how few of those errors actually led to any data being unrecoverable. And that's before I've even tried any of the cleaning methods to remove the surface contamination which is sometimes the cause of such read errors following such storage conditions...

I just checked and there are no Amigas in my closets here. I did pass some on to a friend who was going to put them in one of his storage lockers. Don't know what he has left - his life has become *very* busy.

A1000 - first off the official monitor wasn't available, so the store loaned me a green-screen one. Very slow BASIC Mandelbrot in shades of green. Long live the keyboard garage! The SOTS (Slap On The Side) hard drives never worked, so the store and I agreed to an upgrade:

A2000 - eventually got the 68020 board turning it into an A2500.

A3000 - workhorse - eventually bought a second as backup, but never needed it, but see below.

A4000T - bought this *after* I heard that they were going under - I was in the middle of a lot of programming and did not want to switch machines at that point.

At times in there I would be running Amiga Empire or AmigaMUD with two modems. Another period I ran the Amiga UUCP package and was a forwarder for news/email.

I got an ethernet card at one point - that would have been for an A3000 I think. Work let me put it on the network in their machine room, so it was running Empire or AmigaMUD (both??) right on the internet for a while.

It's been quite a while since I had UAE running - I don't think ever on this current Linux box. Probably good - saves lots of time! :-)

Still got my A4000/030 ... and an A1200 and an A500. Not booted up in years, but not forgotten!

Had all four of the above at one point or another.

The A500 was a 2nd hand unit, bought in my late teens to replace/supplement an ageing ZX Spectrum 48k [*].

Later on got a A1200, new from a shop in Leeds (UK). I had some money by this point!

Got a CD32, such a shame it never took off.

Got a 2nd hand A4000/030, later on found someone else who'd upgraded from an 040, so bought the old 040 board from them for cheap(ish). That was interesting to upgrade, it was not a simple plug-and-play, needed a newer ROM (good idea to do this anyway), plus several jumpers had to be set correctly for the new CPU to work. But so much faster than the 030!

Also got a Village Tronic Picasso IV board for it.

A500 was sold a while after getting the A1200.

Still have the A1200 and A4000.

Don't recall what happened to the CD32 (it's not in the loft (no damp in my loft), I just checked!).

*: The Spectrum started as a regular 48k rubber keyboard, I modified it to create a universal joystick, that could be used to emulate any keys pressed (via jumpers). I wore the printing off the keys with use, no problem, I'd memorised the keys by that point (and I mean all of it, not just A-Z etc, but POINT, CAT, PEEK, POKE, IN, OUT etc). Then I wore the membrane out! By that point + (Plus) conversion kits were available, so it became a + and I got an micro-drive for it. Had one of those cards that can dump the memory to a micro-drive, so much nicer than tapes! This is currently also in storage. Bit of a hoarder!