…is directly proportional to the value of equipment destroyed!”
I don’t know who first coined this phrase, but it’s always struck a chord with me.
I came close to gaining lots of experience in the last week!
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My Vampire500 board came with “some assembly required” – the FPGA, SDRAM and level translators were all in place, but installing the non-essential stuff – the micro SD slot and PS/2 socket – was left as an exercise for the user!
I want to press the Micro SD slot into service so that I can load alternative Kickstart ROMs, because my old A500 board has kickstart 1.3, and I need a more up-to-date ROM to test Zorro III autoconfig, and to run certain test software.
As it happens I haven’t done any surface mount work before, so I was a bit nervous about attacking an almost-one-of-a-kind board with a soldering iron – but after butchering the control board from a dead hard-drive and convincing myself that I *am* capable of soldering on that scale, I had a go at mounting the micro SD socket. I was relieved to find that it has locating pegs that fit holes in the PCB, so at least I didn’t have to worry about alignment.
Well it *looks* OK – now to see if it actually works!
Building on my previous rather perverse mashup of Amiga and ZPU technology, my old Amiga 500 motherboard currently has not just one, but *two* ZPU processors!
