Real Time Clocks and the Amiga 1000
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- čas přidán 18. 04. 2020
- This is a walk-through of part of my collection of Real-Time Clocks (RTC) for Amiga 1000 Computers. For a lot more specifics and detail on these devices please see: amigalove.com/viewtopic.php?f...
Each RTC shown here plugs into the Amiga differently than the next, and each addresses the problem in a completely unique and different way.
Intro Music clip from "Our Time" provided with permission by the SUPREMELY talented musician Waveshaper (with permission):
waveshaper1.bandcamp.com/trac...
Other music permission by the ULTRA bad ass Axion:
axionsynthwave.bandcamp.com/ - Věda a technologie
WOW learn something new everyday. I never knew there were RTC's for the A1000. Just what I need another something to look for. I do have an A1000 in my collection and back in the day I use to own and use one.
Hah! Glad you enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching, Stephen!
Just in time to chill out to something really beautiful.
I had an A500 myself as I was at school and saved for the a501 memory expansion just for the realtime clock. Thankfully the extra memory was really useful and the next game I brought required 1mb which was an unexpected bonus.
Lovely to see these and to learn a bit more about the 1000. We all take these things for granted nowadays but it was really special back then. Turning on the computer and it new the date and time.
I shudder and the thought nowadays but I used to come home from school and turn my amiga on just for the clock. Cost of electricity and screen burn hadn't reached my consciousness at that point.
Hah!! That's great about turning it on just for the clock. Hey, why not? I sometimes do that even today. All of my machines *have* to have an RTC or it drives me a bit batty. I really like having DOPUS running on boot with the clock showing. On the 1000, just seeing "StarClock" activate on boot is a total trip, every single time. I love it. I really want to learn more about the Timesaver and it's multitude of features. I think my next 1000 project though will be to get the MultiFunction module'd Starboard 2 working alongside the StarDrive'd one. So 2 Starboard 2's with all of the features combined. It'll be totally bananas! Haha And back in the day? Those two upgraded boards would have cost over $2000 - back then! That's a bit over $4k today. Incredible.
Ha ha! The ending is great! But you are a legend my man. Anyone who can pull off an awesome video about RTC's on the Amiga 1000 is a fierce lion beast like the one over your shoulder on the wall behind you. You are no silly moose ;-) GG AmigggaaaaLuuvveeeeee.com
Bwahahahah!
@@AmigaLove Just watched the video again. Love the Delorians and I totally agree about how cool it is that companies made accessories that match the style and design of the A1000. She is certainly a beauty
Fantastic video! I remember seeing so many crazy clock options back in the day.
There were so many beautiful options for the Amiga 1000...
I also love the "AmigaLove" from Amiga Bill in the end credits!
Thanks for the kind words, Doug, I really mean it. And I love all the crazy clocks, too, and keep an eye out constantly. That being said, I think I *might* have all the really cherry options out there. But who knows? Maybe I'll find more over the years. HAH - by the way - that's ME at the end!! I recorded myself doing that like 10 times. I listened to all of them, and picked the one that sounded most like him. =D
This was a great video to nerd into during breakfast this morning. I really like how much you elaborate on these smaller topics, really interesting to watch!
Thanks, @domedagsPoeten! I really appreciate it. Glad you enjoyed it. It's been a weird obsession of mine for a while - glad to get it out there! =)
Amiga Love weird obsessions are the best obsessions! Keep it up 😀
That's why I love AmigaLove ! Always more and more love for the Amiga and for the 1000! Thank you Intric8 for this fascinating video!
Thank you so much for the incredibly kind words. You've made my day, Batte Man. And I'm very inspired by what you've been up to lately, too! If you are a programmer... I do wonder if you could rewrite the original StarClock software to make the time current...
@@AmigaLove Unfortunately, I'm not a developer... I do few IconX and other Arexx scripts, but nothing more... But, maybe someone with skills will make it a day ;)
@@batteman OK Good to know. I have some local friends that might be able to lend a hand some day. If I loan them a StarClock (which I'd be happy to do)...
Love the Legacy of the Ancients poster! Niche topic, nice to see this overview. RTC was never really on my mind in the day.
Hah! Daniel, I think you're the only person to ever comment on that poster. It's a reproduction that the original artist hand-signed. I think he still offers them on his website. I wanted the original painting, but some guy it saving it for his future retirement, seems like. I think he got it for a song, but is trying to sell it north of 10K or something bonkers. I went with the poster. =) And yeah, I realized when I was making this it was a super niche topic, but it's been rolling around in my brain for a long time. Had to get it out. Thanks for watching!
Great video... just discovered your channel and subscribed. Cheers from London
Oh that's awesome - thanks, L. Green! Really glad you liked it. Cheers from Seattle! =)
Fascinating esosterica-but quite interesting, nevertjeless. My 1000 kit never had an HD as you had to have Daddy Warbucks money to rock a HD in 1987. So, never had much need to date files beyond the file name. That habit still sticks to this day for incremental saves.
The prices of some of these things back then really is stunning. It was WAY out of my league, too. I was a C64 guy for a very long time. The Starboard 2 with 2MB RAM + multifunction module would have cost over $950 alone. It would have been about the same if you'd gone with the SCSI module. Then, on top of that untold hundreds to add a 20 MB HDD. It's incredible. And those weren't even true auto-booting environments. You had to create a custom Workbench boot disk, even with it being installed on the drive. It was total Westworld sci-fi wild west back then.
Quite an effort are in the collecting all of those the microbiotics I recall but the others I never heard of
Yes, Microbotics devices have become quite difficult to come by these days, especially the expansion boards that go inside the Starboard. The RTC collection has taken me a few years to put together and there are a few internal devices I've only read about but never found. But I'll keep hunting! =) Thanks for watching!
Music from an awesome 80s movie :-)
Waveshaper (the intro tune) is a synth lord of the highest order. I had the pleasure of seeing him perform live a couple of years ago (and even shook his hand). He's a great guy, and insanely talented. Axion - the tune at the very end - is sort of new on the scene. I absolutely love his album all the way through.
I still have the Time Saver. I want to set my 1000 back up again soon just to show these kids what we used before they had high-speed gaming computers. ; )
Hah! Very cool. All the extra features of the Timesaver are pretty impressive. I wonder how many people "bricked" their Timesavers by forgetting their custom passwords, if they ever set them up. I had a Timesaver I gave a friend that I assumed was faulty and now I wonder... maybe it was simply password protected? Pretty amazing little device with its own RAM, microprocessor and EPROM. Sucker could really use a tiny little fan - they can get a bit warm!
@@AmigaLove No, I didn't set up the password. lol But I bet there is some
hack to reset the password in the EPROM.
My friend who influenced my A1000 purchase had a Time Saver, I'd forgotten its unusual packaging and extensive manual. I almost bought one but opted not to.
Kudos :) Didnt know that RTC on A100 was so versatile. Using it between KB thats clever :)
I'm glad you found it interesting. Someone told me yesterday there was even a floppy port clock. !? It's kind of crazy. Thanks for watching!
I sure would like to get one of those MouseTime modules (or any RTC for the A1000 ofc).
In theory it should be simple-ish to reverse engineer the MouseTime unless they have scraped off the markings on the chips inside which wasn't unheard of.
All of these RTCs are surprisingly hard to acquire. I have a sinking feeling a lot of them simply got tossed in the late 90s as "useless junk" at that point. But I find them absolutely fascinating from a historical and product design standpoint. The ones that went a bit further with extra features, even more so. Thanks for watching! Really appreciate your comment, too.
@@AmigaLove Yes. Indeed hard to acquire. Nothing is easy when it comes to the A1000. :)
Nice video! Do all those a1000 expansions block the joystick port or just this one? Never noticed it.
Hi Tim! The Starboard 2 when inserted into the expansion port doesn't block the joystick port at all. It sits just far back enough so you can get a plug in there no problemo. Now, you couldn't fit a MouseTime in port 2 and use a Starboard2 at the same time, but you wouldn't need to since the Starboard2 has an RTC. Thanks for watching!
@@AmigaLove ah ok, it really looked like it would block 1 of the 2 ports in the video.
The clock on my Amiga 2000 (came with Workbench 1.3) was hilariously inaccurate until the 2.0 ROMs came out.
Was it really? I've not noticed that before. Well, I will see that every couple of months it might be off a minute or two but nothing super crazy. I wonder what was going on there with yours? Hey - thanks for watching and commenting! Hope you enjoyed they video.
@@AmigaLove I used subtitling software on it that needed to be accurate to 1/100 of a second. It never ran the same way twice. You probably wouldn't notice it in normal usage, but it was rage-inducing for clock-sensitive stuff. The 2.0 ROM upgrade cleared it up instantly.
@@CantankerousDave LOL! OMG that must have totally driven you crazy. Did you work in broadcast design? So cool!
I think you made a mistake when you state the Time Saver can save 1000 kilobytes. :) 1 MB of ram back when it was released would have cost a small fortune.
I think you will find it was 1000 BYTES. ;)