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That's pretty cool. Be sure to remove the clock battery as they are prone to leaking acid on the board. This is VERY critical!

In regards to your question to locating a Workbench floppy, frankly I can't post links as it still counts as warez. However, looking on the Internet Archive for one shouldn't be too difficult to find.

To write them, you can use a Greaseweazle or Kryoflux which is a floppy disk controller that connects to your PC's USB port. It can read and write raw flux data that normal conventional drives can't do, in this case, Amiga disks. You could also go for the Gotek approach, you could boot up X-Copy from the Gotek connected to your Amiga and load up a Workbench image to write onto another disk.

Yeah I'm very rusty with Amigas as my father himself never owned one and I learned most my computer skills from him. He had a C64 growing up. Didn't know it was possible to write a workbench floppy from Windows though!

If you do happen to pick a Greaseweazle up, then I suggest you go check out the wiki page, which will help you understand on how to operate it. By default, the software is terminal-based; however, GUI's exist if you're more familiar with that.

https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/wiki

Speaking of C64's, I saw a C64-C at a retro game store that I visited yesterday (in-box). The SID chips in those are revised, so games that use tricks to add a second sound channel would produce static. This doesn't affect the older SID chips, like the one in the 'breadbin' model.

Yeah it'll probably be a bit before I get any progress on that. I would love to get this thing operational again though; It's essentially the missing link in my computer timeline, I have every desktop tower/computer the family had from the 80s to present, including the first computer I ever used. It'd be cool to have them all working again!

EVERY computer from the 80's?! You must be living on a gold mine by now lol.

Have you seen the inflation of the vintage computer market? The very first line of IBM computers cost a fortune even today.

They didn't have anything outside Commodore 64s in the 80s, though that being said they had like 5 C64s for some crazy reason. One of the towers from the mid-90s is currently inoperable because uh, I tried to flash the bios with on that was compatible with hard drives >5GB. Maybe I'll make a blog post with each of my desktops on it.

If you've got a photo of the motherboard somewhere, then I can look up what BIOS you might need tied to that specific board. You can't slap some random Award or what-have-you BIOS thinking that it's going to show signs of life, each revision BIOS is unique and different to one another.

No signs of life, unfortunately the only way I can probably fix it is to flash the EEPROM chip directly, something I've never done and don't likely have the tools for. I keep all these PCs in a shop that I'm not at so it'll be a day or so before I could even show it. I know the tower model is an NEC Ready model, but not much else.

I overwrote it with a custom bios that was made for the motherboard, and it crashed during the flash. Thus it's likely not got a properly functioning bios at all, and these older PCs didn't have any failsafes. It's a project I'll probably head back to at some point.

>No signs of life, unfortunately the only way I can probably fix it is to flash the EEPROM chip directly.
You could always reprogram the chip using an EEPROM programmer which is the much preferred method, in my opinion.

Correction, I actually had pictures of the board floating around, as well as the tower. NEC Ready 9522. Not 100% sure of the board, but I've found it online before.

This is your motherboard - BCM FM540. https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/bcm-fm540

No BIOS dumps unfortunately. Make sure you did backup the BIOS if you're going to program it back on.