An electronics enthusiast remade a 1993 DIY project from his youth, but hard-earned skills and experience ironed out errors in the printed instructions.
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(Image credit: CU Amiga Magazine, The Internet Archive) A three-decade-old “Amiga mystery” has been solved by an intrepid electronics-focused TechTuber. Rob Smith originally tried to make a DIY sampler for his Amiga computer back in 1993. Despite his best efforts — carefully following a magazine-printed guide and reaching out to geeks at his local Maplin (Radio Shack) — he could never get the finished sampler to work. Now, 32 years later, with extensive experience on his side, he has returned to the project. Spoiler alert: he eventually found and quashed the mistakes in the CU Amiga Issue 039 step-by-step guide.
Watch On Smith explains that he was saving up for a pre-built sound-sampler expansion when he spotted the above-linked CU Amiga issue and the step-by-step guide to making your own ‘generic’ model. Typically, Amigans would use these to grab audio samples for developing games, demos, slideshows, and ProTracker (.MOD) compositions. The project appeals as it fused his computer and DIY electronics interests.
It must have been frustrating to work on this money-saving project and, after his best efforts, have it flop. Eventually, Smith threw the stuff away, as far as he remembers, but kept a hold of the key analog to digital converter (ADC) chip, as it was one of the most expensive components.
With this same component in hand, Smith decided to have another crack at the DIY Amiga sampler, this time with experience, and the huge resources of the internet behind him.
Following the magazine’s instructions precisely, in 2025, ended up with the same result as in 1993. An unresponsive device, which actually crashed the Amiga when it was summoned to do its business.
Having followed the CU Amiga Issue 039 printed tutorial with the utmost care, Smith found at least one glaring error quite quickly. He looked up CU Amiga Issue 040, and found that the Build Your Own Sampler Part 2 tutorial (for a stereo sampler) included a correction for the mono sampler in Issue 039!
Blaming a typo, CU Amiga 040 stated that “C1 should have been a 47uF capacitor.” The magazine printed a month prior has listed this component as “7uF.” Oops. A quick few pokes with the soldering iron and swapping the correct component into place rectified this error.
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