Commodore Amiga 500

This page starts with a sad tale, a little while ago I won an Amiga 500 computer on Ebay, it took a while to get here, but it eventually arrived, however UPS obviously played football with the box whilst in their care, and despite being wrapped up in the most amount of bubble wrap I've ever seen in a box, it didn't survive the trip



Almost smashed to pieces! Poast sad reacts only



However despite the case crumbling around it, it still booted, and can read disks just fine, in fact, everything works as expected

The picture is monochrome because the RGB cable doesn't work so I used the monochrome video out port just to test it.

Also, I KNOW ABOUT ASPECT RATIOS, AND I DON'T CARE THAT THE PICTURE IS STRETCHED!



Some of you may remember my Amiga A500+ suffered at the hands of a rampage from a leaky Varta battery destroying many traces on the PCB, however the case is still good, albeit the keys have yellowed a bit

A plan is forming in my head, give me a minute, I'll get there shortly...


Board swapping time



As the case was in pieces, it was quite easy to take apart, you can see this Amiga runs Kickstart 1.3 with 512KB of RAM. It's a rev 6A board as well, this may be significant later



Stripping down the A500+, in the 3rd picture you can see the damage caused by Varta's rampage



Putting the A500 board in the A500+ case, I'm using the floppy drive from the A500+ as the eject button is broke on the A500's drive, and it appears to be heat staked on the A500+ drive, however the drives seem to be identical



Putting the top RF shield from the A500+ back on, this was missing from the A500, The bottom one was there, and it fitted to the top perfectly, including the little cover over the side expansion port



Just need to fit the keyboard from the A500, you may have noticed the A500+ keyboard has two extra keys which are blank



Putting the top cover back on



Setting it up, you may notice I'm using the RF modulator, the RGB cable supplied with the A500 doesn't have the blanking pin connected, and the TV cannot be switched to RGB manually, so all you get is a white screen, and typically I can't find my RGB cable, so rather than use monochrome video, I'll have to use RF like we all did back in the day, don't pretend you didn't


Testing the A500

This machine only has 512KB of memory, a lot of the games and demos I have require 1MB, so they don't always work



Booting up Workbench 1.3, and like a child, I immediately go to the Say programme

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I try to make it say ianwilliamhill.co.uk and failed, you can see what I had to do to get it to sound right, but it did sound right in the end



The clock programme



Trying the extras disk and... yep, this is what you get



Trying out the Shadow of the Beast game that came with this A500, I forgot to get a joystick out of storage, so I can't start the game



I dug out some discs from my A500+ days



Trying the D MOB 3 music demo



Xenon2 Megablast



Thunderhawk intro



This takes me back



James Pond 2 Robocod



Great Giana Sisters, this is as far as I can get without a joystick plugged in



Dirty Cash, fruit machine simulator, it won't start



Pinball Dreams II (Fantasies), what extra memory? The game doesn't start


Hardware



Serial numbers of the two machines



RGB cable that came with the A500, the blanking pin (16) isn't connected, so the TV can't see the RGB signal, and you only get a white screen



The PSU, nothing special about this one



Another tank mouse to add to the collection, I have three now



This is the drive from the A500, the eject button got broken off while in transit



The A500+ keyboard, can you see the two blank buttons?


Software



Workbench 1.3 and the Extras disk



Shadow of the Beast



The Kickstart 1.3 boot screen in all it's RF glory



And lastly, the broken case bits, someone told me it's possible to repair the case and make it look as good as new.

I have two issues with that...

1. I don't know if I got all the bits
2. I can't be bothered.

Anyway, this was my A500 board in a A500+ case, now I may be wrong, but is it possible to modify a A500 Rev 6A board to 1MB of RAM with Kickstart 2.04?

For the other Amiga bits and pieces I have, check out my Amiga A500+ page


For more retro hardware check out my online museum here