Commodore Amiga 500+

My Amiga is currently not working, it is suffering from "Death from Varta", but it is the system I spent most of my teenage life with, so it will be either repaired or replaced at some point.

Update: Read about what happened here Amiga A500



I have neutralized the battery acid and cleaned up the board, and as usual the Gary socket bore the brunt of Varta's rampage, so the socket was removed and replaced, the Gary chip had it's legs cleaned, but the Amiga still only outputs a black screen, so there must be some trace damage on the board. The power LED doesn't go bright, so something is stopping the CPU from running at this moment

But that won't stop us from looking around the Amiga and all the other goodies I have. BTW, my Amiga was part of the Cartoon Classics pack



On the rear of the Amiga are two joystick/mouse ports, stereo audio out, disk drive, serial port, parallel port, power socket, RGB video, and mono video out



On the left of the Amiga is the side expansion port, usually for a Hard disk or CD ROM drive



Underneath is the bottom expansion port, normally used for memory expansion



Power pack



The original power supply died, so this is a replacement, the PSU doesn't weigh much, so must be a switch mode power supply

A520 Modulator




If you wanted to connect the Amiga to anything other than a monochrome or RGB monitor, or a SCART television, then you needed this. It stuck out the back of the Amiga by some distance, and you needed the phono cable to route the audio to the TV
However I did eventually get a Phillips CM8833MkII monitor.

Display cables



I had obviously broke the RF cable, so had fitted a plug to what little cable was left, then used an extension from a VCR, and here is a home made RGB to SCART cable

Roctec Roclite Floppy drive




Like most Amiga power users I had an external drive, you could daisy-chain up to four disk drives to the Amiga

Mouse x2



My main mouse was a 3rd party mouse, but that's with my Atari STE at the moment, so here are two standard Amiga tank mice

Quickshot Python 1 Joystick x2



I had these joysticks, they were great



Note the switch, setting it to Sega allowed you to use two fire buttons in games on the Amiga

1Mb Chip RAM expansion



This took a beating from Varta, so I've no idea if it works

Centronics printer cable



I used to have a printer, but it broke and was disposed of



Documentation

The Amiga and Workbench user manuals



Various other documentation and leaflets that came with the Amiga




The A520 modulator user manual



The instructions for the 1MB memory upgrade



The Amiga came with a special copy of Amiga Format, these postcards came with it



The instructions for the Roctec floppy disk drive



The instructions for the Phillips monitor and Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 game



If you had an Atari ST you could exchange the disc, and look at what I wrote inside the cover





Cartoon Classics bundled software

Bart Vs The Space Mutants



Lemmings (One disk version)



Captain Planet and the Planeteers (Special version)



Deluxe Paint III




Purchased software

The Addams Family



Jaguar XJ220



Zool



Monkey Island 2, LeChuck's Revenge




Donated software

Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon



Trivial Pursuit



World Class Leader Board



Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker



WWF European Rampage



Skidmarks




Random floppy disks

I won't bore you with every disk, you know what most of them are, all I will say is there's a lot of "blank" disks here. The following disks here are the most notable



Workbench 2.0

This is the GUI software that came with the Amiga



Blank disks

I only had four unused disks left



Relokick 1.3 and Workbench 1.3

Relokick downgraded the Amiga to Kickstart 1.3, this made some games work, I got hold of Workbench 1.3 for that garish blue and orange feel



My version of Workbench Extras

This is a suite of useful software I created



My version of the Workbench 2.0 software suite

This was my version of the Workbench 2.0, you had full Workbench 2.0, Extras, Fonts with FED (Font Editor), AmigaDOS, which booted to the command line, and Fastbench, which was a minimal GUI built for speed



A whole load of demos and PD software

You would order these from adverts in the back of various Amiga magazines, usually about 50p a disk



Magazine cover disks

CU Amiga cover disks from #24 to #97 and every disk in between



More magazine cover disks

Amiga Format cover disks from #31 to #67C and every disk in between



Even more magazine cover disks

Some random disks from other magazines I bought



Some more PD disks

Yes the Amiga 500 could run a Spectrum 48K emulator. Slowly, but it did work



And finally, the Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 disk that came with the Phillips monitor



And that's my Amiga journey, for more retro hardware check out my online museum here