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 expectedThe 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 bitA 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 xtra 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
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 bits2. 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
I - FOR without NEXT, 136:1