A500 to A500+ production transition and quirks

I just noted the post in the thread about A1200 motherboards that suggested that there was no stock rotation on some of the Amiga 1200 production runs. Hence the motherboard in your machine may not be predicted by the year of production or purchase of your machine. It reminded me of a question I have meant to ask on here for a few weeks.

I can recall seeing an odd Amiga 500, maybe two, probably at the 1991 World of Amiga show. This was the show where I first saw the A500+, and one of the most striking things about the case was the shortened return key to make way for the extra key. The thing was, While I was there, I saw a machine on display promoting a product, which was labeled as a straight A500 and running 1.3, but it had the extra key. I think the label was more in the style of the A500+ label too. I can not remember why, but I think I have had a snoop around this machine and noticed it had 1meg chip, but no trapdoor expansion, suggesting that it could have the A500+ motherboard, just with a 1.3 rom and a new A500 label stuck on.

Does anybody know if this was a known variant of this machine? I would be really interested to see anybody has come across one. It really did seem very white (but not as white as the A1200 case).

My A500 was an ECS machine, but I think it had an older case, a lot darker than this A500, and I do not recall it having a model label at all.

The big C= did all kinds of weird stuff where the A500+ is concerned. The transition phase included A500 machines with ECS Agnus and OCS Denise, or vice-versa, with either KS1.3 or KS2.04. It was something to do with the A500+ not being properly released until 1992, but they were desperately short of A500 stock for the Christmas period, so sold A500+es as A500s.

So there were A500s that went out with Kickstart 2.0 in them? I know for sure there was a lot of A500+ stock about at the World of Amiga show in 1991. Commodore must have really fouled up to be running short, especially as there were dealers carrying stock of A500's they had bought for Xmas retail I would have assumed was still being sold well into 1992.

I can remember there being 1.3 A500s still being sold after the A600 came out. And we know there was versions of the A600 that went out with Kickstarts that did not even support the internal ide interface or cardbus...

I wonder if any machines labeled as A500+'s got sent out with 1.3 in them? Or even better, 1.2 :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jumping Anaconda

I can recall seeing an odd Amiga 500, maybe two, probably at the 1991 World of Amiga show. This was the show where I first saw the A500+, and one of the most striking things about the case was the shortened return key to make way for the extra key.

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Are you talking about these two layouts?

http://openbytes.files.wordpress.com...9/amiga500.jpg
http://image2.ac7.org/image/1097.jpeg

That's just the US layout (first image) vs the standard international layout (second image).

Now I am getting confused. The layout of my A500 matches what you say is the US layout (but obviously with the UK keymap) and that is what every A500 I had seen was like apart from the one I saw at the 1991 World of Amiga.

The one I saw at that show had a case similar to the A500 Plus, but without the Commodore indentation. Instead it had an oblong identation to take an embossed "Commodore Amiga 500" sticker, in the style of the one on the A500 plus.

When did the 8A motherboard go into production? I had a 1990 Screen Gems bundle machine. I would have been really curious to see what that had in it.

Also, has anybody ever come across a 512k A500 Plus?

AndyLandy is correct.

There were some vanilla A500 machines which were pretty much just A500+ internally, due to low stock at one point. So a nice little upgrade there, at the time.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jumping Anaconda

So there were A500s that went out with Kickstart 2.0 in them? I know for sure there was a lot of A500+ stock about at the World of Amiga show in 1991. <SNIP>
I wonder if any machines labeled as A500+'s got sent out with 1.3 in them? Or even better, 1.2 :)

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What I believe happened, was: (in contrast to the above scenario) you had A500+ machines with the spec of a bog-standard A500 (this was assumed to be down to a transition period).

Interestingly these A500not-so-plus systems still had the the newer OS/Kickstart 2.04 version fitted!

The trick to telling them apart without breaking warranty seal is in the Power/Floppy status LEDs:

A500 (early)
Red Power LED / Green Floppy Drive LED

A500+
Green Power LED / Amber Floppy Drive LED.

This early A500s power light turned off to access the audio filters. Whereas the A500+ only dimmed its LED.

Was it only the 8A A500s that had the Red light? I had the Green/Amber with the dimming light in my Full ECS machine. I thought the first release Kickstart 1.2 A500s had the red light too, and they switched to Green/Amber dimming when the 1.3 ECS A500s went into production.

I wonder how many of these A500-not-quite-a-plus machines were made?

The same was true of that-era A2000s too. r6.x boards sometimes had a mix of OCS and ECS chips.

But surely mixing the custom chips caused compatibility issues?