A500 expansion recommendations

[bichobola]

Hi guys;

Recently I restored my old A500. Got a 512kb ram expansion, a gotek drive and a second disk drive.

Just wanted to know some hardware recommendations, accelerators, ram expansions, and hdd adapters.

There's a lot of option out there... ide68k, tf, witcher, mkl's, etc...

Thanks in advance!

 

[Watson]

Your current setup is perfect for all those classic Amiga games.

As for expansion, that depends on your goals and budget really. The cheapest option would be a Raspberry / PiStorm, and I'd recommend using this with emu68k by Michal Schulz.

The PiStorm will give you a CPU 68020/030/040 Accelerator, RTG, super-fast Hard Disk interface, Wifi + lots more.

And you can run the amazing Caffeine OS by Captain Le Chuck (I believe). It's definitely well worth checking out if you haven't seen

 

[bichobola]

Hi @Watson;
Seems difficult to get a Raspberry Pi 3 Model a+ right now. What do you think about the M68EC020-TK?

 

[Watson]

Hi @Watson;
Seems difficult to get a Raspberry Pi 3 Model a+ right now. What do you think about the M68EC020-TK?

The board looks pretty good, although I have no experience with that one.

Which model A500 do you have?

 

[RetroNinja]

For a quality of life improvement, go for an optical mouse.

Look around and pickup any hard drive expansion that plugs into the side. I was amazed at how much more I liked my A500 once I picked one up. The 2nd part of that is to add a ZuluSCSI card (replace the spinning hard drive). The 3rd part of that is, ideally, the expansion card should have some SIMM slots to add a little more memory. The 4th part of that is you can step up to WDHload.

If you see someone willing to trade a 68010 for a McDonald's Happy Meal, get it, just for kicks.

If you are looking for an OS upgrade, remember AOS 3.2 has a 2MB requirement. So either boost your memory or don't upgrade the OS past 3.1.4.

It's always a personal preference, but, I would never upgrade the CPU in an A500 (excluding the 68010) with any accelerator. I would prefer to move the more serious upgrades to an A2000/A3000.

 

[bichobola]

@Watson I'm not sure of the version of my Amiga. I have it stored in a box right now, as I'm moving to a new home in 1 month or two.
@RetroNinja I allways dreamed with a side expansion scsi but it was and it is very expensive. I'm looking at the ide68k, and maybe modding kickstart 1.3 or upgrading it.
The gottagoram 8GB module seems interesting also.