Amiga 500 New Member - Perth WA

[ddacks]

Hi my name is Chris Ryan. I live in Perth Australia and I am trying to trick out my old Amiga 500 but I am struggling to find the parts, info to do this.

I really like modding my games console's to unlock their true power and Amiga is where it all began for me. Well Atari 7800 to be exact but I was only little then.

Can you offer me any advice about how I could do to my Amiga 500 exactly what you have done? Any assistance would be really appreciated.
Anyway hope to hear from you soon

Thanks

Chris Ryan

 

[Jon Hare]

Welcome to the great AmiBay Community!

I'm sure you'll get any advice you need. But more informations of what you have and what you want to do with it would help

 

[Brian]

Welcome, Chris!

You should have pretty good luck here with whatever assistance you require, whether hardware or software. I recently purchased an A1000 from one of the other members, so I probably won't be much use to you. Many other members are extremely knowledgeable about the Amigas, though.

Have a good time!

 

[r0jaws]

Welcome to Amibay Chris.
There are quite a few members from your hemisphere on here, including a couple of Mods.
I'm sure you'll get all the help you need.

 

[TheoryBoy]

Hi, and welcome.
I just recently got my old A500 up and running. The biggest problem I think you may have is getting stuff on to floppy so you can use the amiga. If you can get a transfer method such as http://wiki.abime.net/file_transfer/hombre or adf sender so you can start filling up some disks.
Hombre is pretty cool, it allows you to transfer via serial, parallel or dd dos format floppy.

 

[SkydivinGirl]

Welcome Chris! It's great to have you here.

Thanks!

Heather

 

[PymerOne]

Welcome Chris

Grtz, pymerOne.

 

[jvdbossc]

Welcome! this is my personal opinion way to go:

First thing to have is a rom switcher, to use the old world 1.3 rom and new world 3.1 rom for workbench if you are no whdload fan like me. (sold on here by amigamaniac)

(I see no point in the A500 with whdload, since then you could start more easy with another amiga)

Then a Scsi expansion + memory or an ide (sold onhere) expansion to run workbench 3.1.

Then pray if you experience that workbench 3.1 is to slow to find a cpu boad somewhere.. A nice pc mouse with cocolino etc..

That would be my PERSONAL way to go, exept the cpu board, since I like the A500 for my old games, and if the cpu board has no fallback mode i would skip it.

 

[Merlin]

Hi Chris,

Welcome to AmiBay!

 

[AndyLandy]

Can you offer me any advice about how I could do to my Amiga 500 exactly what you have done? Any assistance would be really appreciated.

Hello and welcome to Amibay!

I think the important question is "What do you want to do with your Amiga?". It's also worth pointing out that one of the best upgrades you can get for an A500 is an A1200. It's certainly possible to pimp up an A500, and if that's where you want to go, then I wish you all the best, but if you're looking for the quickest path to an über-Amiga, starting from an A1200 or A4000 is the best way to go.

If you want to make your A500 awesome, you'll want a Hard Disk, some Fast RAM and probably a CPU accelerator (You can sometimes find '030 upgrades for reasonable prices)

If you go down this route, a Kickstart upgrade is practically a given, then you can run the most-recent Workbench releases and software that goes with them. You might also want to look at upgrading the Denise graphics chip to the ECS version and upping your Chip RAM if you can. Finally, you might want to consider a scandoubler, so you can use your Amiga on a modern monitor. The Indivision ECS is probably the best choice here.

Alternatively, grab an A1200, stick in some Kickstart 3.1 ROMs, a trapdoor accelerator card, a 4GB CompactFlash card and an Indivision AGA and you'll have an Amiga to be reckoned with!

 

[ddacks]

Thanks Everyone for you help!!

Thanks Everyone for you help!!

Firstly thanks to everyone who welcomed me & 4 all the helpful advice!

I am a little more advanced with this now. I managed to buy a board that uses the CPU port and gives a cf and ide socket. I got this from some guy in Iceland.

Next I needed a rom switcher and ks 1.3 and 3.1. This was easy enough to get hold of.

I then got a 8gb cf card and installed classicwb_68K on it, and purchase a copy of easy adf and extracted it to my pc so i could use it with winuae.

This allowed an easy transfer of adf to hard drive (via cf usb adapter)

The problem is now when I try to execute games on my A500 PAL Rev 5 through this rad version of workbench, it say I dont have enough memory. So naturally I have been looking for a Megachip (or equilaviant) and a Super Angus 8375. Sadly these seem to pop up and disappear very quickly.

I think the idea about the video card upgrade is really neat also.

The main reason I am sticking with the A500 is it is the same one I have had since my childhood. I will definitely get a tricked out A1200 down the track.

 

[matt020]

G'day Chris,

Im near Joondalup, are you north or south of the river?