Amiga 500 upgrade or big box Amiga?

[dragan]

Hello,

I have an Amiga 500 in excellent condition, it has never been opened or serviced. Now, I would like to give it a sensible upgrade with focus on compatibility. I have been eyeing Vampire v2 or v4 (playing AGA games sounds very promising), but I don't know about compatibility, as I read it's not that great. I was also looking at ACA500plus with ACA1234 from Icomp but I am not sure if it's a worth upgrade. To complicate thing further, I always loved and adored big box Amigas (never owned one) and I started looking at 2000, 3000 and 4000 so I would like to ask which one of these provides the best compatibility? Maybe I should leave Amiga 500 as is and try to find and buy one of these big box amigas? ReAmiga is also an option. Any thoughts?

 

[jamonyorke]

Aca500plus is IMHO the ultimate upgrade for the A500, even without the extra accelerator. I have one myself and I really enjoy it.

It gives you a nice speed bump while retaining optimal compatibility (68000 @42Mhz), 8MB of fast ram, and big & fast storage (one CF card for booting and installed software, and another card for easy file interchange with a PC or other amigas).

It also gives you a "kickstart switcher" for free (1.3 and 3.1), and if you have a rev6 board / 8372A agnus, it can configure your trapdoor ram as chip ram (for a total of 1MB) without even opening your amiga.

All these are excellent upgrades and make the A500 a superb machine for WHDLoad gaming, for example, with total compatibility.

 

[CrazyC]

I still think an a1200 is the best point for compatibility, but you could always also look into putting your a500 (or an a1200) into a checkmate case giving you a nice looking 'big box' amiga - depending on what expansions you want to run. It kinda all depends on what you are going to use the amiga for and how deep your pockets are......

 

[dragan]

Aca500plus is IMHO the ultimate upgrade for the A500, even without the extra accelerator. I have one myself and I really enjoy it.

It gives you a nice speed bump while retaining optimal compatibility (68000 @42Mhz), 8MB of fast ram, and big & fast storage (one CF card for booting and installed software, and another card for easy file interchange with a PC or other amigas).

It also gives you a "kickstart switcher" for free (1.3 and 3.1), and if you have a rev6 board / 8372A agnus, it can configure your trapdoor ram as chip ram (for a total of 1MB) without even opening your amiga.

All these are excellent upgrades and make the A500 a superb machine for WHDLoad gaming, for example, with total compatibility.

Glad to hear that, Aca500plus is affordable so think I'll go with it!
Thank you!

 

[YouKnowWho]

Oh boy...opinions like...

@dragan - you're in Europe, so you have access to really good supply choices and options. It's funny you are noting this because it's exactly the question I considered a while back myself. And while these decision tend to be personal and sometimes driven by choices and memories of past, here is how I see it.

Get a 1200 wedge. It's just so damn clean and pretty. It has it all, including A500 V2.0 looks. You can make a clean setup and with a CF card and memory upgrade you have a pretty nice machine already, making it quite cost effective. If you want to take it further 030s are quite affordable, and even 060 is easily possible - something not at all that simple or affordable on ECS. That alone should make you stop and think. Game compatibility is good because people have been working to make it so, and it's really impressive what the community has done out there for our simple "user's" benefit.

Since you're in Europe, 2000 would be my next choice if you don't want a native AGA machine. They can be had at a decent price and have so much room. I actually feel 2000s compare to towers with all that expansion room in there. ECS, upgradable, throw a TF in there and indivision ECS w/Super Denise and you still have a video slot and all 5 Zorro slots free plus ISAs for a PC Pentium system on a card maybe? Toaster? Emplant? RTG card? Go nuts! ...and it will all be so clean.

500 would be my last choice, even though we all have lovely memories of them, because 1200s exist. If I'd go 500 I'd aim for a 500+, and again TF and indivision ECS it for a truly disturbingly fantastic A500 based ECS wedge experience without any external appendages, which are not to my personal taste. I like it all to be clean and self contained.

That's my 2 cents.

 

[dragan]

I still think an a1200 is the best point for compatibility, but you could always also look into putting your a500 (or an a1200) into a checkmate case giving you a nice looking 'big box' amiga - depending on what expansions you want to run. It kinda all depends on what you are going to use the amiga for and how deep your pockets are......

Mainly for games, and A1200 make sense as I would like to play some AGA titles as well. I do realise there is no need for accelerators if I only want to play games, but I am curious what people are doing with Amigas that have more powerful CPU's like 060?

Oh boy...opinions like...

@dragan - you're in Europe, so you have access to really good supply choices and options. It's funny you are noting this because it's exactly the question I considered a while back myself. And while these decision tend to be personal and sometimes driven by choices and memories of past, here is how I see it.

Get a 1200 wedge. It's just so damn clean and pretty. It has it all, including A500 V2.0 looks. You can make a clean setup and with a CF card and memory upgrade you have a pretty nice machine already, making it quite cost effective. If you want to take it further 030s are quite affordable, and even 060 is easily possible - something not at all that simple or affordable on ECS. That alone should make you stop and think. Game compatibility is good because people have been working to make it so, and it's really impressive what the community has done out there for our simple "user's" benefit.

Since you're in Europe, 2000 would be my next choice if you don't want a native AGA machine. They can be had at a decent price and have so much room. I actually feel 2000s compare to towers with all that expansion room in there. ECS, upgradable, throw a TF in there and indivision ECS w/Super Denise and you still have a video slot and all 5 Zorro slots free plus ISAs for a PC Pentium system on a card maybe? Toaster? Emplant? RTG card? Go nuts! ...and it will all be so clean.

500 would be my last choice, even though we all have lovely memories of them, because 1200s exist. If I'd go 500 I'd aim for a 500+, and again TF and indivision ECS it for a truly disturbingly fantastic A500 based ECS wedge experience without any external appendages, which are not to my personal taste. I like it all to be clean and self contained.

That's my 2 cents.

It seams like I will buy ACA500plus AND 1200 Interesting note about 2000, does anyone knows if 2000 motherboard has some limitations when it comes to speed of connected cards?

 

[YouKnowWho]

Oh sure, Zorro III is faster, but one cannot deny the value of a 2000 system and all that room in there. Back in the day, it was my last Amiga with a GVP 040 and other goodies, and I had a really hard time justifying to myself a new Amiga at the time. Now? I wish I got one, but back then, the value proposition wasn't there for me. Mainly AGA and Zorro III was the selling point - with new cards needed, less overall room and less room for cards. Even with the towers there are potential configurations where the towers have less room for cards than the 2000 if you start using video slots and ISA cards in there.

Oh no...did I contribute to Amiga's failure through not upgrading by trusty 2000 back in the day? Is that why Apple pushes everyone to upgrade their phone every year, because they'd die off otherwise?

 

[CrazyC]

Mainly for games, and A1200 make sense as I would like to play some AGA titles as well. I do realise there is no need for accelerators if I only want to play games, but I am curious what people are doing with Amigas that have more powerful CPU's like 060?

Well, I can only speak for myself (proud owner of 3 A1200s - all different). My 060's let me play one or two higher end games (Amiquake) etc, and give a snappier workbench.
To do what everyone tends to do and put several thousand games on a CF card and run them all via WHdload and workbench (I use igame as the front end - which benefits from a faster machine as well when you have that many games and screenshots) you will need some extra ram as a minimum.
I followed what is quite a common path when I got my first a1200, started with a CF card and no ram. immediately found I needed a 4mb ram card as minimum so got one. a couple of weeks later I traded that in for a blizzard 1230. (for gaming and general use that is the sweet spot really - nowadays there are a significant number of 030 based cards though.)
Then late at night some months later I went down the rabbit hole and bought a Blizzard 1260 card on amibay. then - well take a look at my amibay blog if you want to see the ups and downs of my story

 

[Aeberbach]

A1200 with PiStorm is the ultimate Amiga. I had an 060, a few different 030s, they are just not that fast and of course you don't get RTG which is a huge improvement for tasks like workbench. Right now the need for a monitor on both HDMI and Amiga video is annoying but the Framethrower to give you full-screen or windowed Amiga graphics through HDMI is coming.

If you get two or three machines dragan I bet you end up using the A1200 and admiring the others...

 

[dragan]

A1200 with PiStorm is the ultimate Amiga. I had an 060, a few different 030s, they are just not that fast and of course you don't get RTG which is a huge improvement for tasks like workbench. Right now the need for a monitor on both HDMI and Amiga video is annoying but the Framethrower to give you full-screen or windowed Amiga graphics through HDMI is coming.

If you get two or three machines dragan I bet you end up using the A1200 and admiring the others...

Interesting, didn't know about Framethrower (pardon my stupid newbee questions) but the point of it is to get de-interlaced picture on the big screen so you don't have to look for 15KHz monitors anymore? In essence you get high resolution WB? What about games? Since PiStorm is actually emulated 68K (right?) how it compares to vampire v2 or v4? Ok, it's MUCH cheaper that's for sure but compatibility is higher/lower when compared to 030 or 060?

 

[Xanxi]

Yeah the A1200 is better than the A500 in any way, and one of the reason is that the A500 needs too much desk space. Unfortunately, desks for computers are not like in the 80's/90's anymore.
I would like to still have my old A500Plus but i need a table for it alone.

 

[Aeberbach]

From what I know compatibility is about the same as a native Commodore CPU. Just like the fast chips with MMU/FPU some things won't run, but there is a good chance there is a WHDLoad compatibility fix. Only the CPU is emulated so to most things it looks like a vanilla Amiga, just very fast - you are still using the real custom chips unlike the Vampire.

The retargetable graphics provided by PiSTorm uses the P96 drivers to produce a very large screen on a HDMI monitor that looks pretty amazing, from memory mine is at 1080p. There is a lot of Amiga software that never expected a screen that big though... some of it will only display on the Amiga video output so you need two monitors. I have been playing Eye of the Beholder on a little 10" LCD (that is 15kHz compatible) next to the 24" LCD I use for the HDMI output. When the Framethrower is finished it will clip over the Denise chip and after a bit of FPGA processing input the video signal into the Raspberry Pi's camera port, then you get the output in a window on the big monitor or it can be scaled to full-screen. Everyone is waiting very patiently, it's the last piece of the puzzle then the search for 15kHz monitors is no longer necessary.

Amiga 1200: PiStorming

Now that my new Amiga 1200 has been restored, and the boot loop repaired, I have been having a play with the PiStorm32-Lite. Things have come along leaps and bounds since this Amiga 1200 board was…

linuxjedi.co.uk

 

[dragan]

From what I know compatibility is about the same as a native Commodore CPU. Just like the fast chips with MMU/FPU some things won't run, but there is a good chance there is a WHDLoad compatibility fix. Only the CPU is emulated so to most things it looks like a vanilla Amiga, just very fast - you are still using the real custom chips unlike the Vampire.

The retargetable graphics provided by PiSTorm uses the P96 drivers to produce a very large screen on a HDMI monitor that looks pretty amazing, from memory mine is at 1080p. There is a lot of Amiga software that never expected a screen that big though... some of it will only display on the Amiga video output so you need two monitors. I have been playing Eye of the Beholder on a little 10" LCD (that is 15kHz compatible) next to the 24" LCD I use for the HDMI output. When the Framethrower is finished it will clip over the Denise chip and after a bit of FPGA processing input the video signal into the Raspberry Pi's camera port, then you get the output in a window on the big monitor or it can be scaled to full-screen. Everyone is waiting very patiently, it's the last piece of the puzzle then the search for 15kHz monitors is no longer necessary.

Amiga 1200: PiStorming

Now that my new Amiga 1200 has been restored, and the boot loop repaired, I have been having a play with the PiStorm32-Lite. Things have come along leaps and bounds since this Amiga 1200 board was…

linuxjedi.co.uk

Well since it's very affordable I will definitely try PiSTorm and thanks for sharing the link!

 

[CrazyC]

Everyone has to work out where they sit on the spectrum that goes from 'I will only use original hardware that was available in the day' through to just running an emulator on a pc. This often results in vociferous arguments (so lets not start that here) and its really about what personally gives you your kick from using the amiga.
With regards to an A1200 and displays there are other display options (although a bit expensive) such as an indivision mk3 that will let you have HDMI (including generally sound over HDMI) output.

 

[sbrentson]

Uh both? Upgrade your 500 AND get the big box. But why stop there? Seriously, I think you’re asking the wrong community if the answer isn’t to have your cake and eat it, too.

 

[dragan]

Uh both? Upgrade your 500 AND get the big box. But why stop there? Seriously, I think you’re asking the wrong community if the answer isn’t to have your cake and eat it, too.

Sorry I didn't quite understand the thing about wrong community? Heh to be honest, as I am not native english speaker I had to look in the dictionary to understand what do you mean by "have your cake and eat it, too."

 

[SilkWorm]

The wrong community is about us not being able to give you an advice about staying with just ONE Amiga
Keep the A500 and go a Big Box as well - I hope now you understand what we want to say.

 

[dragan]

The wrong community is about us not being able to give you an advice about staying with just ONE Amiga
Keep the A500 and go a Big Box as well - I hope now you understand what we want to say.

Hahaha it's crystal clear now I am already looking for Amiga 2000 on Ebay. Thank you very much!

 

[CrazyC]

Yes this hobby can become both addictive and very expensive, and it all happens quite quickly! Good luck.

 

[cgugl]

With a Vampire Firebird you have everything you need.
You have a fast RTG graphic card, hdmi output, a flicker fixer, a network card, a lot of memory (512Mb or 1Gb) and you can use both ECS and AGA (ecs and aga are also redirected on the HDMI)