Denise 
Enterlogic - Christmas of 2023, I had a notion of picking one of these motherboards up as a mini project. So, I acted on that idea as I remembered that I was given a A500+ motherboard a few years preciously along with some other boards. It was clear that the board had battery leak damage so it was stored away...but with this new board, the damage wouldn't matter once the chips had been spared any damage. Luckily when I eventually found the old board, the chips looked in great condition!
A large order to Digikey (and other suppliers) and many many hours later I only got the board 80% done with the Amiga custom chips still yet to be populated and a RAM SIMM to be built.
At this stage, I thought I had only a 20% chance of it working - usual high confidence
To my amazement the thing actually worked…but only after I soldered together a second SIMM memory stick as the last one wasn't working right (turned out to be many solder bridges).
Its now is mounted in a Mini-ITX case, with a mini PSU and most importantly a PiStorm (second photo with the Pi attached, third without). That was ordered after I initially had it all working and I was playing a few classic games, notably Elite: Frontier. The rose tinted glasses fell when I remembered the really low framerate on A500 stock hardware.
Took a little bit of work to 1) get the PiStorm mounted as in the clone board there are Zorro slots right beside the CPU so the PiStorm as it won't clear them so additional stacked sockets needed to raise it up enough, 2) to get the Pi setup with PiStorm itself. PiStorm itself wasn't working well for me, turned out that I was using too new of a Raspberry Pi image for any instructions I could find. Loaded a 'Buster' Pi stock Lite image and all worked! …but Frontier wasn't performing like I'd expect. One simple edit and BOOM! Silky smooth intro sequence which my teenage self would have most likely passed out when seeing
The SIMM RAM stick in that second photo, the soldering looks better in person…honest! It works just fine but I have a shopping list of equipment which I might get in the future for such soldering tasks.
More tinkering done since, a RGBtoHDMI under the Denise chip with a PiZero doing the hard work. Coming soon is an addon to the RGBtoHDMI board to push audio into the HDMI signal also. Some heatsinks attached to the hottest chips - but overall this is a very expensive A500+ BUT I've learned a heap and even more confident in fixing/breaking/tinkering with hardware
This is how she looks now, I thought the badge was needed
You can see both below the PiStorm (right) and the RGBtoHDMI PiZero (left). I didn't install the 3D printed port plate/cover as I installed the external floppy port so I still need to either find or edit the STL file to allow for that. Power wise, just takes a 12V input in the bottom right, there is a pico power supply in the top left of the case.
Enterlogic - Christmas of 2023, I had a notion of picking one of these motherboards up as a mini project. So, I acted on that idea as I remembered that I was given a A500+ motherboard a few years preciously along with some other boards. It was clear that the board had battery leak damage so it was stored away...but with this new board, the damage wouldn't matter once the chips had been spared any damage. Luckily when I eventually found the old board, the chips looked in great condition!A large order to Digikey (and other suppliers) and many many hours later I only got the board 80% done with the Amiga custom chips still yet to be populated and a RAM SIMM to be built.
At this stage, I thought I had only a 20% chance of it working - usual high confidence
To my amazement the thing actually worked…but only after I soldered together a second SIMM memory stick as the last one wasn't working right (turned out to be many solder bridges).Its now is mounted in a Mini-ITX case, with a mini PSU and most importantly a PiStorm (second photo with the Pi attached, third without). That was ordered after I initially had it all working and I was playing a few classic games, notably Elite: Frontier. The rose tinted glasses fell when I remembered the really low framerate on A500 stock hardware.
Took a little bit of work to 1) get the PiStorm mounted as in the clone board there are Zorro slots right beside the CPU so the PiStorm as it won't clear them so additional stacked sockets needed to raise it up enough, 2) to get the Pi setup with PiStorm itself. PiStorm itself wasn't working well for me, turned out that I was using too new of a Raspberry Pi image for any instructions I could find. Loaded a 'Buster' Pi stock Lite image and all worked! …but Frontier wasn't performing like I'd expect. One simple edit and BOOM! Silky smooth intro sequence which my teenage self would have most likely passed out when seeing
The SIMM RAM stick in that second photo, the soldering looks better in person…honest! It works just fine but I have a shopping list of equipment which I might get in the future for such soldering tasks.
More tinkering done since, a RGBtoHDMI under the Denise chip with a PiZero doing the hard work. Coming soon is an addon to the RGBtoHDMI board to push audio into the HDMI signal also. Some heatsinks attached to the hottest chips - but overall this is a very expensive A500+ BUT I've learned a heap and even more confident in fixing/breaking/tinkering with hardware
This is how she looks now, I thought the badge was needed
You can see both below the PiStorm (right) and the RGBtoHDMI PiZero (left). I didn't install the 3D printed port plate/cover as I installed the external floppy port so I still need to either find or edit the STL file to allow for that. Power wise, just takes a 12V input in the bottom right, there is a pico power supply in the top left of the case.
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