Hello from the UK.
I've just rediscovered my old Amiga 500 from my parents loft and found this place very useful for helping getting it back going again.
After plugging in and it all working I put a floppy in only to then hear the awful screeching sound of something going very wrong. After finding out the loft wasn't a good location for storing floppys for 20years I did eventually find some in a box that worked. Then I found out the read head in the drive was totally seized so even the none screeching floppys didn't actually work.
Once I got a PC drive hacked into to my beloved Amiga (with the help of this forum) I finally got workbench loaded only to find out my memory expansion was broken (nooooo!) so most games didn't work.
Sure enough (as again suggested here on the forum) my battery had leaked and everything was green and furry (well furry is ok by me... but it stopped it working which made me less furr friendly).
So more hacking happened and after a cleaning and rewiring almost all the pins on the board the system clock was working but still no extra ram (gah!).
By this point I knew pretty much how the ram worked (the circuit looked simple enough) and I'd had enough of messing around with the old green and furry (broken) memory so I checked my box of old ram and found some 386 SIMMs. Only 1bit by 1Mbit instead of 4bits by 256bits in each chip but I assumed that just meant I had to use 4 chips for each 1 on the existing board (I know a little electronics).
So an old IDE cable cut in half, 13 resistors and 2 SIMMS worth of ram and I had my expansion memory back again.
I did a test with Advanced Amiga Analyzer and seems very solid. Checked by loading Monkey Island and sure enough it seems to be working. (yay!!!)
So thanks to all the various people who posted on those forums that helped guide me into bring my A500 back to life again.
Maybe I'll post a pic of the mess of wire that is my new memory expansion.
I've just rediscovered my old Amiga 500 from my parents loft and found this place very useful for helping getting it back going again.
After plugging in and it all working I put a floppy in only to then hear the awful screeching sound of something going very wrong. After finding out the loft wasn't a good location for storing floppys for 20years I did eventually find some in a box that worked. Then I found out the read head in the drive was totally seized so even the none screeching floppys didn't actually work.
Once I got a PC drive hacked into to my beloved Amiga (with the help of this forum) I finally got workbench loaded only to find out my memory expansion was broken (nooooo!) so most games didn't work.
Sure enough (as again suggested here on the forum) my battery had leaked and everything was green and furry (well furry is ok by me... but it stopped it working which made me less furr friendly).
So more hacking happened and after a cleaning and rewiring almost all the pins on the board the system clock was working but still no extra ram (gah!).
By this point I knew pretty much how the ram worked (the circuit looked simple enough) and I'd had enough of messing around with the old green and furry (broken) memory so I checked my box of old ram and found some 386 SIMMs. Only 1bit by 1Mbit instead of 4bits by 256bits in each chip but I assumed that just meant I had to use 4 chips for each 1 on the existing board (I know a little electronics).
So an old IDE cable cut in half, 13 resistors and 2 SIMMS worth of ram and I had my expansion memory back again.
I did a test with Advanced Amiga Analyzer and seems very solid. Checked by loading Monkey Island and sure enough it seems to be working. (yay!!!)
So thanks to all the various people who posted on those forums that helped guide me into bring my A500 back to life again.
Maybe I'll post a pic of the mess of wire that is my new memory expansion.
