Help me 'deck out' my A500

[tiffers]

'Allo lads,

I've been working for some time on an A500 setup. So far I have:

• A500 - Green Power LED, Orange Drive LED
  • 512kb Chip + 512kb Fast + RTC (A501)
  • 1Mb chip RAM hack - switchable
  • KS Switcher with 1.3 + 3.1 ROMs (from AmigaManiac - v2.0)
  • ECS Agnus + Normal Denise
• A590
  • V7.0 ROMs
  • 2Mb RAM
  • 4.3 Gb SCSI HDD
  • OS 3.1 Installed
    • narrartor.device, translator.library, speak-handler copied from 2.05 disks
• Ricoh CD-RW SCSI Drive hooked up to A590 external port - need to get the audio from here and the A500 audio 'spliced' together.
• A520 Modulator
  • Modded for S-Video out (looks sweet on our 40" LCD TV )
• Prototype flickerfixer/scan doubler - Image is a bit wavey, but it works
• Hand-held scanner (plugs into A500 bus port - same as A590 )
• Couple of Zip Sticks, couple of Star Cursor Joysticks (the BEST sticks ever!)

I've scored a tonne of disks (a 55 Litre storage box full + a DVD player box full) which include a lot of cool software.

But I was never a power user when I had an Amiga in my youth (no HDD, base RAM and my mates (who all copied everything between themselves) wouldn't let me have any of the good stuff), so I'm not sure what applications would be good to have installed within Workbench. So far I've got Dopus 4 and a CDFS installed.

• How can I brighten up my Workbench experience? (NewIcons?)
• Which CD writing software would be best on this system?
• Which utils might make launching common apps easier?
• Where can I get some good mod files, and how best to play them
• So on and so forth...

Basically I have no idea where to start. I'm going to install some sort of C development environment on it and make it a fun machine.

If this was your A500, what would you install on it?

Obviously I don't have an accelerator for it, and I doubt I'll afford one (donations welcome ;-)).

Thanks guys,

tiffers

 

[ad-rs1600i]

I will be watching this post with interest, as I too had many friends with Amiga's who were not that willing to share disks when I was a kid! Mine was also just a bog standard thing, and now for my A600 I've pretty much brought everything I would have wanted as a kid!!

Keep your fingers crossed for a ACA530 accelerator from Individual Computers, that would finish your setup off a treat

First thing I want to do when I get mine going again is to install and play Beneath a Steel Sky

Best of luck with your project

Adrian

PS - are you running a standard A500 psu? I have one for my A600 and am trying to work out whether I will need to upgrade it or not! thanks

 

[tiffers]

PS - are you running a standard A500 psu? I have one for my A600 and am trying to work out whether I will need to upgrade it or not! thanks

Yup. Tha A590 and external cd-rom have their own power, so the A500 is almost stock standard with regards to power consumption. Ahh the prototype flickerfixer also has an external power supply, but I'm pretty chuffed with my S-Video modded A520 + 40" LCD

Some research today would have me list MUI as one of the first things to install. I haven't found a free cd-rom writer application yet. I actually wonder if a 7MHz machine has enough bandwidth to write to a CD without experiencing buffer underflows. Anyone successfully using modern media
(which seem to all be 4x speed minimum) and a scsi writer on their A500?

@thread
What workbench mods can I install which will look good on a 4 - 16 colour system without bloating the machine down to a crawl?

tiffers

 

[AndyLandy]

I haven't found a free cd-rom writer application yet.

MakeCD is now available for free:
http://www.estamos.de/makecd/

I've successfully used it on an A1200 with an 030/40 and a bunch of FastRAM. No idea how it'll perform on a bog-standard 68000 though.

 

[rkauer]

IIRC, writing CD from a 68000 CPU computer is almost impossible. Even using pure DOS environment.

 

[jvdbossc]

It looks you did not get much answers, all power users these day's poor old A500 neglected :-o

I am busy with my 600 and aca630 since that is on ecs as well I came across these today, it is difficult to remember every lha file:

Tools Daemon = add extra menu's to the top (white 3.1) (black 2.0) to quickly start apps you like. if you ask me this is the way it should have been done in os 3.9

Visual Prefs= adjust workbench colors to your likings, runs with ecs, but takes a while before starting. I notice no delay after usage.


Magic Menu enhance menu also adds some option you can right click anywhere and have some options then

I'll search further, i know there are other goodies as well like a clock for the top etc..

Do not forget to install mui (I did not select the icons)before that
lha.run (lha main archiving tool) Installer-43_3.lha (main install tool)

 

[tiffers]

It looks you did not get much answers, all power users these day's poor old A500 neglected :-o

I kind of noticed this also. I've come across a couple of packages where it's not made particularly clear up front that an A1200 seems to be the base machine (ie 68020 / AGA required)

I am busy with my 600 and aca630 since that is on ecs as well I came across these today, it is difficult to remember every lha file:

Nice. I won't be buying an accelertor for this A500, but I'd like to get it setup for a comfortable WB experience.

Tools Daemon = add extra menu's to the top (white 3.1) (black 2.0) to quickly start apps you like. if you ask me this is the way it should have been done in os 3.9

Will have to check it out.

Visual Prefs= adjust workbench colors to your likings, runs with ecs, but takes a while before starting. I notice no delay after usage.


Magic Menu enhance menu also adds some option you can right click anywhere and have some options then

Do not forget to install mui (I did not select the icons)before that
lha.run (lha main archiving tool) Installer-43_3.lha (main install tool)

I have Installer-43_3 and I have as yet to install MUI, but I have v3.8 ready to roll. I have the latest v2.15 lha which fixes year 2011 bugs.

@thread

Can anyone tell me if ClassAct and MUI clash? Can one have them both installed simultaneously? ClassAct 3.3 files found on AmiNet, are they ok to run on a 68000 ECS Agnus only A500 with 1MB Chip + 2MB Fast?

Also, does NewIcons v46 work on the machine I described? I've got an emulated A500 running in E-UAE in Linux, and after installing NewIcons, the WB screen has gone bright pink. Not much use to me. I have the WB set to 16 colors. Not interlaced as yet. I assume I will need interlaced display with NewIcons installed?

I've found a bunch of things I want to install, but I haven't even got past the basics.

tiffers

 

[Buzzfuzz]

Keep your fingers crossed for a ACA530 accelerator from Individual Computers, that would finish your setup off a treat

It's not definitive what it's going to be, but the closest post came to a ACA520 and 530, while Jens idea is to make the ACA520 also with a 1200 expansion slot to fit an ACA1230.

But Tiffers, this is yor best bet.
This will come with probably bufferd IDE ports and 8MB, perfect to run Classic WB 3.1 Full, which will have all you need.
And of course good for WHDLoad.
But the Classic WB3.1 Full setup will run also on your stock A500, if you have at least 4MB of fastmemory in there.
Right now you have 2, but if you could increase that to 4, you should be good, just disable copper in wbstartup as that is AGA only, but after that it should run fine.

It looks you did not get much answers, all power users these day's poor old A500 neglected :-o

Awh, that hurt my feelings :ROTFLOL2:
I have a fully decked out rev 8.1 A500Plus with A530 and Kickstart 3.1 and yeah once I have the nerve to upgrade the crystal oscillator to 50Mhz, it will run as good as any modern day A1200 accelerator.
Yeah it already has an MC68030RC50C, it only needs a good XC68882CR40A or 50A.
But this runs Classic WB3.1 just as good as an A1200 with Blizzard 1230.