Wednesday 8 July 2020

Back to the Roots (almost)

Back in 2018 I picked up an Amiga 500 from eBay with a mouse, joystick, Gotek floppy drive replacement and a box of disks. This is my first classic Amiga in over 10 years. Unboxing this A500 was pretty nostalgic, and brought back that some of the feeling I experienced on Christmas Day 1992 when I unboxed my A600, despite the A500 coming in a tired printer box stuffed with old newspaper and bubble wrap off-cuts. I have never owned an A500 myself, but had I friend back in the early 90s who had the standard 512k model. Back 'in the day' 10 year old me thought my A600 was a cutting edge powerhouse with it's huge 1MB of RAM and more modern looks in compariosn to a stock A500.

I don't think the box is original ;-)
The A500 before any cleaning
The Gotek, an audio mixer cables for one of the two A520 modulators and an RGB to Scart cable
Original PSU, A520 modulators and a few more cables
A treasure chest ;-)
The whole lot was just over £80 once shipping was added so not bad at all compared to prices now. At the time I went for an A500 as they seemed to be the cheapest Amiga model and readily available, I had also read they are less likely to suffer issues with leaking capacitors than the later A600 or A1200. The final reason was the fact I had never owned this particular model, I have had two A600s, three A1200s and briefly an A3000 (wish I had hung on to that one in particular!) over the years so was interesting to me to try something a little different.

The seller had listed the Amiga as having a keyboard fault and had also warned not to try and use the Gotek straight away as it wasn't seated correctly. I unpacked to find the description accurate, fortuantely no case hacking has happened to the case which was good to see.

The system powered up and I then set about preping a USB memory stick with some games and demos to run on the Gotek, after confirming that the floppy drive was indeed faulty. Loading games of the Gotek was pretty straight forward, however soon found that many of the games I wanted to play required 1MB of Chip RAM. An included 512KB RAM board was not working and seemed to be causing a yellow screen on boot, having cleaned this board up it still failed to work.

So overall happy with my purchase I went hunting on eBay for a replacement RAM expansion and so it begins...