The Amiga 500 - along with the CDTV, the A1000, and the CD32 - are somewhat of oddities within the classic range of Amiga computers. They the Zorro ports that the "big box" Amigas have, while also missing the PCMCIA port the A600 and the A1200 have. All of this makes expanding them a bit more troublesome - but not impossible.
In the year 2020, a lot of people would probably agree that every Amiga belongs on a network - including Amiga 500 personal computers. Having a standard Ethernet port, or for that matter wifi connectivity, opens a lot of doors - including easy and fast file transfers. Fortunately, all of this is doable on an Amiga 500. The proper, quickest and certainly most elegant way of doing this is by equipping your Amiga 500 with a native networking solution, adapted for the Amiga 500's left most expansion port. Even better, there is brand new hardware made using modern manufacturing methods available for this particular purpose.
What you need, for a fashionable and - most importantly - future proof way of letting your Amiga 500 access your local network and the Internet at large, is the
X-Surf 500 - an Ethernet networking interface card for the Amiga 500. Moreover, you'll also need the
ACA 500 Plus card, which plugs straight into your Amiga 500 expansion port. Once the ACA 500 Plus is in place, you'll plug the X-Surf 500 into it and install an appropriate TCP/IP service stack. AmiTCP is one option (included with the X-Surf 500 for free), and
Roadshow another option (a brand new TCP/IP service maintained and under active development by AmigaOS developer Olaf 'Olsen' Barthel - highly recommended).
The combination of these two pieces of hardware not only gives your Amiga 500 an Ethernet port, but also a brand new MC68SEC000 processor capable of running at much, much higher frequencies than the stock A500 processor, another 8 MB of much needed RAM memory and two compact flash card slots - efficently working as two Amiga hard disk units. On top of that, the ACA 500 Plus should easily let you switch between the old AmigaOS 1.3 version and the upcoming, brand new
AmigaOS 3.2 release. While you wait, upgrading the Amiga 500 to the latest version of AmigaOS for the legacy range -
Release 3.1.4 - is advisable.
All in all, consider investing in...
- The ACA 500 Plus expansion card
- The X-Surf 500 peripheral card
- AmigaOS 3.1.4 (including a ROM chip and a set of system software floppies)
- The Roadshow TCP/IP stack
Your Amiga 500 will thank you for it. Zippy file transfers over the network and accessing all sorts of networking services will be a breeze. In combination with the ACA 500 Plus' silent and speedy hard disk implementation, a ton of more RAM and a faster processor, your Amiga 500 will feel like a lot snappier and fun to work with. Best of luck!
