Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: jasongins on September 03, 2003, 02:47:50 AM
-
I never had an Amiga - my parents wouldn't upgrade me from my C64 at the time. They got a PC, so that was the direction I wound up going. I got a used Amiga 500 a while back, but I think the floppy drive or power supply/connector may be flakey. Floppy drive operation is very inconsistant and sometimes improved by lifting up on the power supply connector while it is plugged in the unit.
Anyway, on to my question:
I recently aquired an Amiga 500 new-in-box refurb. My original thought when I ordered it was to use it. I was hoping to see what I missed. Anyway, the unit has arrived, and I got the feeling upon examining it that maybe I shouldn't disturb it. Everything is sealed, packed, and mint. The question I have is this: Would it be "wrong" to unpack it, open the manuals and disks, and start using it? Does keeping it packed and stored do more forAmiga 500 preservation than becoming a user? What do you think?
-
Well I myself am a user type rather than a collector. I would use it, but it might be worth more in the future unused. You could alway buy a 500 or a floppy drive off ebay cheap.
BTW if I did try to collect stuff my wife would throw it out anyway.
Stew
-
I'd say ... keep it sealed for 50 years ... then sell it :-)
There is always a nut who will pay you good money for it then.
In the meantime, get yourself an A1200 or an A4000 to play with ... then you can easilly put a harddrive in it and maybe a faster cpu.
-
I should probably investigate the floppy drive issue further. Do the newer HD floppies work properly in the older drives? It seemed the unit had difficulty duplicating disks (the duplicates didn't work upon completion), and the drive seemed to have difficulty mounting disks. Jiggling the power connector seemed to promote drive activity, but I can't say it made any real improvement. Any suggestions?
-
The box itself isn't sealed, but the mouse is in bubble wrap, all the documentation is sealed except for the Amiga Basic book, and the A500 itself has some kind of foam wrap on it. Are the boxes normally sealed in plastic when new?
-
I'd say just use it and enjoy it. Can't see it being much of a collectors item, but maybe I'm wrong. You'll find many folks here at Amiga.org willing to help out newcomers, so don't hesitate to ask for help. The Amiga in all of it's incarnations is a wonderful hobby. Best regards....Art
:-D
-
There are Amiga collectors out there I am one of them.. I buy anything I see that's Commodore-Amiga when I find it on e-bay..
My dream would be to move to westchester pa and turn the original commodore offices into a museum...
-
I'm not quite sure what are you referring to, but if you are trying to use HD disks in Amiga 500, that wouldn't work. You need DD floppy disk to copy from source to destination. Destination disk must be DD disk. Source disk, I assume is DD. Which app are you using for disk copy?
Regards,
levelLORD
-
My fave Amiga collector's item is a paper boing ball christmas tree bulb that has the logo and says "Amiga's first Christmas"..
Still have it on the tree every year..
-
I'd go ahead and use it. Mostly it would be good for retro gaming and although he'd probably have to get an accellerator off of ebay to do anything "serious" with it; he would get the flavour of it, maybe whetting his appetite for a 4000 or 3000 (or even 2000) bigger box that is more expandable. He should probably be mad aware of the Amiga battery problems which might even affect a "new" Amiga that is several years old. ;-)
-
DonnyEMU wrote:
My dream would be to move to westchester pa and turn the original commodore offices into a museum...
@DonnyEMU -
Any idea what's there now? I imagine the guys at Software Hut aren't too far away, if you wanted someone to ask...
Best,
Mike
-
@Stew
BTW if I did try to collect stuff my wife would throw it out anyway.
I hear yah Stew. Where did it all went wrong? Remember when we could put our stuff any place we want? An no one telling us to clean it up.
Anyway it's not like the shoes, clothes, make-up take so much space, right?
Coder
p.s. You might see a -Edit- here soon and we all know why.
-
Coder wrote:
@Stew
BTW if I did try to collect stuff my wife would throw it out anyway.
I hear yah Stew. Where did it all went wrong? Remember when we could put our stuff any place we want? An no one telling us to clean it up.
Anyway it's not like the shoes, clothes, make-up take so much space, right?
Coder
p.s. You might see a -Edit- here soon and we all know why.
That should help against edits .....
:-D
-
levelLORD wrote:
I'm not quite sure what are you referring to, but if you are trying to use HD disks in Amiga 500, that wouldn't work. You need DD floppy disk to copy from source to destination. Destination disk must be DD disk. Source disk, I assume is DD. Which app are you using for disk copy?
Regards,
levelLORD
The main difference is the little hole in the corner of a HD (High Density) disk. If you have 2.x and are trying to shuffle things back and forth with the built-in CrossDOS support, you'll have to wedge something sturdy into the hole - without interfering with the disk - and cover it with tape. Most HD floppy mechanisms use a physical switch to detect the hole, so it has to be enough to push it down as an old DD floppy would. If you're only using them in the DD Amiga drives (pre-1200), they shouldn't have switches/sensors for such, so that wouldn't be a problem.
Next up are slight differences in the ferrous emulsion of the disk; the magnetic sensitivity specified for DD and HD is a bit different, since HD needs higher 'resolution' in the magnetic layer, and the magnetic write power was a bit different between the two specs, etc. You could often get by without worrying about it (I own a bunch of DD disks 'doubled' with a special punch back when HDs were more expensive, and the converse has held for quick transfers using the 'hole-blocking method above), but it's something to consider when looking for reliability. Further, if you're trying to read decades-old floppies, you have to consider they may have degraded naturally by now...
...or your floppy could be out of alignment, or just need a simple cleaning.
If the power supply is a problem (I don't have schematics around, so I couldn't tell you if it supplies a voltage *only* used by the floppy and nothing else), there's nothing 'holy' about the mysterious C128-style plug. If you're positive that's the problem, and have half an ounce of soldering skill, you can slice the power supply cord about 3 inches back, pull out a continuity tester/ohmmeter, match up the colors to a new set of connectors of your choice (a DIN could probably cram in that spot on the 500's backplate, with some creative bending of pins?), and do the simple resoldering on the 500 and the PS. If you *do* do this, the savvy thing to do is to get 3 of your favorite new sort of connector - one for the power supply cord, one for the 500... and a third to solder on to the possibly-flaky original square connector, so you're left with an 'adaptor stub' around if you ever want to try reusing the supply on a normal machine with the original connector.
And/or you could just clean the power connections with some WD40 and pipecleaners... (Don't use lubricants on the floppy heads, though!)
-
Personally, I wouldn't mind using it but I'd take good care of it. Dust it of once a week, keep it out of the sun etc.
But like someone said, if you want to get the Amiga Experience (tm), I would recommend an A1200 with a hard drive. Better OS, better graphics, and it can still run a lot of the old A500 games.
-
as someone said you can cover the HD hole with tape...
An A500 won't allow you to easily transfer adfs from uae etc... I would go for a second hand 1200... you'll get a computer that will run almost everything the A500 ran, you'll be able to access pc formatted disks more easily thanks to the OS, you can plug an ethernet pcmcia, cheap accelerators, you can plug it directly to your TV... The A1200 is a great little computer :-D
-edited- If you decide to buy an A1200 and you want to plug in an ethernet pcmcia you'll have to use a 16bit ethernet 10 card (ethernet 100 won't work...)
-
To jasongins:
The Amiga 500 is a toy. I only use them for spare parts on my Amiga 2000HDs. My advice to you is to sell that "mint" Amiga 500 on eBay and then buy yourself an Amiga 2000HD. It is a much better machine then the Amiga 500. You can usually pick up a nice Amiga 2000 system for less then $100.00 (not including monitor). Then you could also buy an A2320 Amber board and plug in a nice SVGA monitor. The A2320 Amber board de-interlaces the video signal and gets rid of the scan lines for a nice crisp clear picture. If you must have the AGA chip set then buy an Amiga 4000. Do NOT buy the Amiga 1200. The Amiga 1200 is also a toy, but it is good for spare parts to an Amiga 4000. :-D
-
Go DoomMaster on your ill-advised crusade against wedgie Amigas!
-
The A1200 good for A4000 spare parts ?
Only if you got some experience in SMD-(de)-soldering .... :-D :-D
Really Do(u)mmy you start to annoy ME !!!
And let me tell you I'm not easiely annoyed :-x
-
@jasongins
The big question is "what do you want to do with it?". The A500 runs an old version of AmigaOS, and is limited in some aspects, for instance, it uses an older Custom Chipset (the part of the Amiga that does graphics among other things) than the more recent models. The A500 is great for retro games, but little else nowadays.
If you do want to do something a little more serious, I'd recommend getting your hands on an A1200 (with a hard drive). Its capable of running far more recent software than the A500, and despite having a smaller case, appears to be easier to expand. You can also get them very cheaply.
If you did get an A1200 then I'd definitely keep the A500 in its box, as it could become fairly valuable.
-
@DoomMaster
If you only want to play non-system-friendly disk based games, watch the odd oldschool demo and dabble with DPaint I see no reason why you would need an A2000HD.
Spending money on scandoublers and VGA monitors is useless when you just want to play games. Hooking up your miggy to the TV will work just fine.
You seem totally obsessed with calling the smaller Amigas "toys". I can agree to a certain point, but that's not always a bad thing. Why fork out huge amounts of cash on big-box Amigas when you won't use all their potential?
I wouldn't trade my A1200s for any A2000HD in the world. OCS graphics and a 7MHz 68000 - how unprofessional :^P
-
HOLY SMOKES.
if you haven't experienced the joys of amiga 500 games, then get the best of them and start playing!!!!!
nb: MANY games are crap. Just like it is today.
-
carls wrote:
Spending money on scandoublers and VGA monitors is useless when you just want to play games. Hooking up your miggy to the TV will work just fine.
Yep. That said, it *is* convenient to be able to use an off-the-shelf VGA at what feels like a 'normal' resolution. If you have an OCS/ECS Amiga, a delacer is a nice investment (and some aftermarket boards were made that wedged into a 500, too).
You seem totally obsessed with calling the smaller Amigas "toys". I can agree to a certain point, but that's not always a bad thing. Why fork out huge amounts of cash on big-box Amigas when you won't use all their potential?
The original poster is new to the scene, so it's important to point out that the 500 and 2000 (HD or not) is practically the same machine, as far as chipsets are concerned. The big difference is the size of the case and the expansion potential, but the 500 was popular enough that pretty much every form of hardware addon released for the 2000 also saw a version that could somehow be strapped to the 500. (Though maybe not from Commodore, and maybe not as 'plug and play' easily, in the case of accellerator cards and the like.)
I wouldn't trade my A1200s for any A2000HD in the world. OCS graphics and a 7MHz 68000 - how unprofessional :^P
Yep. If I were serious about it, I'd trade my 2000HD for a 1200, just to take advantage of the PCI busboards and the like of today. (And of course, to clarify, 1200s have IDE controllers built in, hard drives aren't an issue, stock AGA has the screenmodes that work on regular VGA monitors if you've got one of those little silver adapter dongles for the video port...)
But if you're mostly using it to get your retro-fix on, a hard drive and a network connection add some convenience, and there are probably one or two things that run on an 'old' box that don't sit so well under AGA. (Of course, those things probably require a 1.3 ROM and the hard drive and any memory expansions disabled, too.) You can drop Ethernet or USB cards into a 2000 - convenient, if you can find an IP stack to use with them - but you can also just hook a 500 up with a null-modem cable, and use oldschool BBS software to transfer files back and forth... or PPP or SLIP over the serial line with an IP stack on either hardware.
-
Crumb wrote:
as someone said you can cover the HD hole with tape...
Just as a followup, I've never found tape alone to work well enough. The little switch-pin in a high-density drive will usually just puncture or dent the tape, rather than getting held down, and you'll sit there in DOS (or on your *NIX machine), wondering why it won't let you format it in the older, wider-track fashion.
Then, when you try using sturdier tape, then you discover that it screws up the way the disk sits in the drive, and you have trouble inserting/ejecting it.
So the ghetto solution I've found is to fold up a scrap of paper and wedge it in the hole before taping, which works long enough to copy over a cool demo or, one supposes, a 'terminal emulator' with XModem (or ZModem, or Kermit...) file-transfer support so you can use a null-modem link instead.
If you're serious about 'making your own floppies,' you could probably find some plastic, Dremel off plugs of appropriate size, and crazy-glue some 'patches' of transparency film over the top and bottom to hold it on.
But at that point, you may as well be on Google, and seeing who still produces and stocks 'real' DD media in this day and age; there must still be a demand for it somewhere in government, if nowhere else.