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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: silvrax on December 31, 2025, 05:17:51 PM
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Hi all, new user here, with an old Amiga A500, looking for suggestions on how to revive it.
So, I dug out my trusty old A500 today to see if it still works. It did, sort of. But now I'm a bit lost where to go next and looking for some suggestions.
What I have is an original A500, rev 6a, with a 512KB memory expansion and upgraded kickstart 2.x.
(I have some other peripherals like an external disk drive, and a hard drive / memory expansion unit as well, but have not tried those yet.)
I bought a new power supply as I did not trust the old one. The system hasn't been powered on for many years.
Years ago I did remove the battery from the memory expansion as it was starting to show some sign of leaking, but there was no visible damage yet.
Today I blew out the dust, and hooked it up to an older LCD TV using a SCART cable I still had from back in the day. That cable has been used in the past with this Amiga, but not with this TV.
The screen flickers a bit on startup but then stays white. From some google searching, I suspect there are some resistors missing from this cable. So then I tried with the monochrome output, and got to a working kickstart screen!
I popped in an old demo disk and confirmed that the b/w image looks okay, and also both sound channels are working. Not too bad.
I then noticed that using Ctrl+both Amiga keys did not trigger a reset.
I powered off and on, and tried to load a workbench disk. It did work, but the floppy drive does seem to behave a bit strange. Sometimes I see the drive led coming on but hear no disk noise, and I think I also had cases where there was noise, but the led was off. I also noticed that sometimes it takes several drive clicks before kickstart notices a disk and tries to boot. And I had some random read failures with pop ups saying you have to replace disk X, which mostly seemed to go away with pressing retry. I guess some of this is to be expected as the disks might be bad.
I was able to confirm that all keyboard keys seem to work, except for the two Amiga keys. Other keys like shift and control keys etc. work fine.
So, that's where I'm at now. I'd like to try and get the machine back into a usable state. Mostly to play some games, but possibly also to try and do some coding again. (Did some assembly/demo stuff back in the day.)
But I'm a getting a bit lost with where to start, which is why I decided to post here. Been looking at rgb2hdmi, PiStorm, gotek, etc. But I'm not sure how usable some of those upgrades are if I don't know how well the machine itself still works. Right now I used it on the living room TV, and maybe with a correct SCART cable that would work, but it's not very convenient. The computer monitor I have only has VGA, DVI and displayport connections. I do have an HDMI to VGA adapter that I use with a raspberry pi on the VGA input, so I'm guessing that might work with an rgb2hdmi upgrade? Not sure what to do about the keyboard, try to fix? Or maybe there is a way to use a modern USB keyboard? Eventually using something like a gotek to not rely on floppy disks would be nice. But it would also be cool to see what I can still rescue off of my old collection of floppy's.
This post is probably already way too long, sorry! But yeah, I would really appreciate any suggestions and help on what to do next!
Happy new year!