Amiga mods, is it worth it?

[azhoward]

I'll have to keep this short for the moment since I'm watching the MLS playoffs between LA Galaxy with David Beckham and Robbie Keane and the Seattle Sounders. (Keane scored just before half time!)

Anyway, I found in storage several A500s, an A3000 with CD, several brands of 3 button mice, a couple of Microsoft bus mice with Amiga adapter, a SupraRam, and a GVP Impact A500 hard drive and memory. I also found a complete A500 tower kit with 020 accelerator and memory. This "towerized" A500 is modded to accept an external keyboard, has a clockport adapter, and has a four zorro slot expansion that I had forgot about producing. It also has a zorro video card that I don't know if it is working or not. I used the A500 tower case to put a PPC towerized A1200 into and had forgotten about the 500 stuff. The A1200 is the one I use now and have added a Subway, Mediator, etc.

Since I think it is perfectly ridiculous to have all this equipment going to waste, I would like to sell them to a good home. However, is it worth it to do a few upgrades to them first such as ROM? Most have 1.2 and 1.3. And would it be worth it to put the modded A500 back in a tower. It's not a lot of work, but there is the expense of buying and fitting out a tower case. Of course, I would prefer to make or buy the proper ATX adapter for the power supply. A reset is already done and it's got 2meg chip, of course. Is it worth the time and expense?

[azhoward]

I hate to say it, but I can't remember how all this came into my possession. In fact, I keep finding things such as a PC XT keyboard adapter. At any rate, I may just unload the A500s as is because I realize that some find fun in upgrading as NovaCoder suggested. However, I may do the 500 tower whether I recoup the cost or not. After thinking about it for awhile, why would you not want to see a tricked out 500 tower in a sleek case? It even has a RGB to VGA adapter! Oh, another thing, I just found two A1000s with keyboards. Will have to look further if there are expansions for these. I've read that working A1000s in the USA are rare, although I'm not altogether certain about that. Even so, I'm not looking that much for profit, just to connect up with people who would actually use them.

Quick question: what was the highest version of ROM for the A1000?

[azhoward]

I hate to say it, but I can't remember how all this came into my possession. In fact, I keep finding things such as a PC XT keyboard adapter. At any rate, I may just unload the A500s as is because I realize that some find fun in upgrading as NovaCoder suggested. However, I may do the 500 tower whether I recoup the cost or not. After thinking about it for awhile, why would you not want to see a tricked out 500 tower in a sleek case? It even has a RGB to VGA adapter! Oh, another thing, I just found two A1000s with keyboards. Will have to look further if there are expansions for these. I've read that working A1000s in the USA are rare, although I'm not altogether certain about that. Even so, I'm not looking that much for profit, just to connect up with people who would actually use them.

Quick question: what was the highest version of ROM for the A1000?

[azhoward]

I'm finding quite a bit. What I'll have to do is gather everything up, assess what I have, and then test what's working and what is not. So far everything works; that is, all the 500s boot up. Fortunately, I also found plenty of power supplies as well. Need to check the A1000s. The 3000 is a little awkward since it has a full size CD drive which doesn't fit the case. (It has a SCSI to IDE adapter.) I wonder if a slim drive could be made to work? I also found about 10 SCSI hard drives and plenty of cables and terminators. What a job just sorting all this stuff out!

On thing I found is interesting. I found an adapter that I had built to allow an external monitor for an old Mac SE 30. Yes, I am finding some old Mac stuff as well such as modems, keyboards, PPC CPU cards and adapters. I even found an old PPC iMac. Ironically, the Amiga stuff is probably worth much more than the Mac. :-)