Just got my A500 and was about to fire it up for testing

[irishmike]

Hello:

I am a total newbie to Amiga and I have been waiting for over a week for this A500 to arrive.  It is here... no manual, not sure if the disk that was in the drive is a kickstart, etc.  never been inside one either.  

First things first, need to know where to plug the mouse in at.  There are two joystick ports and I may be wrong in assuming it is one of these, but I see no place to plug it in.  It has a box that hooks to the video port and gives me RGB RCA out for my monitor that I have... I have seen adapters, but I am not ready to take this step.

Need to get this bad machine up and running first.  Hard Drive?  is this external if it had one?  SOrry for all the questions, but this is my FIRST amiga :-)

SOmeone please help!  I can be IM'd on YIM jmikeneedham(at)sbcglobal(dot)net... or just pmail me.  I will wait online for a bit though.

Thanks for any and all help... an idea of how to use the AmigaOS would be nice too :-)

Thanks in advance for all your help.

Mike Needham
LOST in Shawnee, Kansas USA

[irishmike]

Thanks TjLaZer!

How do I know if it has one of these hard drives inside?  Is it going to be under the bottom port?  also I do have the modulator and I am not sure if the disk is that bootable workbench disk or not, the question becomes, do I have the disk in the drive at power up?  Thanks again.

[irishmike]

Hi all:

Thanks for all the great advice.  I am proud to say that the "mystery disk" contains Workbench 1.3.3 :-)  The machine is alive and well and it does not yet have a hard drive, that is my next quest to find one of those illusive sidecars :-)

Have a great day and happy computing to you all... also I am seeking a C= monitor with cable to replace the 520 modulator on this box.

Again, thanks for all the support of a newbie!

Mike

[irishmike]

A hearty thanks to all who have advised/helped me out on this one.  At least I know the machine boots.  Thanks to MagicM for the offer :-)

I am still looking for a sidecar and possible C= monitor for the a500... would like to get muli-color... also I am looking for the illusive A1 mobo and have made contacts... either the companies are VERY backlogged or the thing is not available yet?  

I did prep for it though, just bought an ATI Radeon 7000 AGP video card with 32MB ram since that seems to be the one sold in those systems :-)

Also, I have a decent Winblows setup that I would trade mobo for mobo if someone has one of these G4 a1 boards... the specs on my mobo are as follows:

AMD Athlon Xp 2800+
Kingston 512 PC3700 RAM (2 256 DIMM)
ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe Mainboard
ATX case up for grabs... inexpensive model but with blue cool cathode light inside (NO Powersupply)

The mainboard does in fact have the NFORCE 2 chipset on it, built in Gigabit Ethernet, SATA.

The whole system is exactly 2 months old.

pmail me if interested!

Thanks,

[irishmike]

Thought of that.  I think I have a line on both a A2000 here in the KC metro and the monitor... but I also found a line on a 2500 which I like better which I am going to buy.

When I get the 2500 and the monitor, my a500 may come up as available, it is actually in very good condition and I got it in a box with the 520 modulator... I would sell that to another person who isn't trying to make the Amiga their main machine :-)

Which brings me to another daft question:  There are adapters from Amiga to a regular SVGA monitor are there not?  Where does one find these?

I assume the 2k series will not have an AGP port for a graphic card... does it have std PCI?  If so, what card should someone find to use in the box?

Anyhow... I also have a nice 80 GB IDE and a nice 20 GB IDE hard disk that I would love to install in my new system...

Anyhow, I can't reveal my entire evil plans to get away from the giant MS at this point, the post would just go on and on if I did :-)

[irishmike]

I am not sure either why the hard drive would not be fine as pictured?  It seems to be on risers above the chips allowing for plenty of airflow around the circuits.  That is just my opinion... they who offer the kit may have just made a fine design... in my experience, I have seen many tighter configurations on other platforms... while we all can agree that heat is not our friend, if you have what appears to be 1/4 of an inch of space, I would think it would be fine.  Plus 2.5 Hard drives are "used" to being in higher heat environments since they are "notebook" hard drives.

This is simply my opinion.  :-D

BoingBoss:

I too would like to know why you think this is not a good idea... is it because of heat dissapation as I have pointed out?

I also am not saying you are wrong, just wanting to hear why you feel the way you do about the kit.

Thanks,