knight76 wrote:
I believe you can increase the chip ram to 1024k by buying the memory chips and putting them on the motherboard in the supplied spaces. Is this true?
No. You have an A500 with 512kbyte on the motherboard and 512kbyte on the trap door expansion (1Mbyte in total) which is the most your Amiga can have without adding a sidecar expansion. Adding more RAM to your motherboard will just make the Trapdoor RAM stop working.
Also, what is still available as far as accelerator cards go via the side expansion slot.
Nothing. No one sells any new Amiga accelerator hardware for A500's anymore. In the past you could get a GVP A530 but it today it is sought after and expensive.
Can the trapdoor expansion slot be used for expanding past the current 512k addon?
Not without additional hardware, all of which is not made today and was rare back then so is super rare now hence expensive. If you want to add more RAM you should consider buying a MiniMega Agnus board. But in reality these are no longer made and highly sought after by A2000 / CDTV users so you'd be better off selling your A500 and buying an A500+ (but if you are getting an A1200 why bother!).
If my internal drive craps itself can it be replaced with a pc laptop ds/hd drive so it can read and write 1.44mb. Or do I need to buy an amiga specific 1.44mb floppy drive.
You have to buy an Amiga one. There are guides to modifying PC drives but I have yet to see a good one that works with readily available modern drives.
