Bought an A500. Now What?

[amigaksi]

>by kedawa on 2008/12/23 3:16:05
...
>The null modem option sounds good and cheap, but that raises a few questions as well. What sort of software do I need on the Amiga side to get the null modem connection going, and will it work with a USB<->serial adapter on the PC side?
>My PC has no legacy I/O.

The first thing you should do is sell your PC and get one that has a parallel port and/or serial port.  They are pretty cheap on Ebay and Thinkpads and Toshibas usually come with Win98SE/WinME sticker on the bottom so you can install an OS that lets you tinker around like AmigaOS.  

Although you can then get a null modem connection, you may not have enough memory on A500 to transfer to RAM disk and connection will be slow.  I would recommend some other solution like floppy simulator or memory cards.  I also would not recommend upgrading chip RAM unless you are an expert in soldering/cutting traces.

And for tinkering on PC/Amigas as well as for normal use, you can try this as well:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320326504551

[amigaksi]

>by darksun9210 on 2008/12/23 8:15:01

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>the cut and jumper i offered is only if you find you need more chipram running WHDLoad from hard disk. and even then it is only a blob of solder on a pair of jumper pads, and one trace line cut.
>i did this when i was 13...

That's subjective.  I can post my opinion of what I think is good for his tinkering just like you can post your opinion.

>while true, you may not have enough ram to boot workbench, run a terminal program, and hold a complete 880k ADF file, amiga explorer can treat the amiga like another device, and pretty much directly read and write Amiga Disk Files to and from the amiga's floppy drive over whatever link you have setup. negating the need to hold the complete disk image in the amiga's memory.

Good.  See you can be rational about it without getting emotional.  If you read all my post in this forum, you see that I was also being rational.  For most terminal programs, you need more than 1MB RAM.

That's good you admit you know nothing about floppy simulator and stuff because you already spoke out against it in some previous post.

[amigaksi]

>by carvedeye on 2008/12/23 9:33:36

>hundreds of pounds?.....you can buy the roms pretty cheap nowadays and harddrives are cheap as chips?

Although he did want to use for games and newer roms and hard drives will add a level of incompatibility.