I'm putting some feelers out in the Amiga community to see if there is any interested in a bit of possibly rare Amiga 500 tower hardware.
In a nutshell, I have all of the parts needed to build an Amiga 500 Plus tower system with 4 or 5 Zorro slots, a video Slot, and Dataflyer RAM and Dataflyer SCSI boards.
Basically it's an Amiga 500+ motherboard and a VERY rare backplane board that plugs into the side socket of the motherboard that provides several Zorro slots AND a video slot. There is a little daughter board that plugs in under the Denise chip with a cable that runs to the backplane providing the interface for the video socket. I believe this makes it possible to use a Video Toaster or Genlock as well as a flicker fixer such as the one on the Picasso IV. I don't recall off hand precisely how many Zorro sockets there are, but I believe there are at least 4, possibly 5.
I also have what I believe to be a Dataflyer SCSI controller and a Dataflyer RAM board which provides some 30-pin SIMM sockets. It is fully populated but I also have some spare SIMMs I could include. These boards were plugged into two of the Zorro sockets on the backplane and worked perfectly.
All of this hardware was mounted in a huge tower case and powered by a single AT power supply with some custom power cable adapters. I have since removed all of the internals from the tower case and trashed the tower and power supply with the intention of some day mounting it in a more modern and smaller chassis but I never got around to it.
I haven't used this system in years. I did power it up about 3 years ago to make sure it all worked before I disassembled it and everything did work properly at that time.
The A500+ motherboard was purchased directly from a supplier as a brand new replacement board when the system was originally built. It includes the 512K trap door upgrade as well. The clock battery was removed from the motherboard from day 1 to prevent any potential for leak disasters. The clock was powered by a remote lithium cell which was trashed with the chassis, but someone could easily install a new NiMh replacement battery or just use a new remote lithium cell.
I believe the kickstart ROM is the stock 2.x that came with the Amiga 500+. I used to have a rom switching tower with the 1.3 rom as well, but I think that is long lost.
I will be taking some pictures this week to show what all this hardware looks like. I may also attempt to power it up to make sure everything still works, but I no longer have an Amiga mouse, keyboard, or monitor so the best I would be able to do would be to verify a kickstart screen comes up on my TV.
The only thing I'm not sure of is I honestly can't remember how the keyboard interfaced. I think I had a regular Amiga 500 keyboard mounted in a home made case with a cable that plugged into the rear of the tower. I'll take a closer look and get a little more info on that when I take the pictures.
To sum it up, here is a list of the parts:
- Amiga 500 Plus motherboard
- Amiga trap door chip RAM upgrade
- Backplane board + Denise daughter board with interface cable
- Dataflyer SCSI board for A2000 (works in backplane)
- Dataflyer RAM board for A2000 (works in backplane)
- AT power supply adapter cables (allows you to power everything with an AT power supply)
- Western Digital 9-gig 50 pin SCSI hard drive (noisy but works fine)
Any ideas what all this stuff might be worth? I'll most likely end up putting it on ebay but I could use some idea as to value. If anyone wants to make an offer I will also consider it. I would be willing to ship world wide if the price was right and assuming the buyer covered the cost of shipping.
Regards,
Dieter
