Why is NTSC Amiga 500+ so hard to find?

[Damion]

I read in and old magazine that the 500+ was never actually released to the North American market. I guess that's not quite the case reading the other posts in this thread ;-)

I think very late A500s over here were actually re-badged A500+s. Or something pretty damn close. My 500 has a full label like a 500+ (though it only says A-500) and the same LEDs as a 500+.

I've never actually opened it up though (still has the warranty seal!) so I don't know what exactly is under the hood. Still only have 1MB of Chip RAM with the trapdoor expansion installed...

I also have one of these (luckily found NOS) with the 500+ style label minus the "plus". I never opened it because of the intact warranty seal, and also thought they hadn't sold Rev 8 motherboards in the US market. It would sure be a downer if there's a leaking battery in there. Knowing C=, they probably would have shipped them sans battery but I suppose it's worth a look.

-edit-

If the BBOAH is correct, US Rev 8 boards were likely all OCS without batteries.

[Damion]

In the intervening years since I posted about my A-500, I did open it up. Turns out to have a rev 6 board inside.

DOH! Didn't even notice the thread was 6 years old.. :lol:

[Damion]

You don't need the ECS Denise for 50/60Hz switching, just the updated Agnus. I had a few PAL reset tools for running games on my 1.3 A500 with a 512k trapdoor card. (The best one was the "BANZAI" tool.)  IIRC, my Rev 6 motherboard needed a modification for 1MB chip (instead of 512k chip / 512k "slow") to get it working. I bought a new 1MB Agnus just to open it up and discover it already had it from the factory.