Sprucing up my A500

[Tenacious]

After removing and re-installing the A501 a few times the machine began working normally, but I'm still concerned because I could not figure out what was causing the problem.

It doesn't take much moisture in the air to make an electrical connection unreliable, especially after a few years of storage.  A "light" application of contact cleaner may help some.  Don't use much.

My next job is to replace the left mouse button, as it is becoming less responsive, but I'm wondering what the best option is for a replacement component.

The original mouse is still working?  Wow!  If it is flakey at all, I'd replace the whole thing.  It's hard to replace the button switches with an good fit unless you can find that exact micro switch (I never found them).  

I also noticed that this machine uses the A501 as chip RAM, while my old machine used it as fast RAM.

Your old 500 had "false fast ram" (it didn't run as fast as the cpu).  It is preferred to map this as "chip ram", as your new 500 has been modified.

What do you want to do with this A500?  If you're after retro games, you're there already.  If you have a more robust vision, there are lots ppl here who have gone beyond 'stock".

[Tenacious]

Unfortunately, I have no way of getting software on to my Amiga.
I'm just going by what the program on my Extras disk tells me.

That's why I asked about you your expansion plans.  The following is from another thread a few months ago.

Quote:
Originally Posted by michel3105 View Post
This is half an hardware issue and half a software question.

Here it is:

Let's say I've got a bare, unexpanded A500.
I want to run a demo (or whatever) on it, which is freely available for downloading, in the usual .mdf or .lha form.

So, I can download it on my pc hard drive, and...?

How can I create a floppy, possibly bootable, to feed to the Amiga 500?

Is WinUAE of any help?


thanks in advance



This comes up quite a bit and I realize the poster has since opted for an A1200. Not a bad path for a serious Amigan.

Here's another option, expand your unexpanded A500, at least moderately. As has already been said, add the 512K trap door ram expansion. Now you have the standard A500 for which most software was written.

Next step, add some FAST ram (like a Supra 500RX, it can take up to 8 Megs). With just 2 additional Megs of fast ram, the character and abilities of a lowly A500 changes dramatically. You can unLHA software to the Ram Disk and run it from there to try it out, without ever having to write to precious and rare 880K floppies. Serial cables and the required software to connect to your internet equipped PC are far more usable now. You will no longer need to use floppies as intermediate storage. A RAD: is now possible.

Take it to 4 Megs or more of Fast Ram and a RAD: becomes even more desirable. You could boot with 2 or more disks worth of all your favorite utils (unLHA, Amiga Explorer, Dopus, etc) and move it all to RAD. Now everything executes almost instantly and will survive a soft reset. Your Amiga can start to have a life separate from an internet connection!

Add a hard drive (even a small one, Amiga software is tight) in a side car, and your Amiga world opens even wider. Usually, these have some fast ram, too.

If you want to play an occasional game that doesn't like expansion, flip the disable switch.


In this day, with so much cheap hardware on eBay and elsewhere, there should not be that many unexpanded Amigas.

My 2 cents.