A500 not boot original games.

[runequester]

I'd wager the internal drive being kaput as the culprit. I remember the internal drive dying on my 1200 and I was stuck playing Dune 2 for a week or so, before we got it fixed, when I was a kid.

[runequester]

I thought a A1200 internal drive was not compatible with a A500 drive?

Edit> I just swapped the drive in from the A1200 and it loaded games fine.

Can I ask what you meant by the memory thing being a red herring? You mean it will load games even without the expansion in many cases? Or that it may still be working even though it does not show up in workbench?

Some games run okay in 512K, a lot of later ones will need 1 MB, it just depends on the game.

I imagine if present, the expansion memory should show in workbench.