help for amiga virgin!

[DCAmiga]

Firstly Congratulations and Welcome to the nutty amiga community noely02, I will give you a basic run down.
The great thing is with the amiga you dont need to load workbench (the OS) first to load games/programs/utilities etc, but they can also load from workbench if you desire to do so.
The basic Amiga 500 set up will load everything from the 3.5" floppy drive, games, operating system (Workbench) and ulitities.
The basic 500 also had no Hard drive (as you probably noticed) but can be added a number of ways, most common way is via the left side expansion door.
You will also need a 9-pin (2 button) mouse and 9-pin joystick to play games and use utilities, if you do not already have them.
The Bottom (trap door) expansion is commonly used for memory upgrades, but there are many amiga 500 "hacks" for different expandabily options.

The amiga disk format type is not compatible with any other system IIRC, and uses a standard 3.5" double density floppy disk, also called an 880 KB disk in Amiga terms.
Most amiga disks are in ADF form on the net these days and google is your friend here and hope this helps.

[DCAmiga]

hi, thanks for all the posts, all i realy want to do at the moment is have a bit of a nostalga trip an play a few old games, i've already got f19 stealth figher of ebay so i can pretend i'm 14 again
 
so i see that upgrading the a500 is really a no no
 
i have a couple of mice, an external floppy drive, and a gvp impact series 2 a500-hd8+ and am looking for a joystick
 
the thing is woth the gvp, i think the amigas have warped a bit with age, i'm afraid to force it into the slots its very tight, and on the one amiga that it did seem to fir eventually, when i powered everything up, lights came on but got nothing on the screen? any ideas
 
where do i post asking the kind folks in amiga land for workbench disks i can buy/borrow/copy?

Sadly I don't own a real amiga and cant help you out for actual floppy disks sorry I only use WinUAE (Amiga Emulator) on my PC.
 
Well looks like you need to play the problem solving game .... does the amiga boot up if you disconnect the gvp impact ?
You should get a white screen with a hand holding a floppy disk labeled Amiga Workbench, if so yay the basic system boots up.
 
Next power down and make sure you have the gvp pushed in to the amiga correctly and the gvp power supply is connected correctly (yes you need 2 psu's - one for the 500 the other for the gvp).
Power up and see if it loads from the HHD into Workbench... if not power down again.
Open the gvp case and inspect the condition of everything (PCB board) and the physical connections (ram and HHD) are connected firmly.
Power up again and listen for the HDD to spin up I think it uses a 3.5" 50-pin SCSI HHD... if not the HHD might be dead.