ECS Upgade for A500

[weirdami]

I have an Amiga 500 that has a mysterious silver box in the trap door that someone wrote "ECS upgrade" on. Any ideas what the deal it is?

There's also a switch on the back of the A500 case. Is that related?

[weirdami]

It's fully contained in the silver colored metal and is triangular shaped to fit in the hole and has only the connector exposed.

[weirdami]

@reddwarfer

It does look something like that, only not rusty. It's all shiny. :-) Except, I should note, if it matters, that there are three indentations around the edges of the trap-door facing side (two on one long side and one on the other) that look like solder mouth points to keep the case on. And, no stickers, just the permanent marker "ECS upgrade".

I don't have a soldering gun so getting this bad boy open to see the innards would damage the case beyond repair.

[weirdami]

Is there a command (say on a workbench disk or something) that I can type in to get details that would say definately what this is?

Speelgoedmannetje wrote:
It could be a fatter agnus (or named something like that) has been installed, wich supports 1mb chipmem. One gets practically an A600 compatible A500.

[weirdami]

I finally was able to plug this thing in and I discovered that the switch controls making it boot to an "insert workbench v1.3" hand screen and a "2.8 Roms (37.175)" disk inserting itself animation screen. That's probably 2.0, not 2.8, but I'm running it with the black and white out to a television through a vcr and it looks like an 8. :-/ Anyhoo, I guess "ECS Upgrade" means you get ECS chip set. And the switch is for toggling between OCS and ECS. Neat.

Now, someone can tell me what company made this gizmo, or if some A500's came like this from Commodore. Maybe I'll try putting in some disks and trying that showconfig idea.


edit: Yup, showconfig shows "ECS NTSC Agnus" and "Normal Denise".

[weirdami]

@Tenacious

When I booted it with ECS on, I remember seeing 800 something KB chip RAM and zero "other". So, I figured it was 1MEG.