Refocus: Amiga 500

[Miked]

Ok, so I've been asking questions about how to upgrade my A500.  I have encountered the problem of scarcity of Amiga 500 parts, so in order to organize myself, I want to make a list of ALL parts that I will need (even if it takes time to hunt them down).  Additionally, I could use some help organizing the importance of obtaining these parts.

My Stock A500:

Amiga 500 w/ 1meg Ram (512k trapdoor)
WB 1.2
1.2 Roms

Thats it!

What I need:

3.1 Roms
WB 3.1 (or higher)
Hard Drive
(external floppy?)
flicker fixer (or something to allow use of a VGA monitor)
ECS chipset (what about AGA chipset?)
Accelerator Card
As much RAM as will possibly fit


With regard to the ECS (AGA?) chipset, what chips are actually involved (I have a general idea, but could use some input as I am concerned about conflicting advice).  Also how "mechanically savy" do I need to be?  Will there be a lot of soldering (i.e. removing of chips/resoldering of chips)

This should make for a well-focused, interesting thread

-Miked

[amigagr]

you can find here some stuff: amigakit. for all the others better get an a1200...

[Piru]

AGA chipset is A1200, A4000 and CD³² only.

[countzero]

Miked wrote:

With regard to the ECS (AGA?) chipset, what chips are actually involved (I have a general idea, but could use some input as I am concerned about conflicting advice).  Also how "mechanically savy" do I need to be?  Will there be a lot of soldering (i.e. removing of chips/resoldering of chips)

-Miked

AGA is A1200/A4000 only. You can not upgrade an A500 to AGA. As for ECS, it all depends on your boards revision and chips on it. If your Amiga is NTSC, you may have a hard time finding these chips, and in the end getting an A500 rev6 or better A500+ would prove a much cheaper solution. I'm not really sure which chips exactly have to be upgraded, but AFAIK Denise, Paula (?) and Agnus definitely need to be upgraded.

edit : I'm a slow writer  :lol:

[SamuraiCrow]

With regard to the ECS (AGA?) chipset, what chips are actually involved (I have a general idea, but could use some input as I am concerned about conflicting advice). Also how "mechanically savy" do I need to be? Will there be a lot of soldering (i.e. removing of chips/resoldering of chips)

OCS chips are not typically soldered but come in square sockets.  You have to be careful to lift on all 4 corners with a screwdriver and replace with equivalent ECS chips.  I've upgraded an A500 to a Fat Agnus before so I could use a PAL/NTSC switcher program to run some foreign software.  It should be pretty painless.

Upgrading the Kickstart should be equally painless in an A500 because it doesn't have the additional addressing capacity of an A1200.

IMHO, though, you should follow the advice the others were giving and get an A1200 instead.  It will save you hassle while giving you more capabilities than an upgraded A500 will ever have.  (A500=16bit custom chips OCS/ECS, A1200=32bit custom chips AGA.)

[patrik]

@SamuraiCrow:

Never use screwdrivers to extract PLCC-chips, especially not with old sockets as the plastic gets much more fragile with time. With an old A500, it will most likely break.

Most electronic stores sells these, which are very cheap and will make the extraction very simple without breaking any PLCC-sockets.

If anyone is wondering, this is only for the Agnus chip, which is a PLCC-chip. All other chips are regular DIL/DIP chips.


/Patrik

[mr_a500]

For the 3.1 ROM installation, you'll have to check the revision number of your motherboard (printed on board at bottom right corner).

If you have Rev. 3 or Rev. 5 (like I have), you'll have to bend up pin 31 on the ROM (so that it won't enter the ROM slot) and solder a wire from this to pin 21 on the ROM. Then solder a wire from pin 1 and plug the other end of this wire into the pin 31 slot.

When removing chips, be very careful because it is extremely easy to break or bend the pins (and if they are bent too far, they will break when you try to bend them back). The Agnus removal is easy if you've got the PLCC puller like Patrik mentioned - and there are thankfully no pins to break on that. It is stuck in there pretty hard though.

[CLS2086]

Hi,
my advice : keep you A500 in its original configurations !
Some games only run in OCS machine with kick1.2
You'd better buy a A1200, it's easy to upgrade and very compatible with ECS games.

[Miked]

CLS2086 wrote:
Hi,
my advice : keep you A500 in its original configurations !
Some games only run in OCS machine with kick1.2
You'd better buy a A1200, it's easy to upgrade and very compatible with ECS games.

You know, the more I research and talk to people, the more I think I might keep my "classic" A500 (perhaps just another external floppy or hard drive).  Maybe I will look into an A4000.  I have had some people tell me if its between a 1200 or 4000...go with the 4000 (assuming I can afford an A4000)

Now here's a question.  If its between a 2000/4000 which way would you go?

Miked

[doctorq]

Now here's a question. If its between a 2000/4000 which way would you go?

The A4000 route. It's easier to find upgrades for this one, and if upgrades aren't the main issue, you can just plug in a harddrive and CD drive from an old PC, and have a decent gaming machine, since these machines comes with a minimum of 030 CPU and the possibility to install 16 MB fast ram.

[motorollin]

A4000 definitely. Everything doctorq said, and you get AGA too.

--
moto

[Miked]

Well, the A500 project is not totally dead.  I am in the process of purchasing a hard drive and fast ram for the A500.  I will upgrade slowly and who knows, maybe a good accelerator card will come along somewhere.

Are there any accelerator cards for the A500 in particular that allow for 68000 downward compatibility?


As far as an A4000- I will keep my eyes open for something good.  It's amazing; all this pentium technology and I could care less about it (although I am a realist, I do need my pentium based system for the real world)


-Miked

[doctorq]

Are there any accelerator cards for the A500 in particular that allow for 68000 downward compatibility?

I believe most of them have. The one I'm selling certainly do, it can be disabled by a switch. The same could my previously A500 accelerator, a Supra Turbo 28.

[Miked]

doctorq wrote:


I believe most of them have. The one I'm selling certainly do, it can be disabled by a switch. The same could my previously A500 accelerator, a Supra Turbo 28.

Doc,  tell me a little more about you Supra Turbo 28.

-Miked

[doctorq]

All you need to know can be found on www.amiga-hardware.com