Slightly Disappointed: A500

[TjLaZer]

Just do yourself a favor and get a 2000 or better yet 3000/4000.  And get a Gfx card.

[Miked]

TjLaZer wrote:
Just do yourself a favor and get a 2000 or better yet 3000/4000.  And get a Gfx card.

I'm the type of person that will lament about something, but still go ahead with it anyway.  With regards to the Amiga 500, if I could retrofit a graphics card, Id be a very happy man  

I know an Amiga 2000/3000/4000 would really make things a lot easier but I like "underdog" products like the A500.  I think thats why I bought it in the fist place (or maybe it was because I had little money

-Miked

[Tomas]

It depends on what you are using your primary computer for. But yes, i believe it is way outdated if you intended to use it for things like web browsing, video playback and so on.. A heavily upgraded a1200 on the other hand is quite capable. You should use a gfx card instead of aga though if you want to for example browse the internet with it.
The a500 is just not very upgradable. If you want an upgradable classic amiga for daily usage, then you should either get the a3000, a4000 or the a1200. I think the a4000 is the best bet if you want a gfx card and so on, as you need to tower your a1200 to be able to do the same with that.

Btw.. Most a500 had the OCS chipset and not the ECS. Only the a500+ and last revision of the a500 had the ECS.

[toRus]

Miked wrote:
It's been 10 years since I dusted off this computer and began the arduous task of upgrading it.  Its a nice computer, but I think my disappointment lies in its graphics capabilities.  I forgot how advanced computers have come in the last 10 years.  The ECS is a slight improvement over OCS, but barely.  

10 years ago the A500 was almost 10 years old already. I think your comments are unfair. For a 20 year old computer you can't really do much better. Unless you get an A2000  :-D

An 68030-50MHz, 32MB A1200 with HD and CDROM is still a nice machine for various tasks but you shouldn't expect AGA to offer you the experience you are getting from VGA cards and monitors the last 10 years. If you are after desktop applications rather than video/gfx/multimedia/games or you can't stand your old 1084S' PAL frequencies I would suggest a BlizzardPPC/BlizzardVision combo, a Mediator/Grex/etc, or a big box Amiga (A2000/3000/4000).

[Jiffy]

Use the A500 with extra ram and a harddisk and you have a very nice machine for games and utilities. Adding more stuff, like for example a turbocard and such, is imo a bit overdone.

As mentioned above, the A1200 is a much more capable machine, although without a videocard graphics are not a big improvement compared to your A500: on a 1084 you're still confined to the lower resolutions. Combined with a flickerfixer and a 15" CRT, you can use (much) higher resolutions, although the speed of the graphics subsystem is becoming a bottleneck for total systemperformance, even when using a fast turbocard. I like the improved image it gives me, although there are many Amigans who dislike the flickerfixers for A1200s as most (all?) of them do not display all colors the A1200 is capable of.

Use the A500 for what its good at in 2006: a very capable retro gamesmachine, with the capability of snooping around in 'the-good-old-days' insides of a classic OS. Adding both a hardddrive, extra ram and maybe an extra diskdrive (for diskcopying) will make your A500 a happy camper, adding more is not worth it and will most likely not give you the extra performance you expected.

[AmigaMance]

@Miked
 Don't even bother with the A500. Just sell it and buy an Amiga 1200. Your disapointment for its limited graphics abilities is completely justified. The AGA chipset of the A1200 is a BIG improvement over the OCS: Much higher resolutions, 256 colors in all of them (all of the "Amiga native" resolutions, anyway) and it's also faster.
 

[marcfrick2112]

@everyone: just my 2 cents worth: I used my Amiga 500 from when I first  bought it with my Tax refund in....(anyone know when the first A500 'bundle' came out, with Tetris, and Where in World is Carmen S.?) I used, expanded, and literally beat that machine to death, only then did I get an A1200.
    That machine gave me much pleasure, sure I can't brag about it to PC-owning friends, but it did what I needed it to do at the time. As for graphics, well it didn't do anything for WB, but I was loading, editing, and saving 'near' 24-bit pics with DCTV unit on my A500 for quite some time....
   And I miss the better (early) game compatibility that the A500 had over the 1200 (Yes, even with WHDload...)
   Only downside IMHO, is some difficulty in finding A500 add-ons....(or A1200 accelerators, or new Amigas, etc. ad nauseum) (Sp?)