Amiga 1000 versus Amiga 500

[Matt_H]

Yes, if you can find a Phoenix board for it, the 1000 will be a pretty amazing little box! Details.

[TheWizard]

Hi cmvsm,

While fitting things like a 1 or 2mb agnus and denise should help an A1000, changing or accelerating the cpu risks losing compatibility with games and demos. You then have to ask yourself, is the A1000 going to be a work system or not.

I would just stick with an A500 for all your nostalgic delight!

[motrucker]

cmvsm wrote:

If I were to get an A1000, what upgrades would be a "must have" to get the machine to "respectable" standards.  I will mainly use it for games and such.  I'd like to give myself the time to explore the rest of the machine's capabilities as I didn't give it much of a chance in my younger years.

* There really are NOT any upgrades you will find these days, unless you use A500 expansion boxes.


What significant capabilities, if any, would the A500 have over the A1000?

* The A500 has newer chip versions, a ROM based OS, can house much more RAM, and there are upgrades that can still be found!

I have both machines (along with A2000, A3000, A4000T and A1200). If I had to have just one of the early Amiga, it would be the A500!

[Zac67]

Kickstarting the 1000 is a very nostalgic thing to do - but very annoying if you happen to add a hard drive. Furthermore, Kickstart 2+ is out of reach without a ROM board. Nostalgic.

I'd rather go with a 1200 - faster out of the box, 2 MB RAM (even chip RAM), and the cheapest and most easily available expansions.

[JimS]

Zac67 wrote:
Furthermore, Kickstart 2+ is out of reach without a ROM board. Nostalgic.

I believe there's a hack on Aminet to add a ROM to the 1000.

[mr_a500]

Yes, if you can find a Phoenix board for it, the 1000 will be a pretty amazing little box!

Bah! The Phoenix board is a whole replacement motherboard, not just an add-on card. That sounds like a cheat to me. You pull all the guts out of your A1000 (except the power supply and floppy drive) so you just have the empty case, then put in the replacement. Why not just put in a Mac motherboard? ..or a PC motherboard? (yuck!)

[Speelgoedmannetje]

mr_a500 wrote:

Yes, if you can find a Phoenix board for it, the 1000 will be a pretty amazing little box!

Bah! The Phoenix board is a whole replacement motherboard, not just an add-on card. That sounds like a cheat to me. You pull all the guts out of your A1000 (except the power supply and floppy drive) so you just have the empty case, then put in the replacement. Why not just put in a Mac motherboard? ..or a PC motherboard? (yuck!)

And if we look at, say, the Atari Jaguar, wich also only has a mc68000 chip?

[amiga_3k]

Better first have a look at the hardware specs of the Phoenix before starting to shout. The Phoenix mainboard is a mix of technologies used on the A1000, A500 and A2000 (it has a video slot, it has a ZORRO II, it has the A1000 expansion port,....). To get a way with licensing it wasn't sold WITH the custom-chips in place. So you'd need a scrap A500 (or 1000) to get the custom-chips from.

So... it's an Amiga(ish), not 'yet another PC, MAC, Atari....'.

[cmvsm]

In regard to upgrades, I probably won't be doing too much of that to be honest.  I'd like to get enough RAM into the A1000 where it could run most games without getting stressed.  How much RAM would that be?

If the A1000 had 1MB Ram and the A500 had the same, would they be relatively equal in terms of game playing?  Aside from the NTSC and PAL compatibility of the A500 of course.

Thanks again for the replies.

[mr_a500]

I've got an Amiga 1000 with 1Mb of RAM and I've also got an expanded A500 so I'm able to tell you exactly how it is. An NTSC A1000 will not be able to play PAL games or demos and this is a major drawback since about 60% of the best ECS games and about 95% of the best ECS demos are PAL. Also, some games that run fine on the A500 will have strange graphics corruptions or just fail on the A1000.

The colour composite output is a major bonus in the A1000 and so is the nice solid design (and A1000 "nostalgia factor") but I don't think these are enough to offset the lack of PAL support, compatibility, built-in-ROM or available expansions.

I can also now admit that I spent way too much on expanding my A500 when it would have been much cheaper and better for me to just buy an A1200. In fact, even though I've upgraded and configured my A500 as far as it can possibly go, I'm still planning on buying an A1200 so that I can go further.

If you're just planning on playing games, use WinUAE. If you're planning on having an upgraded Amiga with harddrive to play games with WHDload (which is waaay better than WinUAE), then get an A500 or A600. If you want to do even more, get an A1200. The A1200 is the cheapest and the best solution.

[amigadave]

@mr_a500,

Is the lack of PAL a function of the different format Agnus chip or the lack of the Kickstart ROM?  I expanded my first A1000 with a Kwikstart ROM board, internal HD with an AdIDE controller and used both 1.3 and 2.04 ROMs.  I never tried installing a 3.1 ROM, but know that they work too.

I thought the newer ROMs from 2.04 foward allowed PAL or NTSC displays?

[CLS2086]

My A1000 is a PAL - 512kb + 2Mb FAST and it seems to run well NTSC games (like Titus the fox/Moktar) due to the presence of the big down black border.
A1000 is OCS not ECS   :-)
And yes newer ROM allow you to switch between PAL and NTSC mode if your hardware allow it ! A1000 and first generation of A500/a2000 can't do it properly.

[cmvsm]

So there is a ROM for the A1000 that will allow it to switch between NTSC and PAL modes?  How would one be able to tell if you had an A1000 that has the compatible hardware for this new ROM.  Where would you find the ROM if you wanted to buy it?

As another post stated, I think that it would be important to have PAL and NTSC compatibility, but I'd love to have it in the A1000 if at all possible.

Thanks again for all the replies.

[BigBenAussie]

Eh? Maybe I've forgotten after all this time....
but I don't remember ever having an incompatability problem with the A1000. I had friends with A500s and we swapped games and demos all the time and it all ran fine. In fact they were all envious because I had a Commodore IBM 512k 4.7mghz XT sidecar(which was like the A2000 bridgeboard but even had it's own slots and I upgraded it with an AT/286 8mghz accellerator) with a hd you could partition for the Amiga and the A1000 could access it. That sidecar was pretty useful for highschool programming classes in pascal.

The only thing that annoyed me was booting up kickstart, and even worse booting up that Janus software to get the hd on the sidecar going.. But I digress.. I'm pretty sure the A1000 switched between PAL and NTSC effortlessly on my monitor (never bothered with the TV out though but what would you expect). Was I just lucky or something? I've got 2meg ram so the A1000 was fairly functional for the day. I bought my A1000 used after the A500s came out. I sought it out as a preference.

My only lament was the dependency on the internal drive to bootup kickstart and then having to switch disks to get workbench going. I would've rathered it would have booted up from my external drives if only to avoid wear and tear on the internal one. Actually if someone knows of a software fix for this I'd love to give it a go. I also have a 5 1/2 drive for it, and I wonder if the disks still work after all this time.

No, the A1000 is an excellent machine, but don't expect it to perform any functions required for today's computing experience. Just your basic games and demos and mucking around with some ancient apps. As soon as I get the space I'll be setting it up again. Of course, as a precaution I actually bought a spare A1000 cheap that had a wrecked case just in case I needed parts. It also still works.

A little while ago, I saw a company on the internet that were selling A1000s with x86 mobos inside them. It would be kind of cool if it booted up straight into a later and nice looking AmigaOS without flashing windows or Linux stuff at me.

I still reckon the A1000 is a classic in it's design. It is just so cute, especially with the A1081/4 monitor. And the keyboard garage. They just don't make them like they used to. I feel the same way about all the Amiga models that look different to your dull PC box of the day. I still love that machine and I haven't loved a machine since.

Ok. Going back to my happy place now.

[Zac67]

The A1000 Agnuses for PAL and NTSC differ, so it's completely impossible to switch around. An NTSC Agnus will only show the top 200 lines (+overscan) for PAL screens and a PAL Agnus will always run a background colored/black border at the bottom for NTSC screens.

The first A500/A2000 Agnuses were the same, but when I expanded my A500 to 1 MB chip, the new Agnus was able to switch via software and some socket pin.