Modding: What can I do with an A500+ ???

[Samuar]

Came across my Commodore Amiga A500+ in the garage today. A few keys appear to have fallen off the keyboard, its an interesting shade of yellow (and no one in my household smokes!) and it got me thinking.

What can I do to it?

Any hardware modding people might suggest? I am very interested, will select the best and post results.

I have a lot of experience with x86 machines and own a lot. I have a fair amount of experience with Apple Macs, and once again own a fair number.

I thank you for your postings in advance and look forward to reading them.

[lorddef]

there is a micronic zorro expansion board that would allow you to fit a graphics card and other boards, and accelerator boards go up to 68030 for the a500.  Although all these expansions are very rare now.

Please excuse spelling; thats what you get from going on a.org after a night out

[JetRacer]

Remove the case and fit a shed around it (har har har) :-)

Fit it into an oldstyle C64 floppy drive :-)

Hire the original storage space used for the Cray :-)

As you might have guessed by now, the shear size of the A500 mobo makes it pretty difficult to do anything with it. Heck, I doubt it even fits into a full-tower PC case. A PC desktop case after some pretty creative hacking (maybe), but that wouldn't be cool.

Sorry for this poor excuse of a post.

[Samuar]

Is that A500+ that awful?

Have fond memories playing "Bart Simpsons Vs The Space Mutants", "Captain Planet", "F/A 18 Hornet", "James Pod 2: Robocod" and of course the many adventures of Dizzy...

So its an A1200 or above I should go for?

[JetRacer]

I assumed you meant "modding" as in modding(..?).

The A500 is big. Steals alot of space. If you just want to play old games, then I'd reccomend UAE (emulation for x86), which can emulate the whole range of Amiga computers, support all Kickstart versions and provide virtual memory expantions. Some games work with a perticular kickstart version, some a special chipset, with or without expantion memory, and some are just generally bitchy.

It's a whole lot easier when expation memory is just a mouseclick away.

If you just want the better specced Amiga, no matter the cost, then wait for AOS4 to be released and buy an A1. It's a fairly modern computer by all means (PPC G4) and it will have the snappy AOS in it.

-Very much unlike f.ex. windows which potentially would look sluggish even if it was plugged into the worlds collective computing power.

[bhyman1]

There's lot's of stuff you can do. I took my A1200 and did this:  

http://www.maximumhomerdrive.com/amiga_stuff.htm

Now my A1200 roxor's.
 :-D