Questions on Amiga 500+ (plus)

[walterg74]

Hi all,

Some time back I had purchased an A500+ to add to my collection.

Recently, while testing out both a 1084S-D2 monitor and an Atari 520 STFM that I'm about to sell (wait, will I get booed for mentioning the Atari, or cheered because I'm selling it..? :roflmao: ), I decided to hook up the A500+ to it to play around, since the monitor purchase was faircly recent.

To my surprise, I got no image even though the Amiga powered on. To rule out the cabling, since the monitor has the D-9 connector and I only had an RGB<-> Scart plus a great little scart to D-9 RGB I ourchased on ebay, I decided to also try the monochrome output, and then also the CBVS output through the modulator, all no dice.

In addition to no image, the disk drive was not loading up discs as usual (or even doing its repetitive click in search for them).

I was out of time then, so I decided to call it quits and check another day. But I did start googling and saw that there was a huge chance that the battery had leaked and ruined my computer...

2 days back I resume playing around with it and opened it up. Looking inside it was great news / weird? News...

The great news was that the motherboard was imppecable and no visible battery damage anywhere... The weird news was... There was no battery... :confused:

Played around pushing the chips and some did make the "creak" sound as if they had gone a little more into the socket, crossed fingers and powered on... To my surprise this time it booted up fine!  (Well, I had to suffer a little more, because first I got no image and thought it was still broken, but it turns out the cable I was testing it out with through the mono output was faulty, and inserting a disk I did see it load, so after a cable change I got the image too :laughing: ).

So questions...

Why does my A500+ not have a battery..? Is it possible that the original owner just removed it to avoid these exact issues of battery leaks?

What do you think/suggest/advice on my computer (based on what's inside that I will explain now) and using it in general? The whole purpose of me and my computers is just for gaming.

Here's what I found out about the unit from disassembling and testing, and that you can check on the screenshots to verify or correct me...

- Seems to be a "standard" A500+ with 1MB RAM
- It has an additional 1MB of expanded RAM though the trap door expansion (should I worry one simm is a different bramd memory?
- Kickstart ROM is 2.04 (is this bad..?)
- It also came with an additional device that looks to be an HDD + RAM combo board with both these in an enclosure to connect through the side slot
- HDD seems to be 50 MB
- Extra RAM seems to be another 2MB of "fast" RAM

Appreciate your replies and comments/advice on using this machine.

Thanks!

[Matt_H]

A previous owner probably snipped out the battery. I think I've also read that some units were shipped without them. Either way, it's good news for the health of your board. The battery only maintains the system time, so if your purpose is gaming it's not a problem not to have one. If you want to reinstall one, grab of these, which won't leak.

I only see a photo posted of your motherboard, but it sounds like you've got yourself a fine setup there. 2MB of Chip RAM and 2MB of Fast RAM is a great start and plenty adequate for most games. Kickstart 2.04 might be an issue if you want to play some older games "natively" (i.e., boot from floppy) but it's good news for WHDLoad which allows you to install games to your hard disk - much easier, faster, and safer since you don't need to use your original media every time you play. Upgrading to OS3.1 would be even better. I suspect your hard drive unit is probably SCSI-based, which means you should grab a SCSI2SD board for an easy Flash-based storage upgrade. All this stuff is available from Amigakit but you can find it elsewhere, too.

[walterg74]

A previous owner probably snipped out the battery. I think I've also read that some units were shipped without them. Either way, it's good news for the health of your board. The battery only maintains the system time, so if your purpose is gaming it's not a problem not to have one. If you want to reinstall one, grab of these, which won't leak.

I only see a photo posted of your motherboard, but it sounds like you've got yourself a fine setup there. 2MB of Chip RAM and 2MB of Fast RAM is a great start and plenty adequate for most games. Kickstart 2.04 might be an issue if you want to play some older games "natively" (i.e., boot from floppy) but it's good news for WHDLoad which allows you to install games to your hard disk - much easier, faster, and safer since you don't need to use your original media every time you play. Upgrading to OS3.1 would be even better. I suspect your hard drive unit is probably SCSI-based, which means you should grab a SCSI2SD board for an easy Flash-based storage upgrade. All this stuff is available from Amigakit but you can find it elsewhere, too.

Hey Matt, thanks for your reply!

Yeah, that's what happens when trying to upload the attachments fro the phone and all get named the same... :lol:

Attaching screenshots to this post...

This is actually not my only Amiga, I also have:

Amiga 1000 (NTSC)
Amiga 500+ (PAL)  (This one of the thread)
Amiga 600 (PAL)
Amiga 1200 (PA)

For those Flash solutions I also have 2 x IDE/CF Kits, although I have not yet learned how to use all hdd based stuff including WHDLOAD properly...

I also have the PCMCIA Transfer kit to get floppies from images, and a 2MB PCMCIA expansion card.

Lastly I could also use the HxC Emulator, although in truth I bought that one for the Atari ST which didn't have the IDE solution.

[walterg74]

Seems I can only upload 5 per post, so here goes 2/3....

[walterg74]

And lastly, 3/3...