0x06 THE AMIGA A500 MODERNISED 

I have 3 amiga500s in original boxes just sitting around..with a bit of courage i intend to clean the casing on one of them...loved them in my youth and i love these machines now at my tender age of 51...thanks for the video.

I bought an A500 a couple years back. I think that it has been maintained, possibly recapped already. I *know* the barrel battery has been taken off the RAM expansion/RTC board and replaced with a receptacle for a lithium button cell. Whoever owned that beast before me cared a lot for it while they had it which made it, quite serendipitously, a fantastic starter machine for retrocomputing. I upgraded it with a Gotek, but everything else is stock. I really like the plain packaging of your Amiga. I got the US A500 "Starter Kit" (meaning yes, it's an NTSC machine) which came in the most 80s box ever, with Memphis typography and graphic design (not the horrid "Corporate Memphis", thank God) and a photo of a girl in a bad sweater hugging her A500. Fantastically 80s, which is why the plain packaging appeals: it's more timeless.

This is just amazing. Memory lane de lux. I dont have the skillset or an amiga anymore, but still had to watch it all. Big props to you.

Benjamin we're gonna make your channel go viral if you keep churning out cool retro gaming content. There can never be enough of it !

Interesting video, I've thought about cleaning my different machines, I think I'll do what you did rather than retrobrighting.

Nice I brought myself a 2nd hand 500 when I was a teenager but as upgrades of hardware came along I had to sell mine also, I brought a 1200 maybe 3 years ago and I am in the process of modding it with brand new case key tops (which I am still waiting for) os 3.1.4 installed on a sd card I have also burnt my own kickstart roms for 3.1.4, I am trying to get it looking original like it came from the shop.

You were lucky it booted up! You could very easily have had a failure! Thanks for uploading.

To remove stickers you can use for example the hot air of a hairdryer. In the other videos of restored Amigas I have seen that they use hydrogen peroxide with UV light for this. After that the device and the keys look like new from the store. I would clean the case and keys again. I think it's great that there are so many upgrades for the Amiga 👍 If I had known that there would be such extensions one day, I would have kept my Amiga 500 and 1200. Thank you for the upgrade guide. 🙂

Watched it all the way through, very informative video. But where you won me over was with "one of the best games". Because it is. :)

The nostalgia I had a 500+ as a kid, great work but you didn’t clean the keys lol

Bravo, bravo! 👏👏👏👏👏 I never bought an A500, but, I do miss my A1000 with 2.5 megs of ram and a whooping 40 megs of hdd. My wife disposed of it along with an A2000 while I was on assignment and that was the last drop that ended up in a divorce. There is a guy that sells refurbished Amigas in the UK and I am planing on getting an A500+ and a A1200. BTW I have a Raspberry Pi running PiMIGA and although is great simulation I want to get a “real Amiga”. You gained a subscriber here. Best regards from San Juan, Puerto Rico 🇵🇷, stay safe.

Yeah man Amiga content, mmmMMmmMMmmmmm Amigaaaaaa

I love this computer, I still.have my old one, but it unfortunately doesn't work anymore, class video mate!

Frontier running so smoooothly!

wow, flashback. I had the exact same model in the same box :)

Pulling out keys BEFORE top cover and keyboard is removed. Wow, that's new approach ;-) Great video, especially preserve warranty sticker part ;-) Cheers! S

just discovered your channel. instant sub... great video.. love the amiga.. look forward to binge watching your content :)

love it. you have got it running nice. I wish I'd kept either my 500+ or my 1200 from back then. they are crazy expensive now... though, and I know it's a dirty word, emulation is possible now and it would be great to build an Amiga themed laptop with booting into workbench and using whload for the software. not as glorious as what you have here but just a little revisit to better times

I miss the A500. Sold it for a A1500HD desktop. Great video!

Great video. Thanks.

In order to remove chips that have been sitting for decades in a socket you will first need to spray some contact cleaner on them. The job becomes noticeably easier.

That vampire is like shoving a jet engine in the 500 haha but it is cool. The low price alternative will be to source a spitfire add-on that just gives 8mb ram, ide and a toggle to make the original CPU run a bit faster. The chip ram mod is just a mod do add-on. And the other floppy option is to use an external gotek

The Amiga PSUs are not filled with resin - you may be confused with the C64. The Amiga units are usually OK if the caps are replaced, unless you are trying to power something with lots of expansions.

Can't believe you did all that without even testing it worked out of the box from ebay :P

the music in the background is by Scroobius Pip if anyone is wondering.

to get stickers off, a heatgun could be your friend, warm em up so the adhesive gets liquid

If you had a monitor you didn't use the A520, you just connected directly to the RGB port. The composite output on the A520 is particularly bad, though there are some S-Video mods for it that help. Doing a vanilla install with the Vampire will be a pretty laborious process to get the most out of it since there are a ton of drivers and extensions, etc. to set up. You can use a preinstalled image like CoffinOS to bring everything up to snuff without a lot of work.

6:10 yes you opened no return xD

fantastico video

Nice!

wow

well there you go im your 100th sub, nice video !

I'd recommend include in the next video about the vampire handles the Kickstart ROM stuff. You kinda glossed over that a bit with just installing WB 3.1. Excellent video otherwise. looking forward to the next part.

My biggest regret was selling my beloved Amiga.

I decided to buy a new one.... good for you, too expensive to get one here in Australia any more.

15:57 The Amiga's predecessor, the Atari 800 could also be thought of as the first multimedia computer. Do consider 'light brightening' the case and key caps. Setting it out in mid-year near-noon full sunlight it will make a big improvement and not risk any chemical damage. Congrats on your very nice A500 with a 1MB Agnus.

Frontier: what a great choice! 🪐🛸🚀 I should fix up my A500: it doesn’t even generate a video signal these days.

Imagine someone being hoaxed on Ebay to buy this rare powerful computer as a modern computer and they get this ancient thing. Ironic that all the packings are there

The trap door on my A500 was super loose as well. On my A500+ it's much tighter so I assume they fixed it when they updated it.

Great Video, quick question, why do you need to remove then ROM ? does de Vampire has its own ROM?

been a while since I saw that psygnosis logo

I am not to understand why you wanted to preserve the warranty label if you were planning to install a Vampire?

Always wince when I see the chip puller. When I do it I feel like I'm going to break the chip or the board.

Is it just me? Now i want a modern PC in this formfactor. I wonder if an ITX Board would fit inside ;).

If you are running the Vampire, the trap door memory is not needed, right?

3:47 no ruah if floppies work OR we can just use raspberrypi its not amiga then

Do you use lead based soldering?

Vampire is a very expensive accelerator, in the end it costs more than a current cheap PC, with the power of a pentium that you can buy for 10 or they will even give it to you as a gift. I would have bought it as an expensive whim for my Amiga500, for 100-150 but it is an absurd expense.

This is exactly the sort of thing that puts me off getting a real Amiga again, all that cleaning. Is it really necessary?

That music is SHOCKINGLY bad man. Lots of royality free decent stuff around too.

Me as a kid: Mum, dad, can we get an Amiga 500? My parents: No, but here - have a Vic20 Oh well, at least I learned to program in BASIC.

Replace PCB with Raspberry Pi 4 and keyboard interface = HDMI output plus 600 times Amiga 1200 performance. 😁

I like your modernization video. It is great to see you putting new life into.this lovely old platform.. HOWEVER, you 8 bit sound audio soundtrack is atrocious. I hated that sound in the 80s and if the Amiga would have had that kind of sound, I am sure it would not have been a success.

how much was it?

The music tho’. I couldn’t stick it out.

I noticed you scratched across other tracks near where you cut a track but was not deep otherwise your AMIGA A500 would not boot.

Nice channel you got here, it would be a real shame... for me if I did not subscribe.

Tha a520 sure look like a joke, i'm happy we have rgb on all our tv in my country(scart).

Amiga was not the first multimedia home computer. Jay Miner's first home computer back in the 70s was the first multimedia machine (Atari 8bit line)

A

Which bank did you rob? 😂

Why limit yourself with only a meagre 512K RAM expansion, go for the max! An 86000 processor could imagine itself something like 32 Megabyte, so give the chap 32 Megabyte! Let him live the life of luxury, who knows how many days this Commodore can still lift his data and address lines? Make the poor basterd proud!