News, Views, Reviews, Photos

Amiga A500 Plus

ByKevin Simon

Jul 1, 2013

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a500p_title

a500p

This is widely known as the shortest-lived Amiga ever, lasting only 6 months until it was phased out by the A600. This was yet another of Commodores secrets with many people opening their Amigas at Christmas expecting to find a A500 only to find something much better. It looked physically similar to the A500, but updated it with 1mb of ram, Enhanced Chip Set (ECS) and Workbench 2.0 which turned the horrible blue interface of workbench 1.3 into a much more lovely grey and blue.

It also allowed the user to see files that did not have icons without resorting to the CLI and put among other things the FastFileSystem into ROM (Kickstart) allowing you to boot from FFS disks containing 880k of data.

spec1

Motorola MC68000
7.16 MHz CPU
512k Chip RAM or 1 megabyte Chip RAM on motherboard
Maximum 512k (A500) or 1 megabyte Chip RAM (A500+)
512k Fast RAM in trapdoor expansion bus (optional)
Maximum 8 megabytes Fast RAM
512k RAM (A500) or 1 megabyte RAM (A500+) on motherboard
256k ROM or 512k ROM on motherboard
3.5 drive bay 2.5 drive mountable
3.5 880K internal floppy drive
Integrated keyboard
2 button mouse
A1000 sidecar expansion bus
A500 trapdoor expansion bus
Compact case
External power supply port
External floppy drive port
RS-232 serial port
Centronics parallel port
2 mouse/joystick ports
Monochrome composite video port
15kHz colour RGB analogue video port
2 stereo audio output ports

 

By Kevin Simon

I run this blog & also self employed cleaning out fish ponds, but due to spinal problems not able to do as much, now started a youtube channel showing my converted Peugeot Partner micro camper also as interest in photography so now vlog about the trips and of course Lego figures out in the wild photos.

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