History: The Amiga 500
Today, I want to talk about the Amiga 500 and how it pertains to you as a potential collector. The A500 is a system that looms large in the consciousness of a lot of North-Western Europeans who grew up in the late 80s and early 90s: It was reasonably capable, it was reasonably cheap and it was reasonably easy to use (all three of which were qualities that could not be said to apply to 80s PCs).
This is not a history lesson of the machine (which has been documented far better in a number of other places) or a technical breakdown (though I will touch on specs very briefly). Instead, it is a look at what the machine offers to you as a retro gamer and retro collector.
The humble A500 comes with the trusty 68000 processor, 512k of RAM and the Original Chip Set (or OCS). From the factory, Kickstart ROMs will be 1.2 or (typically) 1.3.
It features an expansion port in the left side and a “trapdoor” slot underneath which can accept a 512k RAM expansion.
It is worth noting that some systems have been upgraded to later Kickstart versions or to the ECS standard, though this is uncommon in my experience.
The main strength of the 500 is that it is basically the reference system for games. Most games released for the Amiga targeted this system and so, if you want to play games authentically from disk (whether using real floppies or something like a Gotek drive), it is the most compatible system you can get.
You do want to make sure you get the trapdoor expansion. Especially as the games moved into the 90s, many titles began requiring 1 MB of RAM and a system without this will be run into limits of what you can do with it. When purchasing a system with the expansion, try to make sure it is undamaged. Many of the memory expansions came with a battery backed clock and these batteries have a tendency to leak which can damage or destroy the board.
Where the 500 runs into challenges is that expansion capabilities are fairly limited. While a fair number of expansions were produced back in the day, they can be hard to find nowadays, though modern after market designers have produced some exceptionally cool kit for them. I think a 500 works best when used in a fairly modest fashion, it’s poorly suited to turn into a mega-Amiga with super fast processors and gigs of RAM.
An additional strength is that this system was produced in large numbers and so is one of the easier machines to find both state-side and in the EU. For retro-gaming, a PAL system is generally recommended since the majority of classic titles were produced in Europe, but an NTSC system will still be able to access a pretty big library of titles.
The main challenge you will find is being able to transfer files to the computer. As it lacks a hard drive interface and later conveniences such as PCMCIA, you will have to find another solution. The Gotek (or similar) floppy drive replacement can go a long way towards remedying this by allowing you to put disk images on a USB stick and then load them in your Amiga. There are also aftermarket solutions that allows the use of Compact Flash or SD cards.
Of course nothing stops you from using real disks, but after 30+ years a lot of them are starting to be in somewhat questionable condition (which has not caused the price of boxed games on Ebay to drop, quite to the contrary).
Overall, the Amiga 500 is a fairly attractive system and if you find a good deal, it is certainly worth considering but you should be prepared to do a bit of work to connected it to the modern world. Ideal for the retro-games player who values authenticity over convenience.
