LGR - Amiga 500 Computer System Review
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
Captain
This was a great machine back in the day, and I was still actively using mine until around 1999. As well as the 512k expansion in the slot, there were expansions you could install in the side by removing a blanking plate. I had the Cortex ram expansion card, giving me a total of around 3 MB in total. Using a resident RAM disk, I could write a shell script to copy the contents of the Workbench disks in to the RAM disk, after which I could then reboot from the RAM disk for blazing fast speed. The original Commodore TV modulators were a pain in the arse. Any movement of the Amiga while in use, which isn't uncommon when the keyboard and floppy are built-in, would likely knock it loose. The floppy drive was an oddity. As well as having its own format for disk (OFS, the drive was heavily controlled by software, meaning you could make it do things that other floppies simply wouldn't allow to happen due to their movement being controlled by hardware. The downside was that the drive was fairly noisy and at times sounded like it would pull itself to pieces when loading some games. Some people programmed the drive to play music, and in theory it was possible to write software that would risk physically damaging the drive, and Epstein didn't kill himself.
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This was a great machine back in the day, and I was still actively using mine until around 1999. As well as the 512k expansion in the slot, there were expansions you could install in the side by removing a blanking plate. I had the Cortex ram expansion card, giving me a total of around 3 MB in total. Using a resident RAM disk, I could write a shell script to copy the contents of the Workbench disks in to the RAM disk, after which I could then reboot from the RAM disk for blazing fast speed. The original Commodore TV modulators were a pain in the arse. Any movement of the Amiga while in use, which isn't uncommon when the keyboard and floppy are built-in, would likely knock it loose. The floppy drive was an oddity. As well as having its own format for disk (OFS, the drive was heavily controlled by software, meaning you could make it do things that other floppies simply wouldn't allow to happen due to their movement being controlled by hardware. The downside was that the drive was fairly noisy and at times sounded like it would pull itself to pieces when loading some games. Some people programmed the drive to play music, and in theory it was possible to write software that would risk physically damaging the drive, and Epstein didn't kill himself.
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John
-I loved my A500 and A2000 back in the 90's. Some of my favorite games for it were some of the SSI classics like the Goldbox Series and the Eye of the Beholder series. They had a cool flight sim too, DragonStrike. The Psygnosis games were usually pretty killer, but in a more arcady way. Birds of Prey, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Genghis Khan, there were so many. And with the purchase of my first Amiga in 90', I never bought a console after that. I had recently bought on original NES to play Final Fantasy I, and Ultima III & IV, but that was the last dedicated game console that I ever got. I was an Amiga Zealot until Commodore died, then, I reluctantly defected to the former enemy PC camp, and have been thoroughly entrenched ever since. No consoles of any sort, and no Apple anything. But in a different world, where two A-Holes didn't gut the company, and the Amiga had been allowed to develop, evolve, and mature, like the abysmal PCs of the 90's were allowed to grow into the monsters of today, then I would still be an Amiga Zealot. Ahhh. To dream of what could have been. -
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-I loved my A500 and A2000 back in the 90's. Some of my favorite games for it were some of the SSI classics like the Goldbox Series and the Eye of the Beholder series. They had a cool flight sim too, DragonStrike. The Psygnosis games were usually pretty killer, but in a more arcady way. Birds of Prey, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Genghis Khan, there were so many. And with the purchase of my first Amiga in 90', I never bought a console after that. I had recently bought on original NES to play Final Fantasy I, and Ultima III & IV, but that was the last dedicated game console that I ever got. I was an Amiga Zealot until Commodore died, then, I reluctantly defected to the former enemy PC camp, and have been thoroughly entrenched ever since. No consoles of any sort, and no Apple anything. But in a different world, where two A-Holes didn't gut the company, and the Amiga had been allowed to develop, evolve, and mature, like the abysmal PCs of the 90's were allowed to grow into the monsters of today, then I would still be an Amiga Zealot. Ahhh. To dream of what could have been. -
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Fastbikkel
I replaced my Amiga 500 for a pc in 1995.
It was only until 1994 or so when i honestly thought the pc could match my expectations with the intel 486, Cirrus logic sVGA adapter and creative soundblaster audio card.
Before that nothing could touch the Amiga 500 as far as i was concerned.
But this is the Netherlands im talking about, things were different in other countries.
The Atari equivalent of the Amiga was very rare to find, i knew only one person who had one.
This owner had trouble finding people to share games with, we all had amigas.
And again, copying was rampant. And there was the famous virus that gave the guru meditation error on boot.
It was important then to not soft reset the machine but the completely turn it off and on. Otherwise the virus would install itself on the next disk if it wasnt write protected.
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I replaced my Amiga 500 for a pc in 1995.
It was only until 1994 or so when i honestly thought the pc could match my expectations with the intel 486, Cirrus logic sVGA adapter and creative soundblaster audio card.
Before that nothing could touch the Amiga 500 as far as i was concerned.
But this is the Netherlands im talking about, things were different in other countries.
The Atari equivalent of the Amiga was very rare to find, i knew only one person who had one.
This owner had trouble finding people to share games with, we all had amigas.
And again, copying was rampant. And there was the famous virus that gave the guru meditation error on boot.
It was important then to not soft reset the machine but the completely turn it off and on. Otherwise the virus would install itself on the next disk if it wasnt write protected.
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Magnus
I have several NTSC version 5 motherboards, but managed to pick up a UK version 6, which is fantastic along with my 2 Amiga 1000s, but I would prefer a European motherboard or phoenix board as well. The Amiga mouse is called a -tank-, for it works like a tank as well. Also, please keep in mind that the original A500s, like the one I purchased in 1988 had a much fantastic quality keyboard compared to later models. this has to do with the lowering price of course. Keep in mind that the Amiga, itself, runs via DC current and not AC, so you can use your NTSC power supply, like I do with my Pal motherboard and it works fine via 1084 monitors. Also, if it's an NTSC machine and you have a 1 meg agnus or more, it can be boot into a more Pal mode that offers better compatibility.
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I have several NTSC version 5 motherboards, but managed to pick up a UK version 6, which is fantastic along with my 2 Amiga 1000s, but I would prefer a European motherboard or phoenix board as well. The Amiga mouse is called a -tank-, for it works like a tank as well. Also, please keep in mind that the original A500s, like the one I purchased in 1988 had a much fantastic quality keyboard compared to later models. this has to do with the lowering price of course. Keep in mind that the Amiga, itself, runs via DC current and not AC, so you can use your NTSC power supply, like I do with my Pal motherboard and it works fine via 1084 monitors. Also, if it's an NTSC machine and you have a 1 meg agnus or more, it can be boot into a more Pal mode that offers better compatibility.
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cabasse
when i was a kid in the 90s, dreaming i had a computer, my dad's company gave us a hand me down packard bell 386, with a dead hard drive. we never got the hard drive fixed, and i think he ended up giving the machine away or selling it, as we also didn't have a monitor, BUT one of my friends gave us one of their old amiga monitors that if i remember correctly looked very much like the monitor shown with the 500, here. i remember it had a 9 pin input as well as a composite - which i ended up running a signal from a VCR from another room into so i could watch tv in my bedroom. still to this day, i wonder if there ever could have been a way took hook it up to vga via some kind of converter.
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when i was a kid in the 90s, dreaming i had a computer, my dad's company gave us a hand me down packard bell 386, with a dead hard drive. we never got the hard drive fixed, and i think he ended up giving the machine away or selling it, as we also didn't have a monitor, BUT one of my friends gave us one of their old amiga monitors that if i remember correctly looked very much like the monitor shown with the 500, here. i remember it had a 9 pin input as well as a composite - which i ended up running a signal from a VCR from another room into so i could watch tv in my bedroom. still to this day, i wonder if there ever could have been a way took hook it up to vga via some kind of converter.
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Marco
The Amiga was far superior to PCs back in 1985 and I owned one in the 80s, and even towards the mid 90s, my PC owning friends and even console owning friends knew their system sound and graphics were still laughable besides a decade old stereo and 4096 colour powerhouse that was the Amiga experience. Despite that many classmates owned PCs with only a dozen or so friends owning an Amiga. But funnily enough we definitely felt like the PC Master Race before the term was even coined, and for many many years forming our own exclusive club for game swaps etc
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The Amiga was far superior to PCs back in 1985 and I owned one in the 80s, and even towards the mid 90s, my PC owning friends and even console owning friends knew their system sound and graphics were still laughable besides a decade old stereo and 4096 colour powerhouse that was the Amiga experience. Despite that many classmates owned PCs with only a dozen or so friends owning an Amiga. But funnily enough we definitely felt like the PC Master Race before the term was even coined, and for many many years forming our own exclusive club for game swaps etc
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lwvmobile
I think what blows my mind more than anything else, when you look at the release dates of the Vic-20, Commodore 64, and machines up through the Amiga and also the competition, these machines were coming out literally every other year. Compounded by all the changing ownership and leadership moving all around, its amazing that such leaps and bounds were made in such a short time span. It almost feels like you could have barely gotten ahold of one machine before its successor came out.
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I think what blows my mind more than anything else, when you look at the release dates of the Vic-20, Commodore 64, and machines up through the Amiga and also the competition, these machines were coming out literally every other year. Compounded by all the changing ownership and leadership moving all around, its amazing that such leaps and bounds were made in such a short time span. It almost feels like you could have barely gotten ahold of one machine before its successor came out.
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Aftersun
Commodore had a really crappy marketing team. The C64 here in the US out sold Apple in the consumer market mostly by price, abundance of software piracy and word-of-mouth. They didn't improve their marketing much at all when the Amiga line of computers hit the market. Everyone I knew wanted an Amiga but just stuck wither their C64. I got an Amiga 500 and ended up with allot of games for it, but there were only two others that I knew of back in 1990 that had one.
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Commodore had a really crappy marketing team. The C64 here in the US out sold Apple in the consumer market mostly by price, abundance of software piracy and word-of-mouth. They didn't improve their marketing much at all when the Amiga line of computers hit the market. Everyone I knew wanted an Amiga but just stuck wither their C64. I got an Amiga 500 and ended up with allot of games for it, but there were only two others that I knew of back in 1990 that had one.
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lazygamereviews
-I don't know why the Amiga wasn't popular in America-
It was partially because Jack Tramiel managed to alienate his own supply chain in the time he was there, and partially because Commodure US has NO CLUE what they were doing.
It was a joke back in the day that if Commodore's marketing was in charge of KFC they'd market it as -warm dead bird-
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-I don't know why the Amiga wasn't popular in America-
It was partially because Jack Tramiel managed to alienate his own supply chain in the time he was there, and partially because Commodure US has NO CLUE what they were doing.
It was a joke back in the day that if Commodore's marketing was in charge of KFC they'd market it as -warm dead bird-
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The
2020, this video reminded me of how old I really am, my early teens were spent with mainly the 600 version as my 500 broke. Was pretty much the same though, the amount of time I spent on that beauty was worth it. All of my spare time job money went to various upgrades and you could get a ton here in Europe, almost everyone I knew had a 500.
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2020, this video reminded me of how old I really am, my early teens were spent with mainly the 600 version as my 500 broke. Was pretty much the same though, the amount of time I spent on that beauty was worth it. All of my spare time job money went to various upgrades and you could get a ton here in Europe, almost everyone I knew had a 500.
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