Amiga 500 – 37 Years Old (1987-2024)

This is the Amiga 500, code-named “Rock Lobster”, which is now 37 years old

It was announced in January 1987, and was released in April 1987 in the Netherlands, and May 1987 in Europe, and cost 499 GBP, which was later reduced to 399 GBP in 1988

It used the standard 880KB Floppy Disks, and early models came with Kickstart 1.2 (before October 1988) and all later models came with Kickstart 1.3

This was the first Commodore Amiga Computer I ever bought, and I remember it came with Kickstart 1.3 and at first I had a few Games as well as Workbench 1.3

At its brains was a 68000 Motorola CPU which ran at 7.09MHz (PAL) and 7.16MHz (NTSC) and it had only 512KB Memory as standard, although you could put in an Expansion Card with an additional 512KB RAM on making it 1MB which was required for some Games to run

Graphically the Amiga had a Standard Screen Size of 640×256 and had Decent Sound Capability which provided 4 hardware mixed channels, 2 left, and 2 right, of 8 bit PCM which sampled at upto 28KHz

The Floppy Drive was completely reprogrammable and could even read PC 720KB Floppy Disks, and even upto 984KB using Custom Format

Most of the chips on the board are socketed, which allows for easy replacement of any dead chips, while the Amiga 500 is OCS by design, it can potentially be upgraded to ECS (Enhanced Chip Set) by replacing all the custom chips inside the machine

The Kickstart is normally either Kickstart 1.2 or Kickstart 1.3 but this can even be upgraded to Kickstart 3.1 if 2MB of Ram is available

The Amiga 500 was pretty expandable, and many trapdoor expansions and addons have been created over the years, such as 8MB Memory Expansions, You can even fit a Hard Drive internally (or externally which would plug into the Side-Expansion Slot)

When Kickstart 2.04 came out (in the A500+ model), many Games would refuse to run on the A500+, as some Games hooked into undocumented features of the Kickstart 1.3 ROM itself, meaning they would refuse to run under Kickstart 2.04

However, Relokick was released on a CU Amiga Coverdisk (March 1993) which loaded the Kickstart 1.3 ROM into Memory, Rebooted, and then allowed these problematic Games to load properly, a few Games were actually updated by the original developers so they would work in Kickstart 2.04

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