Pimped Amiga 500

Summary

Back in the early ’90s, I had an Amiga 2000 with just one expansion card: a SCSI controller paired with a massive 290 MB hard drive. Getting software and games to run from the hard drive—with only 1 MB of chip RAM—required a lot of tricks. But it was fun, and it taught me a lot about computers. A few months ago, I stumbled upon a cheap Amiga 500, and I couldn’t resist. I decided to restore it from the ground up and add a GottaGoFast RAM + IDE controller to finally build what would have been my dream machine in 1990: an Amiga running OS 1.3 with fast RAM! This is the story of my pimped Amiga 500: 1 MB chip RAM, 8 MB fast RAM, and 512 MB of storage. Quite a beast for its time! 🙂 Used Materials Here is the hardwares pieces I used: Amiga 500 I bought with a “512K memory expansions” IDE68K + GottaGo FastRAM 8MB from AmigaStore.eu A 512M CompaqFlash card (LIMEI, “professional grade”) A 40 pin 3.5in IDE ribbon cable A dremel to creare a compaqflash slot Some (dupond) wires and solder Some pin headers A multimeter Isopropyl alchool Q-tips Facom “Contact Spay” Ambro-sol galvanized zinc spray paint A driller and a dremel First boot At first, I had a hard time getting a Workbench disk to boot properly — even though the game disks I tested worked just fine. (They probably have better error correction routines.) Each time I tried to start Workbench from different floppies, I ran into either “Read/Write Error” or “Please insert disk in drive 0!” messages. After several attempts and a few frustrating retries, I finally managed to reach a command prompt. That’s when I noticed something strange: the system was reporting 1 MB of chip RAM. Wait a second — this is an Amiga 500, not a 500+! Even with a memory expansion, it should normally show 512 KB chip RAM and 512 KB slow RAM. This means my A500 must have been modified to convert the slow RAM into chip RAM. (For reference: “slow RAM” sits on the same bus as chip memory, but it’s not directly addressable by the custom chips.) Inside O...