Amiga 500 The Amiga 500 was introduced in February 1987 as a follow-on to the Amiga 1000 and as the low priced companion to the Amiga 2000. Where the A2000 was meant to be the big, expandable professional machine, the A500 was targeted towards the home. It had the same chipset, sound and video modes as the A1000 and A2000, but instead of being a desktop box with a seperate keyboard and numerous expansion slots, it was a single piece console with just a single expansion connector coming off the side. It came with 512k RAM as standard, though it was easily upgraded to 1meg with the addition of a cartridge in a trapdoor in the bottom of the machine. It also came with a single 880k 3-1/2" floppy disk internal, and could accept additonal floppy drives connected to it's external floppy port. It could use either a television for it's disply, using an included adapter that combined the video and audio signals, or it could use Amiga RGB monitors. The A500 was a popular game machine and quite flexible.

This particular Amiga 500 has been upgraded with a Kickstart 2.04 ROM, and a GVP A500-HD+ SCSI controller housing a 50meg Quantum hard disk and 4meg of FastRAM, for a total of 5meg of RAM. Besides the GVP SCSI controllers for this machine, which had space enough to hold a single 3-1/2" hard disk internal, there were also a number of excelerators available for it, including the Supra Turbo-28, which used a souped up 68000 CPU, to the A530 from GVP which used a 68030. There were also a number of different motherboard revisions, with Rev 3 being an early example, the Rev. 5 being the most common and which usually shipped with the 512k Agnus chip, to the Rev 6 and above, which are less common and which may be found with the 1meg Agnus chip, which would allow you to use the internal 1meg of RAM as all chip RAM. Some Rev 5 and below mainboards are known to have compatibility problems when trying to use any of the OS ROMS above 2.04. Silk screened on the A500's mainboard is the codename 'Rock Lobster'.

On April 29, 1994 Commodore International shut it's doors, and on June 20th 1994 Jay Miner passed away. Early in 1995, German PC-manufacturer ESCOM bought Commodore, though they themselves would go into receivership the next year. Then in mid-1997 Gateway 2000 bought all rights to the Amiga with plans to continue developement of the platform.

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