amadeus777999 wrote:

"The Arcade" stick's looking awesome - I remember it from the magazines back then.

They are totally worth it. (I have two of them) They have a better feel on the stick compared to Competiton Pro's. Yet the competition has microswitches in the buttons, which the arcade does not have. If you like me, have long hands and grip too tight on the stick, then the square raised part of the base, will be in the way of the edge of the hand, and it will cause your hand to cramp. Only one joystick is worse on this point, which is the Zip-Stick. (picture below) The Zip-Stick is an absolute horror to use in my opinion. I had one back in around 2003/04 and it was never able to use it more than 5 minutes, 10 top, before my left hand was utterly in cramps and unusable for half a day. I have no such issue with the arcade stick. It just sits perfectly in the hand. The only way to make it the ultimate stick for platform games, is to have a microswitch instead of the leaf used for the button.

Thanks for the info about the chip mem possibilities.

I think that a turbo card would be nice, but i think it cost also >120-250€. Personally i wouldn't spend so much money to my amiga.

As for your option Scandoubler... Would be only an option if the CRT get broken.
I have my old CRT ,the original Commodore 1084S-D1. ,see this picture examples:

Commodore 1084S-D1

So i would still use it, to have originally amiga screen feeling 😎

Due to your topic joystick's:

Have had win an auction on eBay, not long ago, a new - old stock joystick:
The Quickjoy Megastar SV-135

melbar wrote:

Thanks for the info about the chip mem possibilities. […]
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Thanks for the info about the chip mem possibilities.

I think that a turbo card would be nice, but i think it cost also >120-250€. Personally i wouldn't spend so much money to my amiga.

As for your option Scandoubler... Would be only an option if the CRT get broken.
I have my old CRT ,the original Commodore 1084S-D1. ,see this picture examples:

Commodore 1084S-D1

So i would still use it, to have originally amiga screen feeling 😎

Due to your topic joystick's:

Have had win an auction on eBay, not long ago, a new - old stock joystick:
The Quickjoy Megastar SV-135

Uhhhh... Holy smokes... That joystick looks amazing. 😳 😜 😜 How good is it?

Regarding the price on a TF-530, then I paid 156 Euro including shipping. Shure it is a lot of money, though the other ones that have 8mb ram and 68000 instead of 68030, will set you back around the same. It really comes down to eighter 68000+8mb or 68030+2mb. Shure there are this IDE and 8mb boards that I was talking about.

http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?7158-A50 … A600-CF-adapter

With this, you can source an 68010 which are cheap enough.

Sucks that they used an inferior "contact method" in newer releases of "The Arcade", good that I didn't get out and buy one. The zip stick looks quite shitty, never have seen that one in the wild.
Attached is the second stick that I found intruiging as a kid...

it looks like this might just became the amiga thread of vogos hehe

All this amiga talk got me really excited and got a breath of some energy to start polishing out my yellowed case. I am doing it slowly and enjoying it a little bit over the last 2 days and plan to take it slow, but so far have polished the top of the case with high grit sandpaper 1200 and rubbed it back with 2000, can see a improvement but not sure what I will do about the keys don't want to risk rubbing out the letters

day 1

day 2

amadeus777999 wrote:

Sucks that they used an inferior "contact method" in newer releases of "The Arcade", good that I didn't get out and buy one. The zip stick looks quite shitty, never have seen that one in the wild.
Attached is the second stick that I found intruiging as a kid...

Looks like a nice joystick. I wonder how it is to play with?

treeman wrote:

it looks like this might just became the amiga thread of vogos hehe […]
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it looks like this might just became the amiga thread of vogos hehe

All this amiga talk got me really excited and got a breath of some energy to start polishing out my yellowed case. I am doing it slowly and enjoying it a little bit over the last 2 days and plan to take it slow, but so far have polished the top of the case with high grit sandpaper 1200 and rubbed it back with 2000, can see a improvement but not sure what I will do about the keys don't want to risk rubbing out the letters

day 1

day 2

You might want to do eighter a retrobright, or give the case a new finish by painting it. On the other hand, then it is only the keys that are looking a bit too yellow. It is so much more easy to just retrobright keys than do a retrobright of the case. Finally. There are a kickstarter campaign that aims at creating new Amiga500 cases. You can follow it on https://www.a1200.net/ as it is the same people who have made the brand new 1200 cases.

Well... Finally I wanted to give my new 500-Turbo a run, and use it as intended. And I ran into some major issue. So it has taken me a couple of days to figure out. The issue was a memory conflict. However this require some explanation to understand what exactly was the problem. And it was not something that arose before the machine started to use more than 512k of ram.

Now...
I was finally ready to start using my machine, and I wanted to install Workbench from scratch. And while booting workbench that was already present on my CF card, then it began to throw all sorts of errors. I thought that it might be the 4gb card, so I tried with a 512mb card that too had a workbench installation. Same issues. Well... It might just be the kickrom version I thought, as it is Kick 2.x version 37.300. Well... It was not. As I thought that I wanted to test with Alien Breed. The version I have requires 1mb Ram, so I thought that it might have issues, so I tried Bubble Bobble as well. Same issue. The machine would freeze. Hmmmm... What then I thought.

I remembered that I had this tool/program called "systest" in my diskbox, and thought that I would test the machine. The first test is Ramtest, and the machine threw a serious memory failure at me.

So I disconnected the TF-530 accelerator and inserted the original 68000 CPU again and ran the Ram test. No issues at all. And naturally I became nerveous, as the TF-530 is an open source product, and is not tested that much, regarding radio noise and stuff. And yet again, the creator tests and tests again and again, for bugs. And I thought that the issue was eighter the Ram gone bad or the controller chip on the TF-530 that had gone bad. Nope... It was not. As I had a longer conversation with the seller in Germany.

What was the issue here, was a memory conflict in the Zorro-II addressing space. It is because I use 512k from the trapdoor expansion as ChipMem, and not using ChipMem from the motherboard alone. Soooo... I need to eighter disable my ChipMem upgrade/mod, modify the mainboard to full Amiga500-Plus spec's or buy a real 500-Plus board. And looking at what a complete set of 1 x Logic-IC and 4 x Ram-Chips compared to what a full Plus board costs, then the answer is straight forward. I need to mod the board to full 500-Plus specs. Well... Not the clock circuit included, as that is not useable in these days and it require a battery which might leak down the road.

I hope this will be the last roadblock, before I can fully enjoy my 500-Turbo edition. The funny thing about this, is that the Amiga did not show any noticeable signs of conflicts, before I actually began to use the memory that was conflicting. I guess this is how things are, when there are no real memory self-test in a computer of some sort during boot. It runs like nothing is wrong, until the conflict in question will be used. And then it will crash. Yeah... Amiga's are so darn simple machines.

wow what a pain, guess the cost of all that extra power.
This reminds me I might desolder the barrel battery from my 512 extension card alto it was supposedly refurbished when I bought it.

Kind of been eyeing off the 2mb expansion card + the adaptor since this thread started after saying im happy with a stock a500 with 1mb ram hmmm

also does anybody know if there is any adf program/utility I can put on my gotek usb floppy and boot it to get the exact system specs? so don't need to open the case

treeman wrote:

wow what a pain, guess the cost of all that extra power. This reminds me I might desolder the barrel battery from my 512 extens […]
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wow what a pain, guess the cost of all that extra power.
This reminds me I might desolder the barrel battery from my 512 extension card alto it was supposedly refurbished when I bought it.

Kind of been eyeing off the 2mb expansion card + the adaptor since this thread started after saying im happy with a stock a500 with 1mb ram hmmm

also does anybody know if there is any adf program/utility I can put on my gotek usb floppy and boot it to get the exact system specs? so don't need to open the case

Well...
My problem can be solved, by converting the 500 to full 500-Plus specs.

Regarding booting from external drive, if that is your thought. Then you can get a boot selector. You will have to sandwich it between a chip and the motherboard.

This way, you can have a gotek drive, in an external drive case. And when you flip a contact/switch, then it will think that the external drive is the internal drive.

currently I have a gotek inside my case plugged straight to the motherboard, using HxC which is good enough for me using a usb stick with adf files I can select which adf to boot into. Was wondering if there is a program I could download in adf format and boot it off my gotek like I boot the games and get a readout of my specs cpu ram angus version

treeman wrote:

currently I have a gotek inside my case plugged straight to the motherboard, using HxC which is good enough for me using a usb stick with adf files I can select which adf to boot into. Was wondering if there is a program I could download in adf format and boot it off my gotek like I boot the games and get a readout of my specs cpu ram angus version

Sysinfo?

thanx for the tip, managed to track down a adf version

basic stock a500, if anything I think getting a ecs upgrade would be the next step for me

treeman wrote:

thanx for the tip, managed to track down a adf version https://i.ibb.co/M5hng1Y/IMG-20181220-133907.jpg basic stock a500, if an […]
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thanx for the tip, managed to track down a adf version

basic stock a500, if anything I think getting a ecs upgrade would be the next step for me

Yup. Sounds like the right thing to do. 😀 1mb Chip is good to have. What will the next thing be then?

As it is a rev5 board, then you can get one of them IDE adaptors, 8mb FastRam (both can be sandwiched in CPU socket) and then a 68010 CPU. Then get a kickrom with HDD support. I think that will all make your amiga better. And you will keep it well in the classic spec's. You know. How it was to have an Amiga back in the days. Or era correct if you like.

I was thinking a serious memory upgrade like the 8mb you said and rom selector would be a really cool mod, its just a wish list for now. Back when I was a kid the 512kb upgrade to make the ram 1mb was the dream so I already achieved that 😀

treeman wrote:

I was thinking a serious memory upgrade like the 8mb you said and rom selector would be a really cool mod, its just a wish list for now. Back when I was a kid the 512kb upgrade to make the ram 1mb was the dream so I already achieved that 😀

Sweet... Yeah... 1mb is a minimum upgrade. If you are only planning to play games, then that is actually enough.
Though if you plan on a different kickswitch than 1.3 then it is in my book only good, if you plan on getting a harddrive too.
Using gotek and original chipset only, then 1.3 is enough, and those 8mb FastRam are a waste.
Meaning, that you will not really be able to use them, because most games just need that 512k Chip plus 512k Slow.
Like Lotus-II, or Alien Breed. They run at normal speed on 1mb were the 512k is only SlowRam.

Though...
If you want to go all in, and have that expanded 500, with 100% compatibility and butt-loads of features for text editing.
Then I think you need some more. And IDE and 8mb FastRam are indeed a welcomming upgrade.
And because it is an Revision5 board, you need to have that "Ooops-Bug" corrected first.

For that you need this device here. It is ratherr cheap and I plan on buying one my self.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Amiga-500-Rev-5-Kick … bpapf:rk:1:pf:1

Next you need some FastRam upgrade, in order to get more room for programs. Like writing ADF files from disks,
or writing disks from ADF files. That can be done, using ADF-Blitzer, and writing back to disks can be done with ADF2Disk.
So an 8mb for sandwiching between CPU and motherboard are a way to go.
There are many solutions, and the following are one of many.
http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?32896-A6 … xpansion-boards

Then you need an IDE adaptor thing. Again there are many, and some autoboot and some does not.
It is a question of how expensive you want it, and the non-sutobooting ones just need a kickrom with IDE drivers.
That would be kickstart 2.x version 37.350 and up. And if you do not want the HDD to run when using 1.3
then this is the best choice. Else you need to remove the HDD it self when booting 1.3.
This is the aproach I personally like, having 1.3 for disk games, and then flipping to 3.1 if I need to work on HDD.
The following are one example of an IDE adaptor for the Amiga500
https://archiwum.allegro.pl/oferta/kontroler- … 7171384736.html

You can just go all in, in one giant go (excluding the Oops-bug pcb), and buy eighter a Wicher-500i, ACA-500 or HC533.
Yes... You still need that Oops-bug upgrade for the Rev.5 board, if you want to use other and newer kickstart roms.
As and example, then my Rev.5 will not boot a 2.x version 37.300 chip. Anyway... Here are links to the 3 accelerators.
You can get the one I have (TF-530) yet that is 156 Euro including shipping to an EU country. And it is the best for
WHD-Loader. The advantage of the 68000 versus 68030, is that the 68000 gives 100% compatibility.
And if the 68000 is clocked at 33 or something MHZ, then you still get lots of speed. It is just a priority what you choose.
https://amigastore.eu/597-wicher-500i-accelerator.html
https://icomp.de/shop-icomp/en/shop/product/ACA500plus.html
https://sordan.ie/product/583/turbo-card-hc53 … -ide-amiga-500/

By the way... The HC533 should have SCSI device build in, so you can actually boot HDD off an Kickrom 1.3 which
is kind of neat if you want to run HDD on Kick 1.3. Yet it is not really my cup of tea. I much prefer 1.3 to be HDD-Free.
And there are a number of other accelerator's out there. Those however are mostly external.

Uhhh.... And there is an DIY harddrive controller as well...
http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/hw/amiga/a500hdd/

Hope you can use all these informations in some way or another....

Forgot to mention....
I have recently bought one of these "4-way" kickrom switcher. It is working flawless on an 500 revision 8a.1 board.
I have had it running with a dual kickstart 2-in-1 switch, that I bought on eBay. (Link below the 4-way kick switcher)

4-way kickrom switcher....
https://www.ebay.com/itm/No-solder-ROM-switch … bD-bu:rk:2:pf:1

2-1 kickrom "switcher"....
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Nuovo-con-Licenza-Do … bP9B3:rk:7:pf:0

some good info there, thanks for taking the time to write it up, especially its aimed where reading websites and other forums there is alot of piecing the information together. the 4 in 1 link is the one I was looking at, probably really only need 2 1.3 and 3.1 but its always cool to also have 2.04 which probably won't use. Its a future wish list anyway

treeman wrote:

some good info there, thanks for taking the time to write it up, especially its aimed where reading websites and other forums there is alot of piecing the information together. the 4 in 1 link is the one I was looking at, probably really only need 2 1.3 and 3.1 but its always cool to also have 2.04 which probably won't use. Its a future wish list anyway

No problemo. I am just happy that you found it usefull. 😀

brostenen wrote:

It really comes down to eighter 68000+8mb or 68030+2mb.

brostenen wrote:

http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?7158-A50 … A600-CF-adapter

With this, you can source an 68010 which are cheap enough.

Thanks for the info, brostenen. It helps me to get a good overview about all the amiga things and possibilities.

Ramp up the different solution's, you can see:

• - The board you have linked: 8MB+ide board --> ~80€
  a 68010 cpu cost ~ 10€
  So you definitely end up with min. 100€
  
  - ACA500+ ,68HC000 + 8Mb, the external solution. --> 135€
  
  - Witcher 500i, (new batches can be preordered...), --> 133€
  Still addtional cpu needed: 68HC000 --> ~15€
  8Mb 72-pin Ram i still have in storage i think.
  So you end up with min. 150€
  
  - HC533, 68HC000 + 8Mb, --> 130€
  Still out of stock.
  
  - Terrible Fire 530 (your card), you have paid 156€.
  Out of stock now.
  
  - New TF534 soon available. with 4Mb instead of 2Mb.
  But acc. to the developer, it will be more expensive.

Conclusion:
These turbo boards are not much more expensive than your first proposal, the 8MB+ide board.
Then you will get also problems with the height and the tight fit inside the case. For me, the better price-/performance ratio is related more to the ACA500+ or the HC533.
Nevertheless, i will only need these upgrade solutions if a want to handle with whdload.

By the way, did you replace some capacitors from your Rev.8a board? I have heard that some of them can make problems... 😕