EEVBlog
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 มี.ค. 2013
- Vintage Teardown Tuesday.
What's inside the 1987 Commodore Amiga 500 computer.
Relive Fat Agnus, Paula, Denise, and Gary in the Rock Lobster
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The Amigas were the best machines for playing Lemmings. The head explosions were spectacular!
The Acorn version was better as it had better sound hardware and more colours. Of course it was far less common as they were typically educational machines.
Still don't know how we managed to get hold of the game at school.
Oh, no!
do you remember wings, stunt car racer, it came from the desert, rocket ranger etc the best
You are now the #1 search result for Amiga on youtube :)
Thanks for this one Dave! The remains of the old MOS factory are nearby my shop - I will post a pic of it on the EEVBlog... :-)
Love a teardown. But It also hurt my heart. My Amiga is still in use!
4:00 Both the "trapdoor" and "sidecar" expansion slots had practically the same functionality. You could connect extra memory to both, add harddrives, faster CPU's, etc...
7:27 That's kilobytes, not megabytes.
15:45 Overscan wasn't meant to get higher resolutions. Normally, computer screens all had a (usually black) border around the usable area. With Overscan, you could feed data to the entire screen just like regular TV broadcasts did.
28:20 Doesn't the case take most of the strain?
35:50 And on the failing double clicks: while the old mouse looks and feels horrible at first, it was quite comfortable when you got used to it, and you could do really fast double clicks with it. So a lot of people increased the speed of the double click in the Preferences. That's why someone (you, in this case) who's not used to the mouse has a hard time opening any files or programs.
39:40 Monochrome, no sound, and a boring game. Try this classic instead: th-cam.com/video/UW4CDWyhxLw/w-d-xo.html
This computer was what I used through almost all of my time in the Air Force. Loved it.
Ian M What
I loved watching the tear down of this wonderful piece ,thanks and keep up the good work
I have to say I love this channel. It's been mostly what I've been watching on my free time over the last few weeks (HTPC).
My very first computer. Saw one at a computer store in West Edmonton Mall in 1989 running EA FA-18 Interceptor and I was amazed beyond belief that such a technological marvel was available to the average consumer (with $2000+ to spare...that was it! I had to have one. I still have my FA-18 Interceptor as well as my Arcticfox disks (in their original sleeve folders)....just cannot give them up. I owned two Amiga 500's back then - both with Amiga 1084 monitors and 20 MB external hardrives (at $500+ a pop) I still do miss my Amiga's....let it go Randy.....let it go.......lol
Damn, I LOVED F/A 18 Interceptor! 😊
Petty simple stuff to play/complete. I liked to drop off the end of the carrier, then afterburn into a flip. A maneuver which, years later, I've seen a fighter jet actually do! 😊
(Purely by mistake I should add! Looked amazing, potentially a life or death moment the pilot managed to save!) 🤔😮😊
Can I give like 20 thumbs up?
This teardown brings a tear to the eye. I used to design/build/sell memory expansion and sound digitizers for the Amigas when I was a boy...
YES! More retro computing! And one of my personal favourites, too. That's my Wednesday evening well and truly sorted. Many thanks Dave!
Loved this teardown. Also, it's great to see your channel now has an XBMC add-on so it's up there with new videos ready to watch on my home theatre pc!
If only he had played Gods, Shadow of the Beast, Sensible soccer, Speedball 2, ProjectX - that machine was a legend in the world of computer gaming :(
ahhh... the best computer I ever owned... kicked so much ass in its day
Fantastic man! Really enjoyed the detailed and animated discussion of the A500's chipset! Very well done!
I love these retro vids. It was the time I learned using a computer and getting into programming. Thanx Dave!
HY1 is called VIDIOT. It's a video hybrid, basically just a DAC which is converting digital R G B data to analog. Later Commodore used off-the-shelf DACs.
Great video, wish I never got rid of my Amiga 500!
just watched a bunch of your vids from here in Calgary Canada.thank you so much for your awesome vids.
I will for shure watch them all.keep up the great work buddy!!!!!!
This has me reminded of my first computer days. Brilliant , well done
That was great. I absolutely loved my Amiga's back in the day. They really were a quite exellent machine. Very flexible. Spent a bleedin' fortune on extras n stuff. Still in loft, except the RGB monitor, I gave it my ex girlfriends lad some years ago.
BTW, just as a thought, if anyone remembers the Sci Fi series Babylon 5 from the 90s, all the 3D graphics and effects was done on Amiga's, with the I suppose now famous ish Video Toaster Boards. Quite incredible for the time. They built a rendering farm with A4000s and Video Toasters to compete with the high end special graphics workstations of the time.
I heard Star Trek TNG was also done with the video toaster. Cool stuff. I had an Amiga 2500 hand me down, but we never got the proper cables for it, so we only had greyscale...which is just a shame. I wish I knew what happened to that thing. It had an HDD and everything built in.
Reboot was also made using Amiga machines.
Wait... you gave something to your "ex-girlfriend's lad"?
Amiga Workbench GUI - still better than Windows Vista.
DOS is better than Vista.
Martin Hartley A punch card system and Babbage analytical engine are better interfaces than fucking Vista.
I agree, I'm a DOS fan too!
+Jay Man
legendary comment, mate!
gotta love geek humour :)
Ted Van Matje
Yep!
I lived this. It was a great ROMp down memory lane! Thanks!! I'd love to see more.
Big fan of these machines. Enjoyed the tear down. Thanks very much :)
Faved as soon as I saw the title!!
The Amiga was running a full multitasking operating system in 128k of RAM at a time when Microsoft's Bill Gates said you need 1MB minimum for multitasking. We once had a 128k Amiga 1000 and were loading and running program after program until it ran out of memory. The graphical clock program was about 1k in size so you could run about 60,000 copies (overhead for program stack etc.) When it came out it had 4096 colours at a time when an IBM had 4 colours. It had 4 channel polyphonic audio at a time when the IBM had a single channel bleep (or crackle). I once was decompressing a program from one floppy to multiple and didn't format enough disks. so I formatted an additional one and as soon as 4 tracks were formatted the decompress task saw a disk that was becoming blank and started the final copy process so it was formatting a track on the blank disk and then copying a track from the source disk. Window to this day can not multi-task as seamlessly. I believe the reason for the failure of the Amiga was that Commodore stopped spending money on future product generations. At the time the directors set themselves up in Barbados and started shuffling funds off shore was the gossip. If they would have released a 640x480 non-interlaced version back in '87 and then subsequent upgrades they would have likely still been around today.
Nice story - one thing though, the Amiga 1000 would have been 256k in its vanilla state. The system was actually designed around 512k minimum, but CBM had them chop it back due to a worldwide RAM shortage around 1985.
My 1000 had only 128k of RAM
They didn't make them with 128k bud - not ever. You might have had 128k (of the 256k) free with Workbench running, mind...
They might not have sold them in the US as 128k, but I got a PAL one in Oz with 128k. It had a plug in memory module that went on the front behind a cover that made 256k. Without it, it would run just fine as long as you didn't run any really big programs. I later upgraded it to 512k by changing a PAL and piggy backing a whole lot of RAM chips on the ones on the motherboard.
I'm not from the US - I'm a whinging Pom! :)
I'm pretty sure the "plugin" module was fitted as standard when the machine was built, as I'm as certain as I can be that there were no 128k models (apparently they had a devil of a time trying to get Workbench running reliably with 256k after CBM chopped it back from 512).
Thanks for that walkthrough.
What a trip down memory lane, thank you!
Amigas were brilliant and easily outperformed its counterparts of its time.
You could actually emulate a current Mac of the time on an Amiga and it ran faster than the Mac itself.
I only stopped using an Amiga 2 years ago and it was heavily upgraded with a 680860 CPU running at 80mhz, 800x600 16 million colours and had wifi, USB etc. Nice to see this video, I really enjoyed it.
Dooglesman Yeh this takes me back. Had an ST, aas soon as I saw an Amiga I sold the ST and bought one. Man, spent some money on mine. In the day. I splashed out for the GVP 32 bit 68030 accelerator expansion, with 120 Meg SCSI hard drive, and 4 meg 32 bit fast ram. It was a Plus too with an extra Meg of chip ram. Cost me nearly a grand with the 4 Meg simm, it only came with 1 Meg. Cost me near 200 for the 4 meg simm and 700 odd for the expansion. Still in the loft.
rationalmartian They were insanely addictive, especially the upgrading part. It shouldn't be in the loft...it should be in use today. Beware the leaking battery in the ram expansion and if it's a 500+ there will be one insode it for the onboard real time clock. They kill them over time.
Hey Dooglesman, do you think an A500 can handle an upgraded processor? Or is the memory timing variance too far off/bus not up to the task.... I got one a while back, since the 2500 I actually owned would be quite pricey and rare these days, but I haven't even powered it on, since I don't have any of the stuff I would want in order to make it usable. I suppose I could just use it stock with the floppy, but the one I had was way more powerful than the 500...
That was amazing! I had an Amiga 500 and an 1200 model during the early 90's. Lost my virginity on those machines :]
I hope they were well nailed down.
Fluid damage voids the warranty.
so you were the 40 year old virgin still living with the parents he got these from?
nope :) I was the 21 yo owning his own house and living with his partner, working from home. but you almost got it right..
I bet that was uncomfortable. Hate to think where the joystick ended up...
Excellent - really enjoyed wandering around my life changing childhood computer, and couldn't help shouting occasionally at the "dunno what this is" moments as you rightly pointed out, more more more!! Subscribed!!
I really love this vintage stuff teardowns........ oh good old times ::) Thanks Dave
"Ahhh, that old solder smell!"
*dies from lead inhalation*
+NaiveAmoeba looooooool
I use lead solder at work almost daily
I've found the 60/40 to be an almost necessity at times. Oddly, some of the old Amiga's solder pads refused to take solder of any kind - until I realized I was being stupid by not using flux :)
Ya, 60/40 + plenty of flux. Always add new solder when desoldering an old pad...I made the mistake of not doing that once, and even with flux, it just ripped off the pad. Especially the new stuff. It is just not able to flow properly without adding some decent solder.
There is little evidence of people having issues with lead poisoning as a result of soldering. Breathing in flux is bad for you.
We had so much fun playing Battle Chess
I was a Driller and Castle Master man myself :D
Hi dave - thanks for your videos. Been watching for a while and they've finally enthused me to get myself a cheap oscilloscope and logic analyser and have a go myself!
Fantastic mate. Still own one and use it today!
13:50 - Wrong! There really the right way up, its just that he's in Australia...
U spelled 'Straya wrong :P
@@TheJamieRamone ...and also "Wrong! They're....."
Remarkably, Amiga computers were used in several of the attractions at Disneyland and Disney World. They were very reliable running day and night for several years. Just a bit of history to google about.
Feels like not too long ago I was unboxing with the smell of a brand new computer. In Jan '89! I was soo happy. 1st game I had was Defender of the crown!!
Love your videos Dave! Hi from Canada...
Christ.. I cringed so much when he was trying to get that expansion ram out.... slide it!!!
lol. me, too.
IT'S ALL RIGHT HE'S AUSTRALIAN .
bob often oi we’re not that dumb
@@Engineeer !? We occupational hi jooohoo
The video called "Commodore Amiga History" should tell you what you wanted to know about how many people and who designed those chips you were asking about, as well as the rest of the system (well, at least the 1000).
(Sorry, I'm afraid that if I post the link to the video, that even though they're technically allowed here, I might get my comment "ghosted" anyway. But I'll post it into a separate comment below:)
Thanks, you brought back such great memories. It took PC's along time to catch up with the Amiga and cost an absolute fortune. Graphical user interface, 4 channel, sample play back and synthesizer, 16/32bit CPU. Multitasking. Arcade standard games. Awesome, one of the most revolutionary advanced home computers ever made. Ah
Thanks for this. Such a great video, the Amiga really was an awesome machine at the time.
The floppy disk was programmable, but the one with the A500 was only a double density drive, meaning it could only read PC 720k disks, not the 1.44. You needed one of the A4000 computers to get one with a built in high density disk drive.
The Amiga prototype consisted of a large board for every MOS chip like Denise, Gary, Agnus, Paula. The right CIA controls floppy, the left controls serial rs232 and parallel ports. The prototype therefore was almost the size of a fridge with main designer Jay Miner. They used names of people because of competition might steal. The project was called Lorraine. Atari was after a few dentist the first investor. But Commodore was able to just in time buy Atari out. Atari therefore created the Atari ST. The Amiga at then was vastly superior in audio and video unless you had tens of thousands of money.
It's 2020 and the Amiga scene just keeps getting bigger and bigger
I enjoyed this an an old Amigan myself - Love your enthusiam!
you forgot to add the extended memory back in place to get a full 1MB of memory before starting the system up ... (maybe that's why that game didn't run?)
also, although Workbench v1.3's disk does work with the ROM v1.2 (albeit with some restrictions ...), you do need a v1.3 ROM just as well to take advantage of the 'new' Wb1.3's disk's full abilities ...
@ 12:55 > it's a revision 5 mobo you're having ... (and the other 'golden' mobo maybe even an older revision ...)
last mobo version revision was 6 i think ...
and if i still recall it right, ROM v1.3 could only be used on that revision 6 of the mobo ...
that revision also allowed to upgrade it by adding more memory on the mobo itself, increasing the Chip RAM up to 1MB on-board ... (it's the one i still own and i did upgrade it too ... that was something the higher A500-plus models did better btw as they came with 2MB of Chip RAM already installed on the mobo in the factory ... there are other hacks possible on the A500 and other Amiga models of course ... probably the most versatile computer of all times to this day ...)
but adding extra Chip RAM on-board also meant the bottom trapdoor extension memory slot could not be used for increasing Chip or Fast RAM anymore, unless you also soldiered an on/off jumper switch somewhere that could let you switch between 0.5MB or 1MB on-board Chip RAM depending on the type of extended memory board you were going to add to that slot ...
real fast memory is done on the left hand side expansion memory slot though because it's closer to the CPU and directly connected to it ... the side expansion memory slot could be used for adding up to 8MB of Fast RAM without an accelerator board (regardless of any amount of Chip RAM installed on-board) or, you could add one of those 'side car' expansion units that had an accelerator as well as more memory plus a hard disk etc ... (there was also that silly 'freeze frame hacking' side unit that was fashionable among the Amiga gamer community in those times ... can't remember its name now but it allows to cheat a lot ... for example you can freeze games on the go if you need to refresh your breath, or add more / infinite lives to the sprites, increase a game's speed up or slow it down and so on ...)
all n all, compared to all other options available by the competition at the time, the A500 was an amazing system indeed, especially considering how low cost it was in comparison to others ... but it was still rather costly to add all those extra goodies nonetheless and not everybody could afford them all really ... some of those old accelerator boards for higher end Amiga models such as the A1200 are still rather too costly even today, especially because they are not easy to find and the new relatively cheap options available that are made by some firms are not as fast as the fastest of the older models anyway ... in short, only a bare Amiga 500 model was really cheap ... a full Amiga system, any model, was not cheap really!
one small detail about fast/chip ram. the cpu was not always allowed to access the chip ram because the video chip was the bus master to access the chip memory and needed a lot of bandwidth to access the ram. also copper, blitter, audio and other dma channels used up memory bandwidth from the chip ram. that did not leave much speed for the cpu. luckily they introduced the concept of fast ram that was only accessible from the cpu. programms running in the fast ram where not slowed down by the other chips. hence the names fast vs. chip mem.
One of my buddies hat one when I was a kid, man was I jealous. I had to make do with daddy's IBM XT with pink/cyan CGA graphics and PC speaker for sound, meep moop.
back in the early 1990s in a workplace i used to make animated tv teasers with an Amiga 500 and a total of 2MB of memory (0.5MB Chip + 1.5MB Fast) and only one floppy drive, using the great Deluxe Paint IV program! people with a 486 PC and 4MB of memory envied that setup simply because they could not do the same thing even if they used the same program on it! only the Amiga could do animation using DPaint ... :-)
still have my own A500 (plus a couple extra ones earned from other places) and i have that great little Supra 500 expansion memory unit for it with 8MB of FAAAAST RAM on board ... have an A1200 with the 060 accelerator board too ... an A2000 (with lots of extra boards such as PAR) and an A3000 etc ...
unfortunately though, all of these lovely angels are in their boxes right now! don't have room to set them up but don't want to separate from them either!
Mate - exactly the same situation I was in. Basically all of my buddies that owned a computer had an Amiga 500 (except for one mate who had an Atari ST). I, on the other hand, had a Commodore brand IBM clone with the CGA graphics and internal speaker for audio. The machine had no HDD and two 5 1/4" floppy drives, so you would boot to DOS via floppy and go from there. I share your (remembered) jealousy haha.
I know nothing about EE but subscribed just for the unaffected enthusiasm!
What a great review!! Reminded me of the first time I opened up my first Amiga 500, I later added the extra 512k
I have a working one of these in my bedroom right now.
+InTheNameOfJustice
Are you 40 and living with your mom?
Miner Willy
Nope. I am 62. Have raised four children. My wife is dead and I live alone. I have taught martial arts, been a Tin minor, a deep sea fisherman, held a senior position in a large charity. Run my own business. Have written a scientific paper accepted by the scientific community. I am a writer of short stories and a published author and photographer. I have studied Feminism and the activities of the left wing for 38 years.
*AND*
I have an Amiga A500 fully upgraded and working, with software, in my bedroom.
Is that OK with you?
+InTheNameOfJustice
Your sarcasm radar seems to be faulty.
Miner Willy
Whereas your lack of respect for others meter is working fine.
+InTheNameOfJustice
Nah your radar is definitely knackered, hence your original gibberish.
Bit more respect mate... this was the holy grail of electronics back in the days...I guess you Aussies never heard of it... yoghurt comes to mind...
Amiga 500's were big in Australia. So yeah ..dunno
Awesome, have fun!
Fascinating stuff. Thanks.
"So what did you do over spring break?"
"I ate grapefruit while watching videos of an Australian dismantling electronics."
I'm not a boring person, I'm "differently fascinating."
HAHA You found the Guru that is HILARIOUS.
This brings a teardown to the eye.
love the vintage teardown's :)
Steve Irwin of the electronics world!
I remember clearly having it bought in Uruguay and smuggling it to Brasil cos back in the day we had a ban on anything computers. Was the first one in my home town to own one, people went crazy when they heard about it.
ban on computers? How? Why? What if police caught you with one?
My dad bought one of these before I was born. He used it for putting credits and overlays onto wedding videos. When he stopped doing that stuff, he passed it onto me. I learnt AmigaBASIC on it, and spent many an hour playing with boot scripts and other tweaks. It died in 2003, when the PSU blew up and fried the board. A truly solid bit of kit, and a staple of my childhood learning.
Thanks for this video! Reminds me that I need to dig out all of my Commodore / Amiga equipment from my parents basement where it has been for the last 20+ years!
I spat my coffee when he was talking about the Dram in the Trapdoor module. "Woohoo, 256kbit, unbelievable, so we need 16 of these chips to give us 512 Megabytes !!".
256kbit x 16, is 512 Kilobyte.
RAM upgrade was sooo expensive. I bought a 1 MB daughter board for my A1000. It cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars -- thousands in today's money I think. Very expensive for a highschool student at the time.
Most 8 biy computers had 64
K of usable RAM at a time. All that silly bank switching and shadow ROM business was fun in its own way.
Paul Sop
Commodore 128 (128KB)
Spectrum 128 / 128+ / Spectrum +2 / Spectrum +3
But it was a TOTAL of 128K, which shared some sections, like address 16384 being the start of the Display addresses (On ZX Spectrum), 8912 bytes in size. After which the addresses from 25296 until 65535 (48K 8bit) was for general user use. The Spectrum 48K was ACTUALLY 64K, with the first 16384 bytes reserved for system ROM, But a user could actually change the values in the ROM addresses to make the system do weird shit.
LOL if my A501 had 512Mb, everything would have run on a ram drive :)
@@Joliie I think the CPU would show you the middle finger when asked to address that memory
RE:colour. The background is blue and the icons were a horrible orange colour, all that is customised using the EXTRAs disk which has more options for hard drive formatting, screen mode, icon settings and of course colour. Also there is a boot option (I cant remember the key combination) but you essentially power up the Amiga with the key combi and an enhanced options screen should pop up, i think it let you choose the screen res, ram options, AGA mode (A600), interlace etc.. The expansion slot underneath could also accommodate an accelerator board to boost clock speed to 40 or 60Mhz (that was on the A1200 at least, not sure for the 500). The 1200 had 2Mb on board ram and up to 8 (or 16?) Mb ram via expansion. My brother had (still has) the A500 and a Video Grabber to watch analogue tv with a built in teletext decoder. Yes you didnt need a high end pc in those days to watch live tv on your amiga! :D I still own an Amiga 1200 which should work but its gathering dust under a bed in my spare room and 5 disk boxes full of all my music work, samples, games and commercial games and dozens of cover disks from amiga magazines lol, god only knows if any/all the disks still work. I have a second, external floppy drive, joystick and hacked mouse as my left button stopped working and i had to solder a micro switch in to use it lol.
Great video, brings back some fond memories of hours of game play with my brother :D
AGA was on the 1200, the 600 was ECS :D.
Preferences (a single program in Kickstarts
UltraPic and A500 was OCS :) - minimal differents
My memory could be flakey, but I think for about 6 months, Commodore did put ECS chips in the A500 line (so-called A500+ computers, along with Kickstart 2.04). This was some kind of stop-gap before the official release of the A600 and A1200 machines.
Samuel Falvo II
I'm amazed that after more than 25 years, PCs still don't have a standard mouse controllable BIOS, if you imagine that the Amiga had that early on, and it worked with the mouse, incredible. Pushing keys on the keyboard for PC to enter the BIOS is also really dumb, as you might fill up the keyboard buffer and make it beep like crazy or miss the right point to push it and miss the BIOS, which has happened millions of times to million of people ;-)
So failure to learn from a machine like the Amiga is really inexcusable, for some reasons the universities fail to teach some really basic things to live by: learn from the best, always analyze how many are doing it and then take the best of all approaches.
Dave, thanks for this teardown, loved my 500 so much and wish I never had to sell it back in '97. I still run all my old fave software on the emulator. The demo scene on this machine was really big back in the late 80s and early 90s. Had a Golden Image optical mouse, several external 3.5" drives and of course a ZipStick!
Couldn't have put it better, thank you.
Occasionally and somewhat ironically, the Anti-Yellowing agent can re-act with bromide and cause it to yellow faster (and in areas without any exposure to light)
When you see a system that is still white on top, but yellow on bottom, that's a great example of that! The bottom in theory should be whiter due to reduced sunlight exposure, but if it's more yellow chances are the Anti UV chemicals themselves are what triggered the yellowing process. :3
Rock Lobster from 52s first album, The B52's.
Sure was. It was also the first song I ever heard that featured a baritone guitar.
i've always loved my amiga 500, but knowing now that it is coded rock lobster makes me love it even more!
Very nice indeed . The days of 80s were so adorable many of us felt in love with the Commodore, TRS80, PCA, and other old tech. I had the chance to work with many of them, I spent good time on PDP11 at the University and did Fortran, Basic, Pascal, Assembly... That was fascinating..
Hey...!!! 😡 Whats, all this... "Turd...", business, then? That's a Commodore Amiga 500 I'll have you know. With a 1.2 kickstart ROM!!! She's a God, Damn, Beauty!!! 🤣
You are a joy to listen to, let me tell you that. The internet needs more quizzical aussies.
nah-ones enough...but you're spot on-this eevblog guy is entertaining eh...that 40 mins flew by...and i wanted to hear he re-soldered the damaged component...lets hope so-and sells it on to the amiga community...
Thank you for yet another great teardown! As an "old-guy" who grew up programming the C64 and Amiga this brings back great memories. I still use my Amiga from time to time but the cunning plan to get the kids into retro gaming failed hard due to sloooow loading times and the perhaps non-standard primitive user interaction.
Somehow I'm surprised you never owned an Amiga back in the days? It was the stepping stone for many who now runs the industry...
Great and Interesting as usual...Thank You!
''Lets power on this turd ''
Is this guy really ragging on the "40 year old who still lives with his parents" who gave him the unit?
Indeed. As someone fast approaching 40 living with my mum (I'm her carer) I found that just a tad offensive.
More and more people are living with their parents these days as the cost of renting/buying a house combined with general living costs are going up at an insane rate, while wages in real-terms have fallen.
Its also not that long ago that multi-generation homes were the norm for the same reasons, its only a tiny snapshot in time that people had the money to immediately move into their own home and get a well paid job.
The 8 bit guy on TH-cam knows one of the main engineers who worked on all the commador computers. Love the channel just found it. Keep up the good work you legend 😁👍
He's been on his channel a few times.
Great video.
I am a huge amiga fan still loves them and use them!. Yes it was awful see u didn't know crap about anything on this machine work of art. The trap door what u did find here was a 512k expansion so u did have 1mb. On the right side is a port for adding a SCSI controller and here you did add a hd. you might not like this but I think they knew how to build computers in those days and commodore was the best company for innovation new computers very sad they are gone see what we are stuck with now.
You did say in the start of this video there is a solution for removing "yellow plastic" can you tell us/me how. ?
PS: your show makes me wanna learn more about electronics.
If you rub case with petroleum jelly and ignite for 10 seconds the unit will turn white again.
You can remove the yellowing, although only temporary (It comes back) via a process developed by an Amiga enthusiast / Chemical Engineer, calling it 'Retrobrite'.
Basically using Hydrogen Peroxide's Oxygen atoms to replace the Bromide atoms.
retr0bright.wikispaces.com/
They also knew how to save money versus build robust hardware. The edge connector direct-coupled to the CPU is a _MAJOR_ static electricity threat, for example. That was a clear case of cost-saving measures. Thankfully, the MC68000 and Signetics parts had excellent static discharge tolerance back then, and I think that's what motivated Commodore to simplify the design. You definitely can't do that with a 68060 these days.
Commodore was not the best for innovation, please don't forget that Commodore bought the Amiga, they did not develop it, Amiga inc. did and the brilliant people that worked there. And it was Commodore that ruined the Amiga, by not improving the chips anymore, AGA came out way too late and way too weak, by then the PCs had caught up and were getting better than the Amiga.
There is a lesson that if the original founders are gone from a company, especially when they had done ground breaking, never before done work, the clock will start running and the company will start to die, because all they can do are improve on a design, but never redesign or radically improve it.
nigratruo It is true what you say and they had one of the worst management teams I have ever heard of. For one thing, instead of keeping the engineers working on a successor model to keep their technical edge for the time Commodore dismissed them. Later when they were forced by competition to bring out real improvements they brought out the A1200 with a lower spec AGA chipset than planned and it came to the market late. At that time 386 and 486 PC's were around with graphics that were just as good (and could be made better) and had almost as basic stereo sound from the Soundblaster and Adlib cards.
Dude, great educational tutorial and explanation about electronic parts. I like that. However, it seems that you have no idea about Amiga systems. This computer was revolutionary and probably the best machine on the market at the time. PC's were and still a piece of crap. If Amiga was alive today, imagine the possibilities. Finally, for your information people still use AMIGA computers today and I am sure you would too if you knew how to use it. By the way Great videos you have out there and looking forward to seeing more.
You have no clue what you're talking about. The Amiga HAM Mode was a mess, slow and difficult to program compared to the simple design of VGA. Thus the HAM mode wasn't used for fast paced action games. For games 32 colors at the same time were most times the maximum, while VGA offered 256 colors on the PC at the same time.
All you needed for VGA was RAM and with more RAM it was simple to improve the standard and introduce new 16 Bit and 24 Bit color modes.
OpenGL4ever
In 1985 PCs still used EGA. Nash may be wrong in saying that PCss were crap in the late 80s however you cannot deny the fact that the Amiga (at least in the UK and Europe) kicked IBM's ass in terms of home cumputing. PCs were too expensive and did not have the Amiga (out of the box) quality in terms of graphics and certainly in terms of sound. The Amiga community is still thriving now and there are manufacturers brining out new hardware for it even now (look at Individual Computers with their Invidision and ACA cards.) Personally my 1200 (030) is the only one of my retro computers/consoles that is set up to use at any time. This machine is networked with Internet access, it can play MP3s and stream Internet radio. It has 12 gig of storage space and can display 24bit colour photos. I simply can't see many people using PCs from 1992 still to do all I have mentioned above. EEVBlog kinda dismisses his 500 as old unused tech as one may do with other computers from this era but this just isn't the case with the Amiga. Go look at AmiBay or EAB.
coope1999
The Amiga 500 was introduced in 1987, the same applies to VGA.
It was the Amiga 1000, that was introduced in 1985.
Of course, a PC did cost a lot more at that time, especially with a VGA card, but that doesn't change the fact, that VGA was much easier to programm than Amiga's HAM mode.
OpenGL4ever I don't think you understand that HAM was never intended to be used mainstream in the Amiga. In fact the person who developed it wanted to remove it but the chip was too far into development and would have taken months to do so he left it in thinking it would not get used. But people did find a use. I know what dates the Amiga was released but my point is that the A1000 had HAM in 1985. 2 years before IBM got VGA. Do not compare HAM with VGA. As I said it was never intended to be used for its main application.
coope1999 Every Amiga user at that time used the HAM mode to boast about their Amiga how many colors it can display. But in practice, it was rather useless and inferior to VGA. That's what i said.
You can't also concentrate only on the release date and compare HAM with VGA by their date.
To be fair you also have to keep in mind, that there was many years nothing else than HAM that offered more than 32 colors at the same time on the Amiga.
Even in 1992, when AGA was released, it still used and offered HAM mode as its best and this was much worse than the already developed SVGA with VESA Bios standard with 24 bit True color at some resolutions at that time.
So to make it short, when VGA was released, the AMIGA could never regain the crown again when we're talking about graphic possibilities.
Nostalgia, i waited decades for computers to be what they are today. Im looking forward to seeing the next 40 years. I dont think the playstation 4 will have the same feeling as all the old 70 80s gear
Super interesting video.... I've shared this to my Facebook page...thank you.
I'm a little insulted, you could have at least googled the machine you was ripping a part to discover what the machine could really do, yeah its had its day but it deserved a lot more respect than your giving it by word of mouth, what your ripping apart is one of the first multitasking operating systems made.
Settle down captain
you are right. beside the multitasking - which was a development more on the software side - the hardware was very advanced. sepparation in fast and chip ram which was very effective and a lot of co-processor and dma stuff going on. really great and unmatched value for the price
Argghh... This guy's accent is well annoying.
***** who cares, the stuff he's doing is great..
you can go listen to Nick Cave after each video, to relax :)
Something wonderful has happened
Your AMIGA is alive !!!
Great review and it is amazing all of the Amiga banter that still exists after all these years. It is like reading the old BBS banter in the day; about how much better the Amiga was than the IBM (which it was). It just proves that the fan boys never die; they just go away.
"Pretty awful" is the state of your work area. "Pretty awful" is your high pitched, prepubescent voice. The Amiga 500 is not "pretty awful".
LOL he mad ^...
dave has fathered a boy
I forgot somethings about your "Petty awful" comment, it is actually really hard to have a clean work area when your a electrical engineer. Also he actually said a lot of good things about the Amiga...
"Pretty awful" is your attitude. By today's standards, it IS pretty awful. He was just saying he didn't miss the slow loading, low quality graphics, and sub-par GUI. Yes the Amiga was in some ways 'ground breaking' but they weren't doing anything other companies weren't also working on, they just got to market first. Commodore ran themselves into the ground trying to support these computers.
Jools Stoo Another ignorant troll.
Those shots of the solder mask.... what a camera! nice one!
Fascinating stuff!!! It has prompted me to look for an amiga emulator for a play with the OS!
I do love these ancient machines.
Pretty amazing that they are over 25 years old. I still remember getting a C-64 when I was a child and using it. I recently gave away one to a collector that my wife had, and found in storage.
loved my amiga and it still runs
I was working in Dallas, Texas for Texas Instruments in the "DMOS-IV" building supporting the wafer fab which was making the TMS 4256. I was a product engineering technician doing electrical and physical failure analysis on those parts. Uggg. after all these years. Blast to the past.
Thanks Dave.
amazing that still works
Almost makes you cry...those guys not only made some amazing computers, they really loved what they did. From giving the chips names, to having their signatures moulded into the plastic case (but on the inside!). How many people think to do stuff like that today?! Even down to the dog's pawprint.
How many hours did I use my A500 and A4000/030? I dread to think. Man, that first 'proper' computer nearly made my brain explode with delight.
Great video :)
LOL! Some of us "whippersnappers" are not so young. I remember the B-52's... wow, what a Tuesday flashback! Love the videos Dave, I can't tell you how appreciative I am for you taking the time to make a positive difference, thanks!
Hoolllyy!!! ... this is one of my favourite old computers...this and the spectrum!
Had this in my watch later since 2013, finally got around to watching it.