My first computer

My first computer

The Commodore Amiga A500 was my first computer. I still have it, although it hadn't been in use since the mid-90s until 2019, when I finally embarked on a project to revive it to rescue some data from floppy discs. This was made possible after my brother bough me a "Gotek"-branded USB floppy emulator for Christmas 2018, as the original internal drive is faulty. That project is documented in a series of blog posts, beginning with Amiga floppy recovery project.

Floppies

Recovered floppy disks

Recovered floppy disks

In 2015 my Dad found a box of our old Amiga floppies in their attic. I knew we had the Amiga, but I thought the floppies were lost. Discovering them meant I could try to recover our old data: childhood drawings, etc.

Hardware mods

[Amiga Test Kit](https://github.com/keirf/Amiga-Stuff) showing 2MB RAM

Amiga Test Kit showing 2MB RAM

Workbench 1.3, reporting nearly 2MB of free RAM

Workbench 1.3, reporting nearly 2MB of free RAM

The first hardware modification I made to the A500 was replacing the broken internal drive with a Gotek floppy emulator. Since then, I've modified the Gotek itself to use a rotary encoder and OLED display, as well as relocating it inside the Amiga case.

Once I learned that my unit was a late model ECS A500 (a rev 6A mainboard with an ECS Fat Agnus), I realised I could expand the total RAM beyond the traditional 1MB. I found a BooBip.com 2MB kit and installed it, although I'm yet to perform the final mod to unlock the last of the RAM (an additional 512K of "chip" RAM). I'm also wondering about the four empty RAM chip slots on the mainboard.

Magazines

I still have a large-ish collection of Amiga magazines from the 90s, mostly "Amiga Format" magazine but a few "Amiga Power"s and miscellaneous others.

archive.org has various collections of scanned magazines. These are the magazines only, not the coverdiscs: but the might exist in another collection.

Blog posts: