Well my Amiga was added in my collection as a gift from a colleague. It was a bone-stock Amiga which he won back in the past on a dutch TV-Show!
I got the machine with only a disk of workbench 1.3 with it. So quickly i discovered the path or better yet the rabbithole that is the Amiga platform with all the custom addons you can buy/make.
It’s great fun soldering adapters/memory addons/rom switchers/boot selectors.
Till today i have not yet recapped this Amiga because well… but i might do that in the near future. Just have to order the right caps 🙂
List of mods i added/bought for my machine:
- Floppy Drive Boot selector – amigakit.amiga.store
- OpenKickstartSwitcher – SukkoPera on github.com
- 27C800 EPROM of AliExpress (you gotta get lucky when buying these, allot of fakes)
- 27C160 / 27CC322 / 27C400 / 27C800 Adapter Board fL866 programmer
- Amiga KickStart ROM Switcher Adapter For A500 – Ebay.com (I cannot Advice this model, but it does work perfectly. By the seller ikonsgr74)
- AmigaOS 3.1.4 – Amiga-shop.net
- A1K A500 Red mousepad – amigastore.eu
- Commodore Amiga 500 RAM 512kb RC512K – Ebay.com (by the seller retrocables)
- GottaGoFastRAM 8MB Autoconfig Fast RAM
- IDE68K for Amiga 500 / 500+ – retroguru.eu
- Compact Flash to IDE adapter (cheap on AliExpress)
- NES64 – Tindie.com
- AMIGA RGB TO VGA MONITOR ADAPTER – amigakit.amiga.store
- Amiga External Floppy controller – retrozonesite.wordpress.com
- CGA/EGA/YUV to VGA monitor converter GBS-8200
- A Gotek beige with FlashFloppy on it
- 3x External FloppyDrive 3.5″
- External FloppyDrive 5.25″
I started with modding by buying a boot selector, this allows you to select to boot from the internal drive or my external drive (which is a Gotek):
I use a Gotek in an external housing, i did not wanna mod the original drive in the Amiga.
After this mod i bought a ROM switcher:
Quickly found out that this not what i wanted, i needed to mod the RF shield to mount it. And the keyboard never sat right. So i swapped it out for a different one where you keep multiple roms on one Chip:
I installed a Diagrom, Kickstart 3.1.4 and the original Kickstart 1.3 on this ROM.
To use Kickstart 3.1.4 you need a license. Which i also own, but the ROM Chip it self i just copied onto this custom rom, so i can use both.
After this upgrades i quickly found that i wanted more RAM and an IDE to boot the Amiga OS WB 3.1.4.
First the ram upgrade:
And i continued into the rabbithole of upgrades, i bought a GottaGoFastRAM 8MB upgrade and a IDE68k upgrade which adds IDE.
The IDE68K, for this mod i needed to add two wires to the connector.
GottaGoFastRAM 8MB:
Well to use the IDE68k i needed to add a drive, which is a Compact Flash of 256MB, which can be swapped via the trapdoor. I might consider later to build a holder for the side of the Amiga. But no need yet for this.
Every mod build in:
And a NES controller conversion kit so i can use the NES controller on C64’s/Commodores (and even with an Arduino on the PC):
And because i wanted to try it out:
And because i needed a good monitor i bought a CGA/EGA/YUV to VGA monitor converter GBS-8200 to connect up a VGA monitor:
And some hardware i got with the Amiga:
