AmigaBlogs

Commodore Amiga 500 Plus

In the 1980s, Commodore made a newer version of their very popular Amiga 500, called the Amiga 500 Plus. It added a few things, namely newer versions of Kickstart and Workbench — both 2.04, 1MB of Chip RAM, and a motherboard-based Real Time Clock. The RTC was battery backed up, and is responsible for VARTA battery leaks. These batteries leak base (not acid, like most people assume) and this eats the PCB causing failures. There were also minor improvements of the custom chip sets, introducing the Enhanced Chip Set.

2019 in Review 

The year is nearly closing and I want to say a sincere heartfelt thankyou to all my Patreons. 

I get this question ALOT..  how to setup an Amigadrive from UAE.

so instead of answering multiple times.. I do this guide.

Here I do a quick setup of UAE and install a STANDARD WB 3.1 installation, no fancy stuff or so. just plain standard.  and then prepare a disk and copy the installation to it so it can be placed in an Amiga and boot.  this will also mean NO support for larger disks etc. maybe a later time.

First let start WinUAE:

Very cool to see AmigaOS developer Saimo release his brand new game "Blastaway"

While it is free, I have decided to also donate, would love to see Saimo develop more games for our Amiga's.

Following on from my build of the Amiga 500 into the Checkmate 1500 Plus case, I have now added a new RapidRoad/X-Surf 100 card, and also found a fix (and some needed bits and bobs) to allow me to install the Vampire 500v2 too!

Interview by Peter Ward

Please introduce yourself in a few words.

Rygar – Legendary Warrior came out 33 years ago and it didn’t take long before it became a huge hit in the Arcades and naturally this meant that people wanted a home version too which led to loads of conversions for many of the popular formats back in the day but we never got an […]

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Created using Brilliance II, in the process of creating a video of the process :)

Today I want to cover an Amiga project I have been working on all this month. I picked up a new Checkmate A1500 Plus case from iMica Ltd, with the extra bits needed to mount an Amiga 500 in it!

So I will take a look at the build process and what I found out along the way, which will hopefully help others as they build systems into this very interesting new case!

Amiga users have dreamt of a laptop for their entire life. Due to the nowadays business and lifestyle, it is a fact that some sort of portable device is more than needed, be it for leisure or serious work. Hardcore retro fans of any kind use to say that only working on “real hardware” can […]

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Frequent readers of this blog already know that I’ve been an Amigan (and before that an 8-bit Commodores super-enthusiast) for all my life. Those readers also know that, for many different reasons, I never had the chance to attend an Amiga convention and/or the old assembly parties that were popular over Europe years ago, and […]

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It is a proud moment when another game is released that I helped in some small way.  Graeme has done a super job on the AGA port of Rygar.

Official Amiga Rygar facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RygarAmiga/
Discord Channel:  https://discord.gg/abeVepe
EAB Forum: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=93545&page=71

AROS is great, and Icaros Desktop has been probably the most well-known distribution out there.  Their 32bit, single core version is very useful.  Now, they’ve released a very early 64 bit version.

There are heavy warnings that this isn’t anything other than a work-in-progress, proof-of-concept version that won’t replace the existing 32bit version for a while.  it does give us something to play with though.

It does support SMP (more than one core).  It also identified the CPU (under VirtualBox).

With AROS’s x86 (and also x64 multi-processor version), porting cpu-heavy apps or creating new ones may be more doable than other variants (no knock against 68060/vampire or PowerPC users, but even those are still not nearly as powerful as the Intel/AMD machines that AROS can run on).

But how to start developing?  Well, the distributor for IcarosDesktop (paolone), has put together a virtual machine image of an Ubuntu distro with the AROS development system already set up.