In my teen years, for a brief time, I had a Amiga 500 with monitor, sidecar for HD and extra ram, software and accessories. It was a great system and really appealed to me for it capabilities. When I had my fill of the fun, I sold it.

Recently I started gathering hardware to build up another Amiga A500 rig. Why a A500? Well, cost is a huge factor and much of the vintage computer hardware is ridiculously expensive.

The A500 that I picked up has a hardware issue and I discovered I had no way to connect it to a color display due to its DB23 RGB connector, making troubleshooting harder. When powering on the A500, the power light flashes 10 times and then a long flash (reset?) then the cycle repeats. Some internet searching suggested it was the Fat Agnus chip. We’ll see.

Next challenge was video. I ordered an unbuffered DB23 to VGA cable. I was able to connect the display to an old Dell U2410 display due to its support for 15khz frequency.

Troubleshooting continues…. With the monitor connected, I get a green screen which possibly indicated bad RAM. Now I have replacement RAM inbound along with sockets.

Couple other items I am waiting for.
– HDMI out using a RaspberryPi Zero and a custom board for a pure signal
– USB mouse adapter
– DiagRom 1.3 for troubleshooting
– Workbench 1.3 disks

This is mostly a test of AWS services and the basic config.