After watching countless YouTube videos about the Commodore 64, I started noticing frequent mentions of another iconic machine: the Commodore Amiga. This sparked my curiosity, but I had never used an Amiga before and had no idea how to operate it. I knew nothing about Kickstart or Workbench. Nothing about Paula, Denise and Agnes. I had a lot to learn and soon enough, I found myself hunting for an Amiga 500. The one I bought came with the classic Kickstart 1.3 ROM, a Revision 6a mainboard and a 512kb RAM extension.
The purchase, however, didn’t go entirely as planned. When I arrived at the seller’s house, I was ready to bring home a full setup, including the Amiga and a Commodore 1084S monitor. Unfortunately, when we powered it up, the monitor refused to cooperate. It had instantly died. Still, I couldn’t resist the opportunity and decided to take home just the Amiga and a stack of floppy disks.
The next day, my luck turned around. I contacted another seller who was offering Amiga disks, and in a stroke of perfect timing, he mentioned that he also had a Commodore 1084S monitor available. I didn’t hesitate and bought it on the spot, completing my initial setup.
Once I got the Amiga 500 home and started tinkering with it, I ran into another issue: a few keys on the keyboard weren’t responding. After some research, I figured I’d need to take apart the keyboard and give the membrane a thorough cleaning to get everything working properly again. It was a bit of a chore, but soon enough, the Amiga was fully operational.
A few weeks later, I decided to future-proof the system a bit. I installed an external Gotek drive so I can load games and other software from an USB stick. I choose for an external model because I wanted to keep the original floppy drive working as well. I also added a ROM switcher with Kickstart 1.3 and 3.1.
I’m currently awaiting the arrival of an 8 MB Fast RAM module with an IDE interface and a 4GB Compact Flash card, which I purchased from a seller in Poland on the AmiBay forum. Once installed, I’ll be able to use it as an internal hard drive, giving me plenty of space to install various software, including Workbench 3.1.
To be continued.
Swap the C64 for an Atari 130XE. They’re better 8-bits. Atari’s back in the day were really expensive; an Atari 800 was around a thousand dollars, hence the C64 outsold them. Kind of like how VHS became more popular than Betamax, but VHS wasn’t the superior format. Same with the Atari 8-bit machines being the more capable.
256 colour palette (compared to the C64s 16), 4 channel POKEY Atari sound (compared to the C64s three), a faster CPU (which is obvious on many games). Compare games on the C64 and Atari such as Elektra Glide, Rescue on Fractalaus!, Pole Position, Prince of Persia, and look at homebrews on the Atari 8-bit such as Space Harrier, and you’ll see why I’m saying this.
Hi Will, thanks for your comment. I will keep the Atari 130XE in mind. You are right about VHS and Betamax. I remember my father buying a Betamax because its potential was way better than VHS. Still VHS won the war. I never used an Atari when I was young. Grew up with the C64 and a Sega Mega Drive years later. I will keep an eye out for the Atari 130.