In the first of our (semi) regular contributors, Philip Bartley talks about the wonder that is the A500.
In its hay day, the Amiga 500 was considered cutting edge technology, with its powerful 16-Bit processor and 512k ram. Later the A500 was updated by adding extra memory, The A500+ was born. The A500/A500+ is the only Amiga that contains the A520 modulator. In theory, the A520 enabled the Amiga to use Scart ports and television support, which was not present on the existing Motherboard. However, after many years of use, the damn thing doesn't work- the sound becomes crackly and the picture isn't much better, unless you're willing to spend £££££ on repairing it (or £34.99 from 1st Computers for a brand spanking new one). Putting all that aside the A500 series still has some life left, any Amiga 500 user with a CD-ROM drive still has the large collection of software which are present on cover CDs. For your reference, if you know any A1200 users you can get a copy of "MessyDos," alternatively there are also many PD libraries that stock it. This allows you to copy files from PC disks to your Amiga (Thank you Gaz for copying nearly 100 Meg from my hard disk) (Oooh sarcasm! -Gaz), but that is irrelevant. The humble A500 can still run versions of PC Task etc, as long as you have at least 1 Meg.
For all you users who have less than one meg or no CD-ROM drive your Amiga still has some uses such as:
Of course, Phil was only joking about these. He doesn't really want to sell his Amiga or destroy it. He's just trying to be controversial, aren't you Phil? Don't make me use the pain stick again-Gaz.)