FastRobPlus

I go each year with Xbox or independently (depending on what's launching) - I know I'll bet here at least on Sunday. Don't forget about SRGE in July this year!

The A500 is B&W composite out. I have a rundown of all the specs here: http://www.thebitpla...com/archives/63 Scroll down to get a system-by-system breakdown of capabilities and collector considerations.

That's an interesting observation! I'm sure that the PET in the background is there because it looked futuristic and it reminded the viewer that despite the antiques, the setting was the far future. But seeing the scene now, you can legitimately say that "sure, Kirk would have an Antique computer since he's such a collector" And working PET would be quite a treasure in another 250 years.

Windows 2000

To add to what Desiv says: Chip RAM can be written into and read by the CPU and the Amiga's custom chips (including the audio chip). So the Amiga can be said to have what we now call a GPU (and an APU.) This is why the Amiga can often be so much smother in operation than other 16bit PCS of the era, despite the CPU being a bit slower (early Amiga is ~7Mhz, early Mac was 8Mhz) Any RAM that isn't Chip RAM on an Amiga is called "Fast RAM'. This is because it's dedicated to only the CPU and can be accessed more quickly. But on a non-ECS Amiga, the first 1MB of the memory map is assumed to be Chip RAM, even if some of it is not. Therefore even if part of your first 1MB RAM is Fast RAM, it isn't accessed in the "fast" way. So Amiga users are encouraged to upgrade to 1MB (or more) of Chip RAM, since it gives the most overall benefit. That sounded a lot less confusing in my head...

Back in the day, you'd get them from an authorized service center and you'd pop them in yourself. If your 500 is old enough, you'd have to solder a trace and connect two solder pads (put there for this purpose) if you wanted to reassign the Amiga's base 1MB RAM to be purely Chip RAM, which is a desirable thing to do. Nowadays, you can find the chips on eBay fairly cheaply. For a 500, you need to add at least a 1MB Agnes, an ECS Super Denise, and a Kickstart 2.x or 3.x ROM. I see someone on eBay US selling $20 SuperDeinse chips, which are probably the rarest of these ECS chips.

The A500s do have mono composite. While this would have sucked back in the day, it's actually a good thing now. It makes it easy to see a fairly clear composite screen on any video source. It also means if an eBay seller says "it powers on but I have no means to test" they are not being honest. I do agree that the 500 is ugly. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that all Commodore machines save the A1000, A3000, CDTV, 128D and perhaps some of the PETs were pretty ugly. Commodore could have learned a lot from Atari in this regard. Still, the internals of the case were fully socketed and the interior was surprisingly cavernous. In the second half of the A500's life, small/clever internal upgrades really made the system powerful and cheap. For example, I obtained this A500 from a former ICD employee. It was a demo of their cheap high-tech ad ons. Hidden in this case, it has: - ICD AddSpeed (68010 @ 14.2Mhz) and AddIDE with a 2,5" IDE laptop hard drive. - Full ECS chipset and 3.1 kickstart on ROM. - A high density 1.7MB floppy drive - ICD AddRAM 540 and 560, with 6MB RAM (though I think only 4.5MB free due to address space conflicts) - ICD FlickerFree Video II scan doubler and flicker fixer (you can see the SVGA adapter lead coming out the side a bit in the pic) I really need to dremel a nice cutout for it...

I agree with amiman99 100% - It's simply crazy to bid up a sealed unit when the seal is likely just a bit of clear tape. You can easily heat the tape with a hair dryer to pop it up enough to open/show the contents. It might start to make more sense if there were a BTS label that was undamaged, giving some evidence that the unit is virgin. But I don't remember the A1000s using these. It might also make sense if the seller could reasonably show that the unit was truly new and there was good reason to believe it had never once been opened - there could be a value in what would be one of the world's only a genuinely unopened A1000a. But that's not the story with this particular unit. I'd much rather buy an Amiga like the ones I have in my collection - used, but in 10 out of 10 condition with perfect boxes. This way, you could carefully examine what you are bidding on beforehand. This is especially puzzling in light of what bojay has learned. If the buyer intends to display the unit in an office, there must be intent to open it. So why bid on an unseen unit? And does he have a new monitor to go with it? It would look silly without one. If they don't intend to open it and instead intend to display the whole thing in the box, then this is a nice box I suppose but I've seen better. I've got better in my garage!

Was anyone else watching this? Am allegedly unopened A1000 just sold for $9,000

Check out the Zeus thread and the "New products for C64 and Amiga" threads at English Amiga Board: http://eab.abime.net/forumdisplay.php?f=29 Both those A500 products have a good shot at coming out this year. Individual Computers says the ACA500 is coming in May.

I don't think so... I don't really collect Synapse - just Bill Williams' stuff. I think I do have a disk/manual for Alley Cat - just not the box.

Part of the problem is they were so amazingly flimsy.

I messed up the last auction because I didn't not understand how eBay's new international shipping worked. It's fixed now, and the auctions are live. Ton's of very old Atari game software here: http://rover.ebay.co...tm/300887371790 http://rover.ebay.co...984.m1555.l2649 http://rover.ebay.co...984.m1555.l2649 http://rover.ebay.co...984.m1555.l2649 Also - still looking for a decent boxed Synapse Alley Cat.

Sorry for the cross-post. Still looking for Alley Cat. Have a near infinite number of Atari games to trade (if you define infinite as around 500) Here's a very small sample of what I have: http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?ff3=4&pub=5574883395&toolid=10001&campid=5336500554&customid=&mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fitm%2F300887371790 http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?ff3=4&pub=5574883395&toolid=10001&campid=5336500554&customid=&mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fitm%2F300887370998%3FssPageName%3DSTRK%3AMESELX%3AIT%26_trksid%3Dp3984.m1555.l2649 http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?ff3=4&pub=5574883395&toolid=10001&campid=5336500554&customid=&mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fitm%2F300887371023%3FssPageName%3DSTRK%3AMESELX%3AIT%26_trksid%3Dp3984.m1555.l2649 http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?ff3=4&pub=5574883395&toolid=10001&campid=5336500554&customid=&mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fitm%2F300887370020%3FssPageName%3DSTRK%3AMESELX%3AIT%26_trksid%3Dp3984.m1555.l2649 I'll trade dozens of rare games - heck - even a dozen rarity 10 games atarimania.com does not know about - for a decent boxed Synapse Alley Cat.

That's a nice, comprehensive list. I favor your last option - and I have found that at least one of the HD disk drives made for Amigas can fit into the drive bay of an A500. Along with an updated KS ROM, you can actually format IBM disks as 1.44 and read them as HD disks on the Amiga side, which can cut out the splitting step altogether. Unfortunately, HD drives are scarce. I think there will be some other easy options soon. The forthcoming batch of A500 accelerators will have clock ports and flash storage, which should help ease the whole process. Theoretically, you could already buy a Subway USB board and a clock port adapter that would fit in an A500, giving the machine USB. Unfortunately, Subways get produced in small batches and are almost always out of stock.

My booth "The Bit Planes" will be back again this year. Slightly smaller booth, and I'll be in the center of the show floor.

This is actually pretty embarrassing. I should give my avatar the RRoD

Yeow! It looks like I kept the calculated international expedited shipping setting from my Ultima I auction, and this was creating some mega-shipping costs. I wish eBay let you model this from the auction creation screen... I've ended the auction for now. Reserve was $60 for the lot (not too bad considering some of those games have sold in the past few months for over $100 each) But I don't think I'll get the bids since by this point, everyone will have passed over the auction due to shipping costs!

Here: http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?ff3=4&pub=5574883395&toolid=10001&campid=5336500554&customid=&mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fitm%2F300884998365%3FssPageName%3DSTRK%3AMESELX%3AIT%26_trksid%3Dp3984.m1555.l2649

My favorite RPG is MM3, and the voice samples in the video are from the MM3 intro. That's a good sign.

Is there a Vacouver club? I'm only aware of the Portland and Seattle clubs.

We see this with Xboxes too. Particularly with the original Xbox. I was at a service center in Asia back in 2003, touring the repair floor. There was a huge cardboard gaylord marekd "bugged consoles". I asked the floor supervisor what went in that gaylord "Consoles with hacked firmware? Consoles with some known chip defect?" Nope. he said it was consoles infested with bugs from some of the S.E. Asia countries.

Nice! I love the Bodega Bay!

I dont know it, but from the minimalist sound of it, I'd bet it's from a 4K inro.

As the manager of global support policy for Xbox for a number of years, I can tell you that they could have gotten well in front of this issue, but chose not to. It isn’t a priority to them.