My Amiga is currently not working, it is suffering from "Death from Varta", but it is the system I spent most of my teenage life with, so it will be either repaired or replaced at some point.
Update: Read about what happened on the Amiga A500 page
I have neutralized the battery acid and cleaned up the board, and as usual the Gary socket bore the brunt of Varta's rampage, so the socket was removed and replaced, the Gary chip had it's legs cleaned, but the Amiga still only outputs a black screen, so there must be some trace damage on the board. The power LED doesn't go bright, so something is stopping the CPU from running at this moment
But that won't stop us from looking around the Amiga and all the other goodies I have. BTW, my Amiga was part of the Cartoon Classics pack
The Amiga itself is quite large, you'll need a big desk, especially if you are using the RF modulator. The keyboard on my Amiga has yellowed quite a lot, the keys should be white, and you'll notice European keyboards have two extra keys which are used for special characters not found in English where the keys are blank and do nothing. US keyboards do not have these keys preferring a larger return and left shift keys. This is also the same as the older Amiga A500
On the rear of the Amiga are two joystick/mouse ports, stereo audio out, disk drive, serial port, parallel port, power socket, RGB video, and mono video out
On the left of the Amiga is the side expansion port, usually for a Hard disk or CD ROM drive
Underneath is the bottom expansion port, normally used for memory expansion
Power pack
The original power supply died, so this is a replacement, the PSU doesn't weigh much, so must be a switch mode power supply
A520 Modulator
If you wanted to connect the Amiga to anything other than a monochrome or RGB monitor, or a SCART television, then you needed this. It stuck out the back of the Amiga by some distance, and you needed the phono cable to route the audio to the TV
However I did eventually get a Phillips CM8833MkII monitor.
Display cables
I had obviously broke the RF cable, so had fitted a plug to what little cable was left, then used an extension from a VCR, and here is a home made RGB to SCART cable
Roctec Roclite Floppy drive
Like most Amiga power users I had an external drive, you could daisy-chain up to four disk drives to the Amiga
Mouse x2
My main mouse was a 3rd party mouse, but that's with my Atari STE at the moment, so here are two standard Amiga tank mice
Quickshot Python 1 Joystick x2
I had these joysticks, they were great
Note the switch, setting it to Sega allowed you to use two fire buttons in games on the Amiga
1Mb Chip RAM expansion
This took a beating from Varta, so I've no idea if it works
Centronics printer cable
I used to have a printer, but it broke and was disposed of
Documentation
The Amiga and Workbench user manuals
I picked up another Workbench manual from a local car boot sale
Various other documentation and leaflets that came with the Amiga
The A520 modulator user manual
The instructions for the 1MB memory upgrade
The Amiga came with a special copy of Amiga Format, these postcards came with it
The instructions for the Roctec floppy disk drive
The instructions for the Phillips monitor and Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 game
If you had an Atari ST you could exchange the disc, and look at what I wrote inside the cover
Cartoon Classics bundled software
Bart Vs The Space Mutants
Lemmings (One disk version)
Captain Planet and the Planeteers (Special version)
Deluxe Paint III
Purchased software
The Addams Family
Jaguar XJ220
Zool
Monkey Island 2, LeChuck's Revenge
Donated software
Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon
Trivial Pursuit
World Class Leader Board
Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker
WWF European Rampage
Skidmarks
Random floppy disks
I won't bore you with every disk, you know what most of them are, all I will say is there's a lot of "blank" disks here. The following disks here are the most notable
Workbench 2.0
This is the GUI software that came with the Amiga
Blank disks
I only had four unused disks left
Relokick 1.3 and Workbench 1.3
Relokick downgraded the Amiga to Kickstart 1.3, this made some games work, I got hold of Workbench 1.3 for that garish blue and orange feel
My version of Workbench Extras
This is a suite of useful software I created
My version of the Workbench 2.0 software suite
This was my version of the Workbench 2.0, you had full Workbench 2.0, Extras, Fonts with FED (Font Editor), AmigaDOS, which booted to the command line, and Fastbench, which was a minimal GUI built for speed
A whole load of demos and PD software
You would order these from adverts in the back of various Amiga magazines, usually about 50p a disk
Magazine cover disks
CU Amiga cover disks from #24 to #97 and every disk in between
More magazine cover disks
Amiga Format cover disks from #31 to #67C and every disk in between
Even more magazine cover disks
Some random disks from other magazines I bought
Some more PD disks
Yes the Amiga 500 could run a Spectrum 48K emulator. Slowly, but it did work
And finally, the Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 disk that came with the Phillips monitor
And that's my Amiga journey
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