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LambdaCalculus
New Jersey, USA

Posted Sun Jul 30, 2017 8:21 am

Yesterday was a joyous day!

My Amiga 500 PSU from Ray Carlsen arrived super quickly (he shipped it Thursday!), so I finally got the chance to see if my Amiga did indeed work!
a500-psu.jpg
Freshly made and shipped super fast to my door! Thanks, Ray!

As my office space is still rather cramped and I haven't got much space to lay everything out, I temporarily took out my Amiga 500, hooked it up, and prayed to several deities that it would indeed fire up and not be a dud! So I plugged in the Amiga, wired it up to a VGA monitor, took a deep breath, and flicked the switch.
a500-run.jpg
Houston, we have signs of life!

My LCD VGA monitor, an Acer AL1706, did indeed show something, all right: "SIGNAL NOT SUPPORTED". Well, terrific. It's getting something but can't handle the Amiga's RGB signal. Oh, well, it's a postitive sign, but not quite what I wanted to see! So I decided instead to just test the Amiga with the composite out signal for now and deal with monochrome momentarily. I took the VGA connector off and hooked the Amiga to my TV via composite. I flicked the switch again and...
a500-boot.jpg
Check it out... Kickstart 2.04!! :D

It booted and was waiting for a disk!! :D

I was afraid of the disk drive possibly being bad after so many years, but I plunked in a few Amiga magazine cover disks I got with the system. CLUNK-CLUNK-CLUNK. The drive chugged along and happily read each and every disk I could throw at it! :D

So I am beyond elated! I essentially rescued a good working Amiga 500, and now I'm going to fix it up and happily set it up with a decent VGA monitor once I have a little more space! I have finally gotten a real, working Amiga... my childhood dream finally come true! And now I'm going to give this Amiga the love it deserves!
Last edited by LambdaCalculus on Tue Aug 29, 2017 10:12 am, edited 1 time in total.

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Jul 30, 2017 10:08 am

I temporarily took out my Amiga 500, hooked it up, and prayed to several deities that it would indeed fire up
LOL! Yes, lord - we've all been there with that feeling of dread. So cool to see it boot up and return to glory.

And damn - well done on those keys! Once you decide how you're going to attack that case, your 500 is going to be mint. <3

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LambdaCalculus
New Jersey, USA

Posted Sun Jul 30, 2017 2:45 pm

I decided that I'll be giving the case a retr0bright treatment, so I need to buy the needed ingredients for that and look for a nice, sunny weekend to lay the parts out in my yard.

The Commodore Amiga Facebook group suggested I get a SCART cable and a SCART to HDMI converter instead of fighting with the RGB to VGA adapter. I might go for that route, but I'm gonna try another VGA monitor I have in my basement first.

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LambdaCalculus
New Jersey, USA

Posted Fri Aug 18, 2017 1:06 pm

My SCART cable and a bunch of other goodies arrived today! Time for another go with the Amiga! :D

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mattsoft

Posted Thu Aug 24, 2017 7:59 pm

BTW, I use a NEC ea190m 19" LCD on my test bench. It's a 15Khz monitor and works great with the Amiga. It also has built-in speakers and can be found for $40 shipped from eBay! You just need the right cable and you're good to go!

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LambdaCalculus
New Jersey, USA

Posted Mon Aug 28, 2017 6:10 am

Thanks for the suggestion, mattsoft. I'll keep that in mind for the next Amiga I get. :)

For now, here's some pics of my Amiga 500 with the SCART cable and the HDMI converter. It looks pretty good on my TV, and now I really want to make some room to put the Amiga up full time! :D
IMG_20170818_191945-2.jpg
Color! :D

IMG_20170818_192446-2.jpg
Lemmings works!


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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Mon Aug 28, 2017 7:40 am

The only issue you run into here is I think your picture is being stretched into a widescreen format, not 4:3. How you'd put it into a 4:3 viewable zone, though, with black bars on the side I have no idea. But those colors look sharp!

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LambdaCalculus
New Jersey, USA

Posted Mon Aug 28, 2017 8:09 am

This TV does have a 4:3 mode (it's called "Game Mode" in the settings for whatever odd reason, though!), so I should try that to see how it'll look!

And the color reproduction is why I also like Samsung TVs. ;)





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