My original A500 from 1987 has not seen much use. She was mostly retired in 1992 when I got my A3000, and only turned on every few years to verify it worked. Well, I was going to do a 10 Minute Amiga Retro Cast a few months back about my A570 CD drive, hooked everything up, and no keyboard response! After some testing, I found that 3 keys still worked... Of course I checked chips, connectors, etc... And finally took the keyboard apart and found three or four breaks in the membrane. I tried a patch job to no avail. Vesalia.de had new membranes, so I ordered one and put that little guy in - yippee! Keyboard worked again! A few months back I found a spare MegAChip in my Amiga stash - I did not even know I had one... So out goes the old 1 MB Agnus and in goes the new one! I thought I might have to do a little soldering, but to my surprise the mods were already done when I had the 1 MB Agnus installed in the early nineties. Literally pop or the old, pop in the new, and now I have two MB of CHIP RAM! Now she is a useful girl again ... And now I am ordering an ACA500 card from Individual Computers to install in her.
I have no idea why. I have plenty of working Amiga's!