Ben from Yorkshire here
I was recently gifted a rev 6a Amiga 500 with 0.5mb 'trilogic' trapdoor expansion (Trilogic were a local Yorkshire computer shop - they also made the 'expert cartridge' for the c64). This is the 2nd a500 I've owned, my first one was back in the 80's - no idea what happened to it.
It's become a bit of a labour of love
When it arrived it would boot to kickstart, but no floppies would work. A recap of it and the expansion solved this and the few games I had on floppy worked OK.
I'm into microcontrollers and had some stm32 bluepills kicking about so built myself a greaseweezle so I could create some more game disks from adf's. One of the first disks I burned was the amiga test kit, and this identified that the ram expansion was a duffer. It has 4 goldstar GM71c4256-12 chips onboard, but I've got no means to test these so decided that on balance it was simpler to just order a new expansion (which includes a clockport).
The keyboard also had some non functional columns of keys 'f3,4,r,f,v' & '(,9,6,3,.'. A quick test of the membrane showed continuity problems right where it plugs into the kb sub board - so not really possible to fix with some liquid conductor. A nice new hard membrane addressed that problem.
My friend who gifted me the machine loaned me an HDMI upscaler and RGB cable, but given that I had to return these it made sense to replace them with an RGB2HDMI as it worked out cheaper than an upscaler and cables. The picture quality is stunning from this, there's some minor shimmer, but I think I just need to do some tweaking of the settings to address this.
The Kickstart roms were 1.3, given that I have a TL866 & adaptor I grabbed a 3.1.4 license and burned some roms I picked up from china (amazingly all were genuine!)
I ordered a Gotek (from a well known retro retailer), and am _still_ waiting for it, I won't name names.
Then deciding I needed more ram, a performance kick, and a hard disk (CF), I bought a TF536. That arrived from alenppc in just a few days from Canada, makes me roll my eyes at the UK seller and the Gotek.
I'd also had to give the Amiga Tank mouse back that I'd borrowed, so bought a PIC based USB to Amiga converter, unfortunately the vendor sent me the ST version, and although it's only a 2 pin swap to fix this, I decided to build my own adapter that could use any HID mouse and not just PS2 compatible ones. Mainly because the vendor agreed to send the correct unit and take the ST one back. Having a lovely A500 sat unusable spurred me on so I built the adapter using an STM32f401CCU6 dev board, some level shifters and various bits and bobs I had kicking about. Anyone interested can get the source code here -> https://github.com/BennehBoy/F401_AMIGA_HID
It was just a quick hackjob, so uses STM's HAL based USB stack (which aint great), it needs some work to make it enumerate the bus correctly at power on - right now the mouse needs replugging every time there's a cold boot, probably a timing issue - but it should be straightforward to force this by writing a USB gpio low for a brief period.
You may also notice another STM32 project on my github which converts 8 bit joysticks to USB - also useful for anyone using rpi based emulators.
Anyhow, Ello!
Ben
