Amiga 500
The Amiga 500 is the best-selling Amiga computer from Commodore. In 1987 he was presented at the CeBit along with the Amiga 2000 and has performance similar to this. Target group for the computer were mainly home users on a budget. At the expense of upgradeability for not using a desktop or tower case and instead opted for a design that was similar to that of the Commodore 128. The Amiga 500 was - even more than the Amiga 2000 - popular in his time especially as a game machine because picture and sound quality were far superior to the then standard PC.
Market policy, the Amiga 500 was designed primarily as a response to the successful competitors Atari ST. In practice, the Amiga 500 fulfilled the role intended for it and hung the Atari ST in the competition significantly. However, he postponed the general image of the Amiga model further significantly in the direction of a " computer game ", in the eyes of the market, the conceptual strengths of the architecture were not sufficiently recognized.
The Amiga 500 has one with 7.09 MHz ( PAL version ) or 7.16 MHz ( NTSC Version ) clocked Motorola 68000 CPU and 512 Kbytes of memory. This can be expanded to 512 Kbytes and 8 Mbytes means of two expansion slots, allowing up to 9 MB of memory are available. In the years 1987 and 1988, the Amiga 500 was shipped with the Amiga operating system AmigaOS 1.2 ( Kickstart ), from 1988 this was replaced by the improved and slightly more extensive version 1.3.
As with Amiga 1200 must be connected to the Amiga 500, a special, provided with its own power switch power supply, because the Amiga 500 has no power switch.
The original form of the A500 still had no built-in hard drive and no controller for it, so there was no connection possible. The operation was carried out purely on the floppy drive. There were games, for which you had to take more than ten disks gradually. Only belatedly offered Commodore to the external hard drive A590 ( including the controller ), which was laterally inserted into the expansion port. Later there were offers from third-party manufacturers for controller with hard drives, some of which could be squeezed into the casing of the A500.
As of 1991, there were with the Amiga 500 Plus, a new version of the Amiga 500 It is equipped with twice as much memory (1 MByte) and with the new Enhanced Chip Set (ECS ) in place of the original chip set (OCS ) feature, which for the first time VGA could trigger monitors. The Amiga 500 Plus was delivered from the start with Kickstart version 2.04. This operating system was technically a big step forward, but had the disadvantage that many existing programs do not work anymore, or if because it directly - the API disobeying - accessed on kickstart routines whose structure had changed now. This affected in particular games. Very soon, therefore hardware extensions came on the market, which made it possible to switch between Kickstart 1.3 and 2.0. The Amiga 500 Plus was a little successful continuation in the Amiga 600.
As an interesting interlude of the Amiga 500 was even the ancestor of all case- modding. He was Commodore in two trendy designs ( ball design, see picture, and leopard design ) sold as a limited edition ( 10,000 units ) for which the TV presenter Stefanie Tücking was recovered as a namesake.