What to do with an Amiga 500

Here in NYC you won't be able to just throw electronics in the trash any more so I'm cleaning out all my old electronic and computer devices that I kept around for no real reason. Is there anything special I can do with an Amiga 500? Donate to a computer museum...? I've long since thrown out th 1084S monitor that I used with it, so I don't really know anything useful to do with it. The closest thing I came across was the guy who makes the no cash gba emulator seems to need one but he's in germany. Oh and I forgot to remove the battery from it before I packed it away, so that might be an issue. Anyway any suggestions on what I can do with it, I really loved that machine and feel bad parting with it?
 
Hang it on the wall? Put it on E-bay? Sell the licence for its OS ROM to someone who uses an emulator? I loved that little machine.
 
Hook up to your TV and play games?
In Europe you would have no problem selling it for decent money, in US I'm not sure ...

I could pick it up next year in April if you're in Silicon Valley :) [half-serious]
 
Is there an Amiga emulator around these days (or any other such software, like a windows compatible filing system) that can read natively formatted harddrives? I still have some stuff, which may or may not be still readable, that I'd like to recover if possible. I once tried a null modem cable to my PC, but it was incredibly slow and tedious. Decent terminal programs for modern windows OSes are also hard to come by these days, being so incredibly obsolete and all... :p I also no longer have any monitors with a VGA input, so actually hooking my incredibly beat-up and mistreated A500 up again to read its own harddrives is not really an option...
 
Hang it on the wall? Put it on E-bay? Sell the licence for its OS ROM to someone who uses an emulator? I loved that little machine.

Stored away is the only way I can keep it, and I don't just want to throw it out... I have no problem giving it away for free (shipping not included) if it finds a good home. I've only used ebay once as a buyer and don't really know how it works... is it a headache?

I could pick it up next year in April if you're in Silicon Valley :) [half-serious]
Sorry Lightman never was and probably never will be in Silicon Valley, but like I said free besides shipping, but then there the whole issue of PAL vs NTSC... I don't remember how things worked in regards to that with Amiga's. I could and should take a look.

Is there an Amiga emulator around these days (or any other such software, like a windows compatible filing system) that can read natively formatted harddrives?
I don't remember about the reading HD's part but you might want to look into Amiga in a box, I don't remember much about it but when I was looking into Amiga emu's that was the one I went with. Worth a look, even if it was a long time ago.

incredibly beat-up and mistreated A500
How dare you treat denise, paula, and fat agnus like that, a pox on your house I say.
 
Is there an Amiga emulator around these days (or any other such software, like a windows compatible filing system) that can read natively formatted harddrives? I still have some stuff, which may or may not be still readable, that I'd like to recover if possible. I once tried a null modem cable to my PC, but it was incredibly slow and tedious. Decent terminal programs for modern windows OSes are also hard to come by these days, being so incredibly obsolete and all... :p I also no longer have any monitors with a VGA input, so actually hooking my incredibly beat-up and mistreated A500 up again to read its own harddrives is not really an option...

You would be surprised how well Amiga emulation currently works :)

To answer your question, yes you can connect Amiga formatted HDD to Windows PC and read data from it using WinUAE emulator. More details here:
http://www.amigaforever.com/tutorials/migration/


If you want I have all the ROM's needed to emulate any Amiga ;)
Fully licensed Amiga Forever user here :D
 
How dare you treat denise, paula, and fat agnus like that, a pox on your house I say.
What can I say? I was young and stupid... :( If it'd been today, I would have treated that computer like a crystal vase, but now it's too late. In my defense though, early A500s were built pretty damn crappily. The keyboard for example had pointy solder connections separated from the top RFI shield by only a transparent plastic membrane, so when the metal pins eventually ate through the membrane (by rubbing against it as you typed on the keyboard) they shorted out against the metal shield and caused the computer to crash.

I had to take out the shield to prevent that from happening... Not ideal, but what can a guy do. More recent A500s than mine had a metal plate on the rear of the keyboard instead.

You would be surprised how well Amiga emulation currently works :)
Wow, that's awesome. Can OS ROM images be bought legally from somewhere, or are they essentially abandonware these days...?
 
...

Wow, that's awesome. Can OS ROM images be bought legally from somewhere, or are they essentially abandonware these days...?

If you own Amiga you can rip it's ROM legally (not even sure if they still have any valid copyrights), otherwise all Amiga ROM's are included in Amiga Forever package.
 
"The Chaos Engine" is on Steam, that's how good it is (or seems). I remember it fondly, damn good graphics. That's why I feel the Steam version looks a bit odd, and could be the 16 color DOS version, not an Amiga HAM version. But's so long ago, my memory subsystems may just idealize it and it was just like that on the Amiga back then.
 
I also had an A500, but nowadays when nostalgia kicks in I don't really care anymore about being legal since C= went bankrupt 20 years ago, so I just download everything and have some fun for a while.

During the good old days, the jaws of my friends who had an Apple II, MSX or CGA/EGA PC would drop while seeing and hearing Amiga games like Shadow of the Beast, Xenon II, or Blood Money, or applications like DigiPaint 3 and Sculpt 3D.
But then VGA and SoundBlasters became popular...
 
Yep, those were the days ... Atari ST and Amiga were probably the best platforms for a few years, certainly here in Europe. The breadth of games available was incredible. Sierra and Lucasarts adventures, Virus, Populous, Warhead, Gods, Xenon II, Lotus Esprit TC, Geoff Crammond's F1GP (best version at the time), Gauntlett, Powermonger, Stunt Car Racer, loads of console ports, the list of games best on that platform (at least for a while, as you say, until VGA and SB), and it was very similar to the breadth of games available on PC today, and a lot of the genres were available then already.
 
Oh the memories... I still have a Amiga 2000 too. My first computer that was really mine!
 
You might use a Freecycle group (a website for your local area which is used for people to give stuff away), a Craiglist post or something. Amiga 500 is probably fairly common but if we throw too many to the trash it will be harder to find one :).
Somebody might want to use it, or have their kids use it (there's some value in a non-networked computer not full of gigabytes of high-level complications)
 
Is there an Amiga emulator around these days (or any other such software, like a windows compatible filing system) that can read natively formatted harddrives? I still have some stuff, which may or may not be still readable, that I'd like to recover if possible. I once tried a null modem cable to my PC, but it was incredibly slow and tedious. Decent terminal programs for modern windows OSes are also hard to come by these days, being so incredibly obsolete and all... :p I also no longer have any monitors with a VGA input, so actually hooking my incredibly beat-up and mistreated A500 up again to read its own harddrives is not really an option...

If i recall it correctly, i attached my ATA Amiga Drive to my PC and transferred the complete harddrive via WINUAE
 
Yeah, well I had SCSI drives for my Amiga, so it's not quite that easy I'm afraid, but I at least USED to have a SCSI PCI adapter card lying about (and a secondary PC that has a single spare PCI slot.) I'd have to root through a big ole box of random computer-related junk though to check that the card's actually still there though... :)
 
Yeah, well I had SCSI drives for my Amiga, so it's not quite that easy I'm afraid, but I at least USED to have a SCSI PCI adapter card lying about (and a secondary PC that has a single spare PCI slot.) I'd have to root through a big ole box of random computer-related junk though to check that the card's actually still there though... :)

My memory is hazy, but i think there was some way of doing it via a serial cable as well, it's been years since i played around with it..
 
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