Back in 2018 I picked up an Amiga 500 from eBay with a mouse, joystick, Gotek floppy drive replacement and an assortment of floppy disks. This was my first classic Amiga in over 10 years. Unboxing this A500 brought back that some of the feeling of Christmas Day 1992 when I unboxed my brand new A600. However, this was not 1992 but 2018 and this was a veteran A500 in a printer box stuffed with old newspaper and scraps of bubble wrap. I have never owned an A500 previously, although had a school friend had an A500 with 512k Chip RAM so had a little past experience. Ten year old me thought my A600 was cutting edge with its 1MB Chip RAM, built-in RF modulator, small footprint, modern looks and updated Workbench.
The A500 and extras was just over £80 once shipping was added, not bad at all looking back from a 2023 perspective and reasonable value at the time, despite its faults. At the time I went for an A500 as they seemed to be the cheapest option for getting a classic Amiga and readily available in the UK. I had read the A500 is less likely to suffer issues with leaking capacitors than the later A600 or A1200. The fact I had never owned this particular model also made it more appealing to me.
The seller had listed the Amiga as having a keyboard fault and had also warned not to use the Gotek straight away as it wasn't seated correctly. I unpacked to find the description accurate, fortunately no hacking had happened to the case which was nice to see.
The system powered up and I then set about prepping a USB memory stick with some games and demos to run on the Gotek. I tried the floppy drive and found it was indeed faulty. Loading games from the Gotek was pretty straight forward, however I soon found that many of the games I wanted to play required 1MB of Chip RAM. An included 512KB RAM board was not working and seemed to be causing a yellow screen on boot, after removing the battery and cleaning the board up it still failed to work. At this point I also took the Amiga apart, cleaning the plastics in soapy water and giving the internals a dust with an air duster. Beneath the RF shield the motherboard looked in great condition, very little dust or debris to speak of
I was happy with my purchase and soon went hunting on eBay for a replacement RAM expansion and then onward down the upgrading rabbit hole!
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