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Amiga 500 HC533 Accelerator Card Review

on April 30, 2024

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Back to the Roots

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 ava...

Amiga 500 HC533 Accelerator Card Review

Inside my Amiga 500 I have installed a HC533 turbo card and DOM (Disk on Module). Initially I had used a Cloanto AmigaForever branded compact flash card preinstalled with Workbench 3.1, however I found it became corrupted with errors after swapping back and forth multiple times between the Amiga and a PC to copy files over in WinUAE. The HC533 fits neatly in the A500 without any riser or relocator needed, although I did need to gently push down a couple of protruding capacitors slightly to ensure no contact with the board. The board sits just clear of the ROM so if you want to use any kind of kickstart switcher you will need a CPU riser or relocator. Before installing the HC533 I removed the original Kickstart ROM and replaced it with a Cloanto AmigaForever 3.X ROM (more on that in a future post). Installing the turbo board is really just 'plug and play' with the Amiga seeing the extra RAM immediately, there was no software to configure or drivers required. The only configurati...

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Amiga 5002
HC5331
Workbench 1.31

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