Pimped Amiga 500 • Hacker News Board

Re: Pimped Amiga 500

#41

Post by mrandish » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 11:01 PM UTC

lysace wrote: post #10

ManlyBread wrote: post #4

I've never experienced the original Amiga and I probably never will. I would however be open to emulating the machine. Are there any good resources for people like who would like to try out the whole ecosystem as a complete newbie in 2025? My knowledge about Amiga is close to zero.

I am very happy with AmigaVision, packaged by Alex Limi (of early Mozilla Firefox UX/product fame) et al. AmigaVision is a carefully curated collection of game and demo configurations for the Amiga computer platform, as well as a minimal Workbench setup with useful utilities and apps, wrapped in a user-friendly launcher. https://amiga.vision/ https://github.com/amigavision/AmigaVision I run it on a Mister FPGA but th…

AmigaVision is very nice. One thing that's especially great for emulation users with modern hi-res flat screens is they've already done the work to set up proper integer scaling, cropping and scanline/shadow mask pixel shaders.

Many of the Amiga's legendary games and graphics were specifically hand-crafted to look best on high-quality analog RGB CRTs. It's shocking how much better they look when properly displayed. The hard-edged, square block pixels on so many retro Youtube channels is not just technically incorrect - it's not what the original developers and artists created or ever intended their users to see.

Re: Pimped Amiga 500

#42

Post by snvzz » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 11:24 PM UTC

merobin_hood wrote: post #6

If you want to experience the Amiga ecosystem in 2025 without touching hardware, the easiest path is: WinUAE (Windows) or FS-UAE (Mac/Linux) — great defaults, easy setup Install Workbench 1.3 or 3.1 plus: Directory Opus, Diskmaster, WHDLoad Use curated packs like Workbench 3.X ClassicWB so you don’t have to configure everything manually For games, WHDLoad bundles are a massive quality-of-life improvement over floppy…

Can get that up to 99% via miniMig-miSTer.

Re: Pimped Amiga 500

#43

Post by danby » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 3:09 PM UTC

merobin_hood wrote: post #6

If you want to experience the Amiga ecosystem in 2025 without touching hardware, the easiest path is: WinUAE (Windows) or FS-UAE (Mac/Linux) — great defaults, easy setup Install Workbench 1.3 or 3.1 plus: Directory Opus, Diskmaster, WHDLoad Use curated packs like Workbench 3.X ClassicWB so you don’t have to configure everything manually For games, WHDLoad bundles are a massive quality-of-life improvement over floppy…

FWIW amiberry is probably a better option for Mac/linux these days. At least until FS-UAE v5 is released

Re: Pimped Amiga 500

#44

Post by danby » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC

EvanAnderson wrote: post #19

Piling-on here: My A1200 and CD32 haven't been powered-on since 2001. They worked when they went into climate-controlled storage but need to be recapped. I haven't had luck finding anybody in the US with experience recapping these models who will do the work. The one person I found was unwilling to do the work w/o my verifying if they work now. I think it's a mistake to apply power to them in their current state sinc…

> I think it's a mistake to apply power to them in their current state since that could cause damage.

One big issue is that these old electrolytic caps can leak and damage the motherboard and this is a common fail state for both the A1200 and CD32, as Commodore used some particularly low quality caps in the 1992-1994 era.

Even if you don't replace the caps they should be removed from the board before they go in to long term storage.

Powering up is unlikely to damage the machines. If the caps have already failed powering up won't cause any additional failure. A cap that hasn't been powered in a long time and is on the very edge of failure can be caused to fail by passing power in to it but that is a vanishingly rare edge case. The most likely issue for the caps, if they aren't working, is that they have already leaked.