Distributor: Commodore

Manufacturer:Commodore

Released: Japan 1987, N.America 1987, Europe 1987

Units Sold: 3 Million Approx Worldwide

RS: 2/2

Expect to pay: 30 GBP, 61 USD, 43 EUR, 7,179 JPY

List of games available at:

Best Fan Site:
www.lemonamiga.com

Official console homepage:
www.amiga.com
Technical Site:

General Info:

The Amiga 500, also known as the A500, was the first “low-end” Commodore Amiga 16/32-bit multimedia home/personal computer. It was announced at the winter Consumer Electronics Show in January 1987, at the same time as the high-end Amiga 2000, and competed directly against the Atari 520ST. The A500 was released in mid 1987 at the price of US $595.95 without monitor. The original A500 proved to be Commodore’s best-selling Amiga model, enjoying particular success in Europe. Although popular with hobbyists, arguably its most widespread use was as a gaming machine, where its advanced graphics and sound were of significant benefit.

Best selling game:

List the one best selling game on the system here and how many it sold.

Top 10 Must have games:

1. Sensible World Of Soccer
2. Cannon fodder
3. Settlers
4. Championship Manager
5. Monkey Island 2
6. Flashback
7. Lemmings
8. Lotus Turbo challenge 2
9. Worms
10. Premier Manager

Key Accessories:

512k upgrade : extra memory lets you play some of teh more advanced games. Floppy Disc Drive: alot of Amiga games were on 2 or more discs so having two discs drives made it alot easier.Hard Drive.

Technical Specs:

• OCS chipset. Later revisions of the chipset made PAL/NTSC mode switchable in software.
• Graphics could be of arbitrary dimensions, resolution and colour depth, even on the same screen.
• • Without using overscan, the graphics could be 320 or 640 pixels wide by 200/256 or 400/512 pixels tall.
  • Planar graphics were used, with up to 5 bitplanes (4 in hires), allowing 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 colour screens, from a palette of 4096 colours. Two special graphics modes where also included: Extra HalfBrite, which used a 6th bitplane as a mask that halved the brightness of any colour seen, and Hold And Modify (HAM), which allowed all 4096 colours on screen at once.
  • Sound was 4 hardware-mixed channels of 8-bit sound at up to 28 kHz. The hardware channels had independent volumes (65 levels) and sampling rates, and mixed down to two fully left and fully right stereo outputs. A software controllable low-pass audio filter was also included.
• 512 KB of Chip RAM.
• AmigaOS 1.2 or 1.3
• One double-density floppy disk drive was included, which was completely programmable and thus could read 720 KB IBM PC disks, 880 KB standard Amiga disks, and up to 984 KB with custom formatting (such as Klaus Deppich’s diskspare.device).
• Built in keyboard.
• A two-button mouse was included.