Amiga 500 Teardown

Amiga 500: A piece of home computing history.

I picked up an Amiga 500 from the local Freecycle list thanks to my wife's sharp eyes. I've fired it up and it works fine, but I decided to pull it apart to see what makes it tick and it's a great thing to look at for electronics people because the whole thing is through hole and big enough to poke at. I've gone through the chips in the video tear-down and covered a bit of the history. The camera work in the video isn't great, I need some practice so I thought some accompanying static photos that you can look at might help.

Amiga 500 Ports: View of the connectors (click for a bigger image).

Amiga 500 "Rock Lobster": The Amiga designers were a fan of B52 songs.

Amiga 500 Motherboard: The enormous DIP 68000 package and some of the surrounding parts.

Amiga 500: A piece of home computing history.

Amiga 500 Inside: View of the whole interior, the silver box on the right is the floppy drive.

Amiga 500 Underside: View from beneath showing the "trap-door" expansion port. Mine had an RTC board with a leaky battery in it.

If you are interested in this retro-computing tear-down video feature, let me know, I've got a heap of other 80's era home computers that I can take apart on camera. There's another article with some schematic info about the plug-in memory and RTC board I showed in the video, just waiting for a part to make that work again.

Section:

Retro Computing

Tags:

Tear-down,

Amiga,

Commodore,

MOS,

68000

Comments

If you want to discuss this article you can reach me via email.