---- Amiga 500 ---- Amiga-Online! >> Amiga Info >> Amiga Models >> Amiga 500

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Launched:  1987

In 1987 Commodore released the A500 - a cheaper version of the A1000 - which came in the "distinct" Commodore box. The basic system still used the Motorola 68000 processor, 512k ram, and Original Chipset (OCS) but had got rid of the ZORRO slots in favour of a DMA slot at the side of the machine. The operating system had been upgraded to version 1.3, which included the Amiga Command Line Interface (Shell) allowing the user more functionality. This is the machine that kicked the entire Amiga world into focus and brought more people to the Amiga than has been done since.

There are two different revisions of the A500 motherboard:

Amiga 500P (American)	The 'Productivity' edition features 1Mb memory (512k Chip, 512k Fast).
Amiga 500C (American)	An improved version that incorporated the new Agnus chip, providing 1Mb Chip RAM (corresponds to the Amiga 2000C).

 ----Technical Specs ----

• Motorola MC68000 Processor
• Oirginal Chipset (OCS)
• 7.16 MHz CPU
• 512k Chip RAM or 1 megabyte Chip RAM on motherboard
• Maximum 512k Chip RAM
• 512k Fast RAM in trapdoor expansion bus (optional)
• Maximum 8 megabytes Fast RAM
• 512k RAM on motherboard
• 256k ROM or 512k ROM on motherboard
• 3.5 drive bay 2.5 drive mountable
• 3.5 880K internal floppy drive
• Integrated keyboard
• 2 button mouse
• A1000 sidecar expansion bus
• A500 trapdoor expansion bus
• Compact case
• External power supply port
• External floppy drive port
• RS-232 serial port
• Centronics parallel port
• 2 mouse/joystick ports
• Monochrome composite video port
• 15kHz colour RGB analogue video port
• 2 stereo audio output ports