The Amigas were the best machines for playing Lemmings. The head explosions were spectacular!

You are now the #1 search result for Amiga on youtube :)

My very first computer. Saw one at a computer store in West Edmonton Mall in 1989 running EA FA-18 Interceptor and I was amazed beyond belief that such a technological marvel was available to the average consumer (with $2000+ to spare...that was it! I had to have one. I still have my FA-18 Interceptor as well as my Arcticfox disks (in their original sleeve folders)....just cannot give them up. I owned two Amiga 500's back then - both with Amiga 1084 monitors and 20 MB external hardrives (at $500+ a pop) I still do miss my Amiga's....let it go Randy.....let it go.......lol

4:00 Both the "trapdoor" and "sidecar" expansion slots had practically the same functionality. You could connect extra memory to both, add harddrives, faster CPU's, etc... 7:27 That's kilobytes, not megabytes. 15:45 Overscan wasn't meant to get higher resolutions. Normally, computer screens all had a (usually black) border around the usable area. With Overscan, you could feed data to the entire screen just like regular TV broadcasts did. 28:20 Doesn't the case take most of the strain? 35:50 And on the failing double clicks: while the old mouse looks and feels horrible at first, it was quite comfortable when you got used to it, and you could do really fast double clicks with it. So a lot of people increased the speed of the double click in the Preferences. That's why someone (you, in this case) who's not used to the mouse has a hard time opening any files or programs. 39:40 Monochrome, no sound, and a boring game. Try this classic instead: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/i71kdqeI3s7cfKs.html

Thanks for this one Dave! The remains of the old MOS factory are nearby my shop - I will post a pic of it on the EEVBlog... :-)

Love a teardown. But It also hurt my heart. My Amiga is still in use!

It's 2020 and the Amiga scene just keeps getting bigger and bigger

If only he had played Gods, Shadow of the Beast, Sensible soccer, Speedball 2, ProjectX - that machine was a legend in the world of computer gaming :(

Can I give like 20 thumbs up? This teardown brings a tear to the eye. I used to design/build/sell memory expansion and sound digitizers for the Amigas when I was a boy...

Amiga Workbench GUI - still better than Windows Vista.

My dad bought one of these before I was born. He used it for putting credits and overlays onto wedding videos. When he stopped doing that stuff, he passed it onto me. I learnt AmigaBASIC on it, and spent many an hour playing with boot scripts and other tweaks. It died in 2003, when the PSU blew up and fried the board. A truly solid bit of kit, and a staple of my childhood learning.

The Amiga was running a full multitasking operating system in 128k of RAM at a time when Microsoft's Bill Gates said you need 1MB minimum for multitasking. We once had a 128k Amiga 1000 and were loading and running program after program until it ran out of memory. The graphical clock program was about 1k in size so you could run about 60,000 copies (overhead for program stack etc.) When it came out it had 4096 colours at a time when an IBM had 4 colours. It had 4 channel polyphonic audio at a time when the IBM had a single channel bleep (or crackle). I once was decompressing a program from one floppy to multiple and didn't format enough disks. so I formatted an additional one and as soon as 4 tracks were formatted the decompress task saw a disk that was becoming blank and started the final copy process so it was formatting a track on the blank disk and then copying a track from the source disk. Window to this day can not multi-task as seamlessly. I believe the reason for the failure of the Amiga was that Commodore stopped spending money on future product generations. At the time the directors set themselves up in Barbados and started shuffling funds off shore was the gossip. If they would have released a 640x480 non-interlaced version back in '87 and then subsequent upgrades they would have likely still been around today.

This computer was what I used through almost all of my time in the Air Force. Loved it.

HY1 is called VIDIOT. It's a video hybrid, basically just a DAC which is converting digital R G B data to analog. Later Commodore used off-the-shelf DACs.

ahhh... the best computer I ever owned... kicked so much ass in its day

I loved watching the tear down of this wonderful piece ,thanks and keep up the good work

That was great. I absolutely loved my Amiga's back in the day. They really were a quite exellent machine. Very flexible. Spent a bleedin' fortune on extras n stuff. Still in loft, except the RGB monitor, I gave it my ex girlfriends lad some years ago. BTW, just as a thought, if anyone remembers the Sci Fi series Babylon 5 from the 90s, all the 3D graphics and effects was done on Amiga's, with the I suppose now famous ish Video Toaster Boards. Quite incredible for the time. They built a rendering farm with A4000s and Video Toasters to compete with the high end special graphics workstations of the time.

Faved as soon as I saw the title!!

Feels like not too long ago I was unboxing with the smell of a brand new computer. In Jan '89! I was soo happy. 1st game I had was Defender of the crown!!

Almost makes you cry...those guys not only made some amazing computers, they really loved what they did. From giving the chips names, to having their signatures moulded into the plastic case (but on the inside!). How many people think to do stuff like that today?! Even down to the dog's pawprint. How many hours did I use my A500 and A4000/030? I dread to think. Man, that first 'proper' computer nearly made my brain explode with delight.

Great video, wish I never got rid of my Amiga 500!

Amigas were brilliant and easily outperformed its counterparts of its time. You could actually emulate a current Mac of the time on an Amiga and it ran faster than the Mac itself. I only stopped using an Amiga 2 years ago and it was heavily upgraded with a 680860 CPU running at 80mhz, 800x600 16 million colours and had wifi, USB etc. Nice to see this video, I really enjoyed it.

Thank you for yet another great teardown! As an "old-guy" who grew up programming the C64 and Amiga this brings back great memories. I still use my Amiga from time to time but the cunning plan to get the kids into retro gaming failed hard due to sloooow loading times and the perhaps non-standard primitive user interaction. Somehow I'm surprised you never owned an Amiga back in the days? It was the stepping stone for many who now runs the industry...

just watched a bunch of your vids from here in Calgary Canada.thank you so much for your awesome vids. I will for shure watch them all.keep up the great work buddy!!!!!!

13:50 - Wrong! There really the right way up, its just that he's in Australia...

That was amazing! I had an Amiga 500 and an 1200 model during the early 90's. Lost my virginity on those machines :]

This not only a retro computer tear down. This is how it all started for a lot of young dudes like me. Get up at 3am start the Amiga, enter another world, befor going to school next day. I'm still a gamer and a technical engineer too. By the way, thanx for these tear down's. My Samsung TNT - Monitor is alive again. (Replacing busted caps)

The 8 bit guy on KZfaq knows one of the main engineers who worked on all the commador computers. Love the channel just found it. Keep up the good work you legend 😁👍

Remarkably, Amiga computers were used in several of the attractions at Disneyland and Disney World. They were very reliable running day and night for several years. Just a bit of history to google about.

Christ.. I cringed so much when he was trying to get that expansion ram out.... slide it!!!

I have one of these. I am first owner. Made in W Germany. About 30 years old. Workbench 1.3. Still works perfectly. Extra 512k ram. Bought an A520 RF modulator to connect it to a modern tv. Also bought the ACA500 plus (few years ago) to accelerate CPU and have CF card booting ability. Very cool piece of machinery😎😎😎

I have to say I love this channel. It's been mostly what I've been watching on my free time over the last few weeks (HTPC).

The Amiga prototype consisted of a large board for every MOS chip like Denise, Gary, Agnus, Paula. The right CIA controls floppy, the left controls serial rs232 and parallel ports. The prototype therefore was almost the size of a fridge with main designer Jay Miner. They used names of people because of competition might steal. The project was called Lorraine. Atari was after a few dentist the first investor. But Commodore was able to just in time buy Atari out. Atari therefore created the Atari ST. The Amiga at then was vastly superior in audio and video unless you had tens of thousands of money.

"Ahhh, that old solder smell!" *dies from lead inhalation*

Big fan of these machines. Enjoyed the tear down. Thanks very much :)

Even the A500, budget priced though it was, was loaded for bear when it came to graphics. People have already pointed out how you managed to find the mono signal, but even the RF modulator gave a rather smudgy signal. One always got the best picture quality by hooking it up to Scart. Autobooting the disks was one thing you noted. What you didn't get to experience -- which is really no wonder as the A500 sacrificed the expandability of the A2000 -- was the flexibility of the system in handling things like peripherals. For instance, resources were tracked automatically, and the system didn't care on which volume a file would be as long as it was recognized. You could do things like hotplug a hard-drive without a bother, especially with the later versions of the OS; heck, adding a relatively inexpansive expansion like the VideoToaster, you could basically pipe the video stream directly into Workbench and draw on the frames by hand (much of the iconically tacky nineties gameshow effects were produced on the Amiga for a fraction of the cost needed on other systems). Programs could be dragged and dropped into RAM disk, treating the RAM itself as any other kind of storage media. As the chipset guys felt the pinch of Commodore's various blunders in the business world, they were driven to increasing lengths of desperation. Some of the decisions were good, others were forced upon them from on high. The successor to the OCS/ECS chipset (32 colors from a palette of 4096, barring modes like HAM and EHB) was actually supposed to have been a completely new chipset, first the AAA chip and then the Hombre. Both of these projects were canceled, an unfathomable idea considering that the AAA was actually up and running at one point and superior to the existing chipset by every conceivable metric. Could the original Amiga 500/2000 have been done better? Well, in retrospect it did have a few flaws. The machine shipped with a somewhat anemic processor (an 020 would have been so much better), too little memory (1 MB should have been mandated), its file system was a bit slow to load in WorkBench, and there's the aforementioned problem with lack of memory protection (a hard problem to solve in software; several people have tackled in retroactively without success). I also seem to recall some issues with the DOS part of the OS being hastily ported from the TRIPOS guys and being suboptimal as a result. But really, those things are just shades short of perfection. I can't precisely articulate all the reasons why I love using the Amiga, but I just do, even today. Playing around with one, especially an expanded one that fully leverages the capabilities of the machine, really rams home how far ahead it was compared to the competition; in an unrefined, formative sense, it's no different from the type of computer you'd use today, only with the ability to hack and understand every last aspect of it down to the metal. All the elements of the modern system were in place: the multitasking, the integrated graphics and sound, the flexibility and hot-plugging capability. Only Commodore could have screwed it up, and God knows how but they did.

The floppy disk was programmable, but the one with the A500 was only a double density drive, meaning it could only read PC 720k disks, not the 1.44. You needed one of the A4000 computers to get one with a built in high density disk drive.

We had so much fun playing Battle Chess

A proper trip down memory lane. I loved my A500 and used it almost to death, up until the PS1 came out at which point I think I gave it to my cousin. With the advancements in technology and mods through the years, I wish I'd kept hold of it. Strangely though, I still have all my Amiga games at the bottom of the wardrobe.

YES! More retro computing! And one of my personal favourites, too. That's my Wednesday evening well and truly sorted. Many thanks Dave!

The video called "Commodore Amiga History" should tell you what you wanted to know about how many people and who designed those chips you were asking about, as well as the rest of the system (well, at least the 1000). (Sorry, I'm afraid that if I post the link to the video, that even though they're technically allowed here, I might get my comment "ghosted" anyway. But I'll post it into a separate comment below:)

you forgot to add the extended memory back in place to get a full 1MB of memory before starting the system up ... (maybe that's why that game didn't run?) also, although Workbench v1.3's disk does work with the ROM v1.2 (albeit with some restrictions ...), you do need a v1.3 ROM just as well to take advantage of the 'new' Wb1.3's disk's full abilities ... @ 12:55 > it's a revision 5 mobo you're having ... (and the other 'golden' mobo maybe even an older revision ...) last mobo version revision was 6 i think ... and if i still recall it right, ROM v1.3 could only be used on that revision 6 of the mobo ... that revision also allowed to upgrade it by adding more memory on the mobo itself, increasing the Chip RAM up to 1MB on-board ... (it's the one i still own and i did upgrade it too ... that was something the higher A500-plus models did better btw as they came with 2MB of Chip RAM already installed on the mobo in the factory ... there are other hacks possible on the A500 and other Amiga models of course ... probably the most versatile computer of all times to this day ...) but adding extra Chip RAM on-board also meant the bottom trapdoor extension memory slot could not be used for increasing Chip or Fast RAM anymore, unless you also soldiered an on/off jumper switch somewhere that could let you switch between 0.5MB or 1MB on-board Chip RAM depending on the type of extended memory board you were going to add to that slot ... real fast memory is done on the left hand side expansion memory slot though because it's closer to the CPU and directly connected to it ... the side expansion memory slot could be used for adding up to 8MB of Fast RAM without an accelerator board (regardless of any amount of Chip RAM installed on-board) or, you could add one of those 'side car' expansion units that had an accelerator as well as more memory plus a hard disk etc ... (there was also that silly 'freeze frame hacking' side unit that was fashionable among the Amiga gamer community in those times ... can't remember its name now but it allows to cheat a lot ... for example you can freeze games on the go if you need to refresh your breath, or add more / infinite lives to the sprites, increase a game's speed up or slow it down and so on ...) all n all, compared to all other options available by the competition at the time, the A500 was an amazing system indeed, especially considering how low cost it was in comparison to others ... but it was still rather costly to add all those extra goodies nonetheless and not everybody could afford them all really ... some of those old accelerator boards for higher end Amiga models such as the A1200 are still rather too costly even today, especially because they are not easy to find and the new relatively cheap options available that are made by some firms are not as fast as the fastest of the older models anyway ... in short, only a bare Amiga 500 model was really cheap ... a full Amiga system, any model, was not cheap really!

Loved this teardown. Also, it's great to see your channel now has an XBMC add-on so it's up there with new videos ready to watch on my home theatre pc!

I was working in Dallas, Texas for Texas Instruments in the "DMOS-IV" building supporting the wafer fab which was making the TMS 4256. I was a product engineering technician doing electrical and physical failure analysis on those parts. Uggg. after all these years. Blast to the past. Thanks Dave.

One of my buddies hat one when I was a kid, man was I jealous. I had to make do with daddy's IBM XT with pink/cyan CGA graphics and PC speaker for sound, meep moop.

Bit more respect mate... this was the holy grail of electronics back in the days...I guess you Aussies never heard of it... yoghurt comes to mind...

Excellent - really enjoyed wandering around my life changing childhood computer, and couldn't help shouting occasionally at the "dunno what this is" moments as you rightly pointed out, more more more!! Subscribed!!

Had one long ago. Biggest thrill was getting a hard drive to store data and a 68030 with dedicated 32-bit memory. Turned the machine into another level altogether.

I spat my coffee when he was talking about the Dram in the Trapdoor module. "Woohoo, 256kbit, unbelievable, so we need 16 of these chips to give us 512 Megabytes !!". 256kbit x 16, is 512 Kilobyte.

I have a working one of these in my bedroom right now.

Had this in my watch later since 2013, finally got around to watching it.

Very nice indeed . The days of 80s were so adorable many of us felt in love with the Commodore, TRS80, PCA, and other old tech. I had the chance to work with many of them, I spent good time on PDP11 at the University and did Fortran, Basic, Pascal, Assembly... That was fascinating..

HAHA You found the Guru that is HILARIOUS.

Hey...!!! 😡 Whats, all this... "Turd...", business, then? That's a Commodore Amiga 500 I'll have you know. With a 1.2 kickstart ROM!!! She's a God, Damn, Beauty!!! 🤣

this was my first contact with computers ever. Father got that monster from .. hell I dont know where, i guess it was loaned. i was 7 back then. this machine had profound impact on my life. now I'm working for worldwide global corp as head of IT ... thank you amiga and EEVblog for the inspiration and endearing video!

Nostalgia, i waited decades for computers to be what they are today. Im looking forward to seeing the next 40 years. I dont think the playstation 4 will have the same feeling as all the old 70 80s gear

Steve Irwin of the electronics world!

I remember clearly having it bought in Uruguay and smuggling it to Brasil cos back in the day we had a ban on anything computers. Was the first one in my home town to own one, people went crazy when they heard about it.

Fantastic man! Really enjoyed the detailed and animated discussion of the A500's chipset! Very well done!

Thanks for that walkthrough.

RE:colour. The background is blue and the icons were a horrible orange colour, all that is customised using the EXTRAs disk which has more options for hard drive formatting, screen mode, icon settings and of course colour. Also there is a boot option (I cant remember the key combination) but you essentially power up the Amiga with the key combi and an enhanced options screen should pop up, i think it let you choose the screen res, ram options, AGA mode (A600), interlace etc.. The expansion slot underneath could also accommodate an accelerator board to boost clock speed to 40 or 60Mhz (that was on the A1200 at least, not sure for the 500). The 1200 had 2Mb on board ram and up to 8 (or 16?) Mb ram via expansion. My brother had (still has) the A500 and a Video Grabber to watch analogue tv with a built in teletext decoder. Yes you didnt need a high end pc in those days to watch live tv on your amiga! :D I still own an Amiga 1200 which should work but its gathering dust under a bed in my spare room and 5 disk boxes full of all my music work, samples, games and commercial games and dozens of cover disks from amiga magazines lol, god only knows if any/all the disks still work. I have a second, external floppy drive, joystick and hacked mouse as my left button stopped working and i had to solder a micro switch in to use it lol. Great video, brings back some fond memories of hours of game play with my brother :D

"So what did you do over spring break?" "I ate grapefruit while watching videos of an Australian dismantling electronics." I'm not a boring person, I'm "differently fascinating."

Pretty amazing that they are over 25 years old. I still remember getting a C-64 when I was a child and using it. I recently gave away one to a collector that my wife had, and found in storage.

The solder joint failure on the power connector is a common issue; I've had to reflow mine at least once that I can remember. Another power issue is an over heating power brick, I grafted an 80mm 240v axial fan onto the top of mine, never overheated since xD

Occasionally and somewhat ironically, the Anti-Yellowing agent can re-act with bromide and cause it to yellow faster (and in areas without any exposure to light) When you see a system that is still white on top, but yellow on bottom, that's a great example of that! The bottom in theory should be whiter due to reduced sunlight exposure, but if it's more yellow chances are the Anti UV chemicals themselves are what triggered the yellowing process. :3

Rock Lobster from 52s first album, The B52's.

I love these retro vids. It was the time I learned using a computer and getting into programming. Thanx Dave!

I know nothing about EE but subscribed just for the unaffected enthusiasm!

You are a joy to listen to, let me tell you that. The internet needs more quizzical aussies.

''Lets power on this turd ''

Fantastic mate. Still own one and use it today!

I lived this. It was a great ROMp down memory lane! Thanks!! I'd love to see more.

I am a huge amiga fan still loves them and use them!. Yes it was awful see u didn't know crap about anything on this machine work of art. The trap door what u did find here was a 512k expansion so u did have 1mb. On the right side is a port for adding a SCSI controller and here you did add a hd. you might not like this but I think they knew how to build computers in those days and commodore was the best company for innovation new computers very sad they are gone see what we are stuck with now. You did say in the start of this video there is a solution for removing "yellow plastic" can you tell us/me how. ? PS: your show makes me wanna learn more about electronics.

Dude, great educational tutorial and explanation about electronic parts. I like that. However, it seems that you have no idea about Amiga systems. This computer was revolutionary and probably the best machine on the market at the time. PC's were and still a piece of crap. If Amiga was alive today, imagine the possibilities. Finally, for your information people still use AMIGA computers today and I am sure you would too if you knew how to use it. By the way Great videos you have out there and looking forward to seeing more.

I had a couple A-500s back in my high school days. I kept all the screws out of the case, and threw away the shielding. It just got in the way for re-seating the processor when the heat lifted the processor out of the socket. The second one came with the above mods already in place, and had a 2" fan carved into the top of the case by it's previous owner. Both had the delightful habit of trashing your floppy disks at random, to include your workbench disks to the point that I kept at least 6 copies of it on hand at any one time.

Those shots of the solder mask.... what a camera! nice one!

Is this guy really ragging on the "40 year old who still lives with his parents" who gave him the unit?

I'm a little insulted, you could have at least googled the machine you was ripping a part to discover what the machine could really do, yeah its had its day but it deserved a lot more respect than your giving it by word of mouth, what your ripping apart is one of the first multitasking operating systems made.

Thanks for this. Such a great video, the Amiga really was an awesome machine at the time.

The operating system came in 2 parts, the ROM in the Kickstart chip, and the floppy disk with Workbench. I think I went up to Workbench 3.5 before I stopped playing with my Amiga 1200 and moved to an Amiga Emulator.

Argghh... This guy's accent is well annoying.

"Pretty awful" is the state of your work area. "Pretty awful" is your high pitched, prepubescent voice. The Amiga 500 is not "pretty awful".

Awesome, have fun!

VERY GOOD VIDEO! I had one of these machines back in the day. One scary memory is coming back to me. I purchased a daughter board for generating full-time, full-screen interlaced video and installed it myself according to the included instructions. One step involved breaking a single trace on the motherboard! I broke the wrong trace by mistake and it wouldn't boot. I had to repair it by soldering a jumper to the MB and then breaking the proper trace! I held my breath as I rebooted...SUCCESS!!!!

Love your videos Dave! Hi from Canada...

What a great review!! Reminded me of the first time I opened up my first Amiga 500, I later added the extra 512k

Brilliant teardown !!! I believe back in these days they used a screen printing process for the soldermask. Not that waterfall and UV hardening stuff we have these days. Thats where that pattern on the soldermask might come from.

What a trip down memory lane, thank you!

This has me reminded of my first computer days. Brilliant , well done

Fascinating stuff. Thanks.

Brings back nice memories :-) We had great fun with A500, A500+, and the big box A2000, A4000 and A4000T machines back in the day. The A500 was one of the first 16bit machines that we managed to use stacked 68k CPUs on. We also used CPUs rescued from engine management units from auto junk yards (with some jiggery pokery on custom daughter boards) to run at 16MHz and 25MHz Overclocked machines were used to speed up 3D rendering and 'crunching' tasks, compressing data to take up less space on the hard disks was very handy back then as storage space on hard disc was crazy expensive back then :-) back in the days when we were 'programming with soldering irons' Proper Fun! :-) The 'Fat Agnus' Blitter Chip was upgradable to the 'Obese Agnus' chip which could do high speed block switching and block copy functions that were essential for high speed video effects. Great Stuff! * On the V1.2 you have to insert the workbench disk then fire up the system (or use the CTRL+both amiga keys to boot)

I remember getting a 16k memory expansion for my C-64, only $200 in the 1970's! A friend who'd just got an IBM PC showed it off to me. He was so proud of it. He made it beep in musical patterns. I told him my C-64 sang the Star-Spangled Banner in English, while it was shooting off fireworks on the screen in color. :) I remember when I kept confusing megabytes and kilobytes. Now I confuse megabytes and gigabytes.

How was the 'Disk' image with the hand in colour if you were using the mono composite output?

I really love this vintage stuff teardowns........ oh good old times ::) Thanks Dave

I enjoyed this an an old Amigan myself - Love your enthusiam!

Hi dave - thanks for your videos. Been watching for a while and they've finally enthused me to get myself a cheap oscilloscope and logic analyser and have a go myself!

love the vintage teardown's :)

Hoolllyy!!! ... this is one of my favourite old computers...this and the spectrum!

Thanks, you brought back such great memories. It took PC's along time to catch up with the Amiga and cost an absolute fortune. Graphical user interface, 4 channel, sample play back and synthesizer, 16/32bit CPU. Multitasking. Arcade standard games. Awesome, one of the most revolutionary advanced home computers ever made. Ah

Oh yeah, I own one of these. My dad bought it for me used in 95, I think. I guess either my family had a newer computer at home, or my dad had one at work. Never the less, I played games all the time on this badboy. Fortunately, my dad bought it with a large box of pirated games and programs. I powered it up again a year or so I think, and it still works like a charm. Man, I love the A500.