Getting my Amiga 1500 back up and running 😁

Ok, I get that, so what about the A1500 itself? What's in it?

The Amiga 1500 (or A1500 for short), is based on the "B" version of the Amiga 2000 (the B2000, or A2000B, the latter German version) - nearly every A1500 I've ever seen has been an ECS machine (or an ECS Agnus and OCS Denise) with a Rev 4.3 motherboard, and 1MB Chip RAM as standard.

The A1500 was always designed to be a "cost reduced" version of the A2000, and they were sold without the hard drive controller card installed (most A2000s had either an A2090 or A2091 SCSI card in them), but, the A1500 always had two floppy drives installed (whereas most A2000s had just one)

Here's the weird bit though, every website you look at will claim that the A1500 came with Kickstart 2.04, but this is absolutely untrue - I even remember seeing an A1500 in either Currys or Comet with Kickstart 1.3 ROM (was on the white "hand holding disk" screen) and speaking to other people I know, they have had KS 1.3 ROMs in A1500s from new.

Either way, spec wise, what you get is as follows

• Amiga 1500 - ECS Agnus/OCS Denise

• 68000 CPU @ 7Mhz (the standard for all Amigas)

• 1MB Chip RAM

• 2x 880k Amiga-compatible 3.5" Floppy Disk Drives

• either Kickstart 1.3 or 2.04 (latter models were 2.04, but earlier ones, still 1.3)

• the usual Keyboard, Mouse, Workbench disks, manuals etc. that get included with the machine

Now, if you've ever seen or handled a big box Amiga, you'll know that this thing weigs a fucking tonne - it's a heavy beast, more so if you load up the Zorro slots with lots of expansion cards, and hard drives etc.

As well as the two floppy drives, there's a 5.25" bay for either a 5.25" floppy drive (for use with a PC bridge-card, like the A2088 for example) or to fit a CD ROM drive (assuming you have the appropriate SCSI or IDE card and the correct drive to go with)

So basically, it's a cost reduced 2000? Really?

Yep, that A1500 sticker was usually stuck over the top of an existing A2000 sticker and with careful removal, you'll be able to see that - then there's the A2000 sticker on the back near the PSU - pretty much says it all.

So what's the story with my A1500? - and what was up with it?

So, this A1500 has changed hands a few times - I bought it years ago at a Play Expo event. When I got the machine, I already owned another A1500, but wanted a second one for "spares" (I was having PSU issues with the other one)

Anyway, I got it home, tested it, it worked (one of the floppy drives was really ropey and barely functioned, but the other was fine) and then I had an "accident" with it - I was plugging in an Amiga "tank mouse" whilst the machine was turned on, and I caught the metal shield on the plug of the mouse against one of the pins on the mouse port - there was a bang (and some sparks) - the machine carried on working, but I'd blown the resistors by the mouse port ................ so I took out the PSU and swapped it with the other one I had, making that the working machine, this one sat there for a while - I snipped the battery out that had already leaked a little bit (but wasn't stopping the machine "working" as such, however, not addressing this will come back to bite me on the ass later) - I got the mouse port issue fixed and the person who did that for me said they'd put the board through a clean, and recap it (neither of which were done)

Fast forward a couple of years, a mate of mine wanted a A1500, and he was up for a "project" so didn't mind buying a "not working so well but can be repaired" machine - so, I sold it to my mate, and he did some work on it, put a "GoDrive" in it, an "RGB2HDMI" and got the PSU replaced - then even replaced the noisy fan with a modern Noctua quiet fan - anyway, he always had issues with this machine and he got Mutant Caterpillar to recap the board for him, but no other servicing needed was done. 

Anyway, my friend for bored of the A1500, and I had an A600 that was pissing me off (yeah, I've had many A600s and they're the shittest Amiga model ever created - that's a hill I'm willing to die on) - we did a part-ex, I swapped my A600 and a little cash for this A1500 - which still had some issues.

I got the A1500 home, and the thing was so unstable, couldn't even complete a memory test without crashing or showing errors. Anyway, after much investigation myself, I let Dominik from DIgital Retro Baty have a look, and he found broken traces on the motherboard that needed resoldering, and at the most recent LAG, I collected it from hin and had it on test all day, and have been using it since then all week, with no problems.

So now, let's take a look what I have in this beast ............

RGB-to-HDMI and the modded PSU

Also in this A1500 is an RGB-to-HDMI adapter, allowing me to use this achine on a more modern display. The PSU is modded with a Noctua fan to make it a lot quieter (the stock PSU fan is a noisy beast) so that's another "quality of life" improvement.

Some issues that need looking at!

At the moment, the one issue that needs addressing is the keyboard .............. during transit, the keyboard took a knock, and it sheered the Ctrl key off (completely broke the plunger), so I need a complete replacement for that key. In the mean time, I've got a PS/2 keyboard adapter on order so I can use a PC keyboard, but until that arrives, resets are done via software or by powercycling the machine. Anything that relies on the Ctrl key is out of the question too.

I could also do with getting more Fast RAM too at some point.

So, that's my story of my Commodore Amiga 1500, I hope you enjoyed coming along for the ride and reading about my favourite big-box Amiga (yeah, I like it better than the A3000 and A4000)