After the huge success of the Amiga 500, Commodore launched a new version of the machine called the Amiga 500 Plus. Some small changes were made to reduce costs and a few hardware changes were also made. It featured 1 MB of memory, the new ECS chipset and a new version of AmigaOS which wasn't 100% compatible with software written for older versions.
While not officially introduced until 1992, the A500+ made a covert appearance late in 1991. Commodore apparently sold out of A500s towards the end of the year, so an unusual step was taken. The new A500+ motherboards were already in production and were placed in the old A500 cases and sold as A500s to meet demand before the launch of the new model. The only problem was that Commodore didn't tell anyone what they had done and many new users were left wondering why some Amiga software wouldn't run on their new computer.
The A500+ has the shortest lifespan of any Amiga ever made, it was only on sale for around six months. One way to describe the A500+ is as a mass market prototype, due to the incredibly short lifespan and the fact that the brand new version of AmigaOS was updated so quickly for its successor, the Amiga 600.
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I bought one in 92, quickly upgraded to two meg ship ram iirc, and a side car HDD, which had either 2 or 4 meg fastram, little modules you plugged onto circuit board inside. I ran a DTP business with it for two years, undercutting the mac based bureaus in the local area by a good margin plus I could multitask on it.
Wednesday 10th May 2023
Brek (United Kingdom)
I have one of these, but it came with dual kickstart roms that are switchable. I''ve noticed that the floppy drive is a bit more quiet than the original A500 drives. Sadly the battery is indeed dead and decayed, having left a white crust on the motherboard which I think is oxydized lead. I do have a spare battery but I have to look into how I can best remove the encrusted lead without damaging the motherboard. The thing still runs beautifully and puts out a better videosignal quality than my A1200''s!
Thursday 19th May 2011
Speedy-san (Netherlands)
The A500+ does have a battery for real-time-clock. If you find these babies please check it, because almost 20 years old batteries do leak and destroy the motherboard! New battery is very cheap and it''s easy to change (only 3 legs to solder)...
Tuesday 14th December 2010
Kalle (Finland)
NAME
Amiga 500 Plus
MANUFACTURER
Commodore
TYPE
Home Computer
ORIGIN
U.S.A.
YEAR
1991
END OF PRODUCTION
1992
KEYBOARD
Built-in keyboard, 96 keys
CPU
Motorola MC68000
SPEED
7.09379 MHz (PAL) 7.15909 MHz (NTSC)
CO-PROCESSOR
ECS based chipset: 8375 Fat Agnus (memory controller and blitter), 8373 ECS Denise (video control chip), 8364 Paula (sound & I/O), 5719R2 Gary (I/O)
