Resurrecting my A500
 

I am a proud A500 owner and currently in the glorious process of recapping it and putting it to good use again. I am between purchasing a Gotek or getting an ACA500 plus.

Now ACA500 plus looks like an amazing piece of hardware and all the reviews I saw about it were very positive.

But I would also like to be able to use adf's in my Amiga, since I don't want the mess that is old, damaged physical floppy disks. I also want to be able to test the .adf's of the various new stuff that is constantly posted here, on a real A500. From a quick search, I see that there are quite a few options for mounting adf's directly in WB 3.1, but these don't seem very user friendly.

1) So, what adf mount software would you recommend? Which one do you think is the friendlier and most intuitive one?

2) I would also like to use my good, old Tomahawk (yeah!) joysticks, if they still work. If they don't, is it easy to find adaptors for USB joysticks? Same thing for the mouse, since I would like to use a modern mouse, not the awful one with the ball.

3) I haven't yet decided between keeping my good, old 1084s monitor, or plugging in a new monitor/TV. Which would you suggest? What are the things to consider?

Thank you in advance!

Are you mainly interested in games or utilities? Mounting .adfs in Workbench is fine, but that approach only really works for system friendly releases. Almost all games require control over the system so you need to boot directly from them.

If you are going to have a hard drive (i.e. the ACA500), the best way to go is to run stuff from it using WHDLoad. And of course you don't necessarily need to choose between the ACA and the Gotek, you can use both; the Goteks are very inexpensive, after all.

Thank you for your reply!

Games would be my main focus, but I want to be able to squeeze some productivity out of my miggy as well.

So, if I understand correctly, even if I mount the adf of e.g. Kick Off 2 in WB3.1, it would still not run, because it needs to boot directly from the floppy.

Yes - well, I don't know about Kick Off 2 specifically but most games aren't going to work that way. They have been designed to boot from a cold start both for performance and copy protection reasons. Kickstart 3.1 will just by itself introduce compatibility issues for older games.

There are of course some games that are system friendly, particularly ones that already include a hard drive installer. But those are mostly multi-disk adventure games and such.

Ok, I understand, this helped a bunch a saved me a lot of headache!

If you get a Gotek, you don't need to 'mount' the ADF, since the Gotek is a floppy disk emulator and uses the ADF file natively.

For the A500, if you want to also keep the internal disk drive, I would also recommend an DF0/DF1 selector so you can boot an externally connected Gotek as DF0 and will be able to boot game ADFs.

For what it's worth, here's my experience on the subject.

I recently got back into Amigas, after about 25 years and started out with an A500 with a GoTek. It didn't take long for me to realize, that GoTek isn't the ideal way to get back into the hobby, at least not for me. It looked bad sitting in the floppy bay, the small buttons felt awkward, I had to lean over to the side to see the numbers on the dismo etc. It didn't feel like a finished product. But most of all, I hated how slow it was. Browsing the contents of the USB stick was slow and loading the games took as long as if I was loading them from real floppies. I didn't want that level of nostalgia. It's an inexpensive product and in a whole different price range compared to the ACA500plus, but at least for me it was just a stepping stone.

So I bought an ACA500plus and have since used WHDLoad for gaming and I'm much happier with that. Of course you know already, that WHDL is not all the ACA can do. I now have a working floppy drive (and an external one too) that I can use to play around with real floppies. After buying the ACA, things got a little out of hand though.. I bought an A500 Plus, 1MB memory expansion, ACA1221lc and an Indivision ECS V2. I'm pretty happy with the setup now, but I just might buy me an AmigaOS 3.1.4 just because. :nervous

I don't know about using USB joysticks, as I have a TAC-2 but for a mouse, I use an optical Logitech USB mouse that's PS/2 compatible. It's attached to the Amiga with this adapter: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Cheap-mouse...72.m2749.l2649

The way I see it, there's no way I'd use an old CRT monitor anymore. It's not that I wouldn't want to, but my eyes just can't stand the 50Hz refresh rate anymore. I tried my Amiga with a small CRT TV, but it made my eyes bleed pretty quickly. I can't believe how I could stare at my 1084 for hours on end, back in the day! I won't get into the CRT vs. LCD debate, and if you have a working 1084 then by all means use that. I'm a happy LCD user, but I realize the image looks better (warmer, smoother etc.) with the CRT. I'm sure it has a few other technical advantages over the LCD too, but like I said, I'm using the LCD out of necessity and it works fine for me.

Thank you for your reply, my friend!

I have the exact same qualms about the Gotek, even more so now that I am actually using the miggy and even the thought of tampering with the case hurts. Thankfully, the drive is still working, so I think I will stick to just ACA500+ for now and use the drive and adf-to-disk apps for the odd adf. Maybe I will get a Gotek when the old drive kicks the bucket.

Yes, Amiga greed, I can definitely relate to that! Indulge! Indulge!

Thankfully, one of my Tomahawk joysticks was working perfectly and the other one should be easily repairable. But I have ordered a Rys MkII adaptor for the mouse!

This is another question of mine that got solved the moment I turned on the 1084; nostalgia flooded back in and I decided that I'm gonna use the good old 1084, for as long as it is still functional.