Hello all, newbie/questions

Hi everyone,

I'm new to the Amiga scene, had a Spectrum as a kid in the late 80s/early 90s which I loved at the time, but my mate's older brother had an Amiga which he was dead proud of, and would (very) occasionally let my friend and I have a go on. This started a long bout of Amiga envy for me and despite repeated requests, my parents never got me one.

Anyway, as I grew older and Commodore died I outgrew/forgot about my intense desire for one, until last year when I was reminiscing with a friend about the old computers we used to have, and I suddenly remembered about it and decided to fulfill my childhood desire and get myself an Amiga.

After a quick search on ebay I found a tidy (though rather yellow) A500 for sale not far away, with a whole bunch of games and joysticks etc for a very reasonable price. I picked it up, messed about with it and played some games on it but haven't done a whole lot with it since, however I've decided to give it some love and hopefully learn to use it properly this year.

My main question is, what upgrades would you recommend, which ones (if any) would you guys say are necessary and what tangible improvements would I see by doing them?

I already have a trapdoor RAM expansion for it so have 1MB in total.

I've bought a Gotek drive and am in the process of flashing it to replace the floppy drive (not going to cut up the case when I install it).

Planning on mixing up some retr0bright to address the yellowing at some point - never done it before so that'll be interesting.

I've noticed there's quite an array of expansion boards etc for it, I may down the line look at adding support for Compactflash so I can run games and programs via WHDload - I presume this is faster than loading from floppy, and I've read that loading from a Gotek is the same speed as from an actual floppy disk so it seems a worthwhile upgrade. Another question would be, which board would you recommend for the job? I've seen 2 that will do it - the ACA500 and kipper2k's fastmem board. Apart from the ACA500 seeming quite hard to get hold of these days, which would you say is best and why?

And finally any other upgrades you think are worth doing (and why)?

Sorry for such a long first post, and hello!

[crazyc]

I think much depends on what you want to be able to do and how much you are willing to spend (and be honest with yourself about that part)
Personally I didn't have a great time with an a500 but thats maybe as I was unlucky and started with an a1200 which has a little more oomph and options. Lots of people really enjoy their a500s, and I am sure will be along to provide advice soon.
Aca500s do seem to be the top dog for these things, but then you get tempted to add an a1200 accelerator to it, and then you might as well have got an a1200 to start with.....

Lots of useful guides both here and on amibay.