Look at this pretty Amiga 500 I found! It came from a seller in Hungary, and it arrived at my house wrapped in Hungarian newspapers for protection. Check out that keyboard layout.

Amiga 500

Let's take a look inside.

Amiga 500 bottom Amiga 500 with top of case removed Amiga 500 with case, keyboard, and disk drive removed

The case gets a good wash, and I'll set it aside to dry while I look around the main board. When summer comes around I'll look into a round of retrobrite to undo some of the yellowing.

Hey, where is this photo?

The main board is delightful. Many of the chips have fanciful names, as does the board itself ("Rock Lobster"). Everything is labeled, so it's super clear to follow where things are. It looks like I have 512KB of RAM, and there are little outlines where a person could add four more 128KB RAM modules to upgrade to 1 megabyte.

Amiga 500 main board Rock Lobster Denise Paula RAM modules

No magic smoke when I plug it in. I have a DB23-to-VGA adapter from Retrofriends - let's try it out.

Amiga attached to power supply Corrupted Amiga screen image

Uh oh. The picture is really corrupted. Is something on the board corroded or loose? I look everywhere, but it all looks good. The video output area of the board doesn't show anything that looks like corrosion. (Also, these labels are so helpful!)

Video output section of the main board

Maybe it's an NTSC/PAL issue? Nope, from the jumpers it looks like this is indeed NTSC.

Fat Angus

It seems unlikely, but maybe the issue is the scandoubler/VGA adapter. I try it with an Amiga 1000 I have on hand, and sure enough, the video is bad too.

Corrupted Amiga screen image

Sure enough, I try composite output, and the image is much clearer.

Less corrupted Amiga screen image

Okay, so I need to repair or replace the external VGA adapter. To be continued...