Hardware – synt4x's blog

Building a Game Boy Pocket Color

I’ve always thought the Game Boy Pocket was the sleekest looking model of the Game Boy line. Even after the Game Boy Color came out with its undeniably sharper looking color screen, I thought the GBC itself looked quite bulky and ugly in comparison. And apparently I’m not alone in thinking this, because over the last couple of years there have been several projects to recreate the GBC so it fits inside a GBP shell. I decided to build one of these ultimate Pockets for myself.

Adding 2 MB RAM to Amiga 500 revision 3

The RAM expansion I’ll talk about in this post is this one, designed by PeteAU with improvements by Mathesar, over at the English Amiga Board. When fully populated and with the use of a Gary adapter, it is capable of adding 1.5MB of slow RAM and 512k of chip RAM to an A500. If you don’t need/want the chip RAM part you only have to use the Gary adapter and connect two pins on it with corresponding pins on the expansion board. No cutting of traces at all!

Disabling the audio filter on revision 3 Amiga 500

All Amiga computers, the A500 included, have a low-pass filter applied to the audio output. On most of them this filter is able to be toggled on or off in software, but on the Amiga 1000 as well as the revision 3 A500 it is permanently on. This post describes how to permanently disable it instead.

Repairing and restoring an Amiga 500 “Space Invaders” keyboard

With the early revision A500 resurrected again, it soon become obvious that there were more things to fix on it. One of the first things I noticed was that the keyboard was in need of repair. For one thing it was disgusting looking, with dirt and grime all over, and someone had used a pencil to draw crosses on most of the keys for whatever reason. But more importantly, some of the keys didn’t seem to work.

Resurrecting an Amiga 500 from the green screen of death

For the past 15 or so years I have been in possession of an Amiga 500 that only boots up to a green screen. I was supposed to buy it off of a friend, but it already had the issue when we tested it out so I got it for free. The machine had been my friend’s older brother’s back in the day. Other than that I didn’t know much about it. I only knew that a green screen meant it was some sort of memory issue, as I’d have learnt from asking about it on some forum (likely eab) at the time. That sounded too complicated to fix for me back then, so I just put it away and mostly forgot about it.