Amiga 500 Home Computer

An A500's price is decided before it is even switched on: recapped and tested with a safe modern PSU sits far above an untested unit with a period brick. The Commodore Amiga 500 was the machine that brought the Amiga's revolutionary multimedia capabilities to the masses when it launched in 1987. With its custom chipset delivering 4096 colours, four-channel stereo sound, and genuine multitasking, the A500 was years ahead of the competition. For a whole generation of European computer users, the Amiga 500 was home computing — and it ran some of the most visually stunning games of the late '80s and early '90s.

The Amiga 500 is one of the most emotionally significant retro computers for European collectors, especially in the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands. Its game library is legendary — Lemmings, Speedball 2, Shadow of the Beast, Sensible Soccer — and the demoscene community pushed the hardware to extraordinary limits. The A500 also saw serious creative use for music (OctaMED, ProTracker) and video production, giving it cultural weight beyond gaming.

Key things to check when buying: the internal floppy drive (very common failure — test with a known working disk), the keyboard membrane, and the mouse port. Capacitor leakage on the motherboard is the A500's biggest enemy — look for any sign of corrosion around the capacitors. The original A520 TV modulator and external PSU should be present and tested. A 512KB RAM expansion in the trapdoor slot is a huge bonus. Boxed examples with the original mouse, manuals, Workbench disks, and the included game pack are the collector's dream.