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What is the newest operating system an old Amiga 500 can run today?

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punchy71

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Hi,
I was thinking of possibly getting an old Amiga 500 I once had back in the early to mid 1990's. If I got another one, what could I do with it now days? Also, what is the newest operating system version it can run in both bone stock form (as is) and fully optioned out to the maximum with cutting edge 2019 hardware?
Thank you
 
Amiga500 stock? As in non-Plus and Plus? I guess the newest would be eighter 1.x or 2.1 depending on what kickrom it came with. And fully loaded, would be 3.1.4 as that OS is from 2018. Unless there is a PPC board and some kind of 2019-Linux/Unix-PPC operating system out there.
 
I know Amiga OS 3.5/3.9 upgrades need a 68020 or above with 4MB+ of RAM and the A500 stock has a 68000 and 512K with maybe another 512k trapdoor RAM.

Stock A500's don't have a HD anyway so you are stuck booting from floppy.
 
punchy71 said:
Running 3.1.4, (which is actually "Amiga OS", not "Workbench") would require installing a new "kickrom" ("eprom"), correct?
Click to expand...

Yes.

Workbench was never the name of the OS (many people got this wrong). It is the Amiga equivalent of a window manager, and the name of the disk that contained it. The OS was originally called Amiga, but is now called AmigaOS.
 
Unknown_K said:
I know Amiga OS 3.5/3.9 upgrades need a 68020 or above with 4MB+ of RAM and the A500 stock has a 68000 and 512K with maybe another 512k trapdoor RAM.

Stock A500's don't have a HD anyway so you are stuck booting from floppy.
Click to expand...

Back in the day I had an A590 harddrive on a stock A500. It really made a huge difference to make a system that was useable for both programming and office work. I still used floppies for games.
 
For game compatibility, you want to stay on 1.3 or 2.x, Most floppy games expect those versions of kickstart.

A gotek running flashfloppy firmware and a 512k expansion gives you alot of options for the software of the time.

Later,
dabone
 
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