I have a spring project that I work on in my free time –mostly during weekends. The project is based around an Amiga 500 and the aim for the project is to muscle it up with various hardware accessories in a professional way.

multivision-scandoubler.jpg

I have not touched my A500 for the past three weeks since I was waiting for my first ever eBay buy –a Multivision 500 scandoubler that fits inside the Amiga. I thought the package would show up at me in one week max, but turned out it took three weeks for it to travel all the way from Germany to Sweden. Anyway perhaps it was good since I have been quite busy with other things during the last weeks.

multivision-500-closeup.jpg

So the Multivision is a cool little piece of hardware, you can be sure I will make a specific blog post about it here on Vintage Amiga hardware blog in the future. But when I opened the package I did not knew if it would work at all since I noticed that one chip had unset itself in one of the chip sockets and one pin on the 48-pin row that gets inserted in the Denise socket was broken off.

You would think that a small chip would be easy to be put into an IC-socket again but this chip was slightly deformed, luckily I manage to straighten out the pin and put it back, however you can tell by how it sits in the socket it has been removed.

The pin on the underside of the card that was broken off disturbed me a bit, by no means a huge problem. Anyone good with a soldering iron can replace it but that would mean that I would need search for someone who could do the repair.

a500-setup.jpg

But I decided to try it out anyways with 47 working pins on the pin row. It did work but the picture was fuzzy. It could either be my TFT (scandoublers do not work well with TFT screens) or the scandoubler was broken.

Turns out I needed to find someone who could repair it I thought while I popped the board off of the A500 Denise socket, but something went wrong I thought since the 47-pins where now removed from the bottom of the card!

Wow, turns out the pin rows where not soldered to the underside of the Multivision 500, it was just a normal precision IC-socket that was stucked to the pins of the socket which the Denise chip is mounted on and that can be bought in any electronic stores. I was quite glad about that and after trying it out today with a new hacked together 48-pin IC-socket the display quality is really nice, much sharper than yesterday when one pin was broken.

a500-motherboard-closeup.jpg

I really like the look inside the Amiga 500 now, there is a turbo board right under the Multivision 500 which occupies the space over the Kickstart chip, and then there is a socket under the Gary chip for the 2 MB extra memory which resides in the typical area for extra memory. Hopefully I will somehow manage to squeeze in that Kickstart switch with three Kickstart chips and I would really like to be able to run an internal Compact Flash card on some kind of IDE interface however space is so tight around the CPU area so I am uncertain about the possibilities of adding an IDE interface.

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