The A500, also known as the Amiga 500, is an Amiga personal computer model. It was released in 1987 at the same time as the A2000.
Some technical specifications:
- Motorola 68000 (32-bit CISC microprocessor with 16 registers lacking MMU for memory protection and virtual memory).
- Default operating system AmigaOS 1.2 or 1.3 (having 32-bit pre-emptive multitasking microkernel) depending on the revision.
- 512 kB of Chip RAM by default (sound buffers, graphics buffers and software existed in same memory space).
- upper limit of 16 MB of memory due to MC68000 limitations.
- OCS/ECS chipset.
- 50 Hz PAL and 60 Hz NTSC by default versions available. 50/60Hz mode can be switched by software.
- software switchable low-pass audio filter. (power led show filter status, darker when off)
- IRQ sharing (like PCI bus).
- IRQ system had 7 priority levels of interrupts.
- Absolutely no limit on number of interrupts available.
- Resources handled by Autoconfig, very similar to ACPI, resources were not numbered or labelled, just given as amounts and addresses.
- No specific I/O ports, used memory mapped I/O space separately for each hardware device (thanks to Jay Miner).