Yesterday was a joyous day!
My Amiga 500 PSU from Ray Carlsen arrived super quickly (he shipped it Thursday!), so I finally got the chance to see if my Amiga did indeed work!
As my office space is still rather cramped and I haven't got much space to lay everything out, I temporarily took out my Amiga 500, hooked it up, and prayed to several deities that it would indeed fire up and not be a dud! So I plugged in the Amiga, wired it up to a VGA monitor, took a deep breath, and flicked the switch.
My LCD VGA monitor, an Acer AL1706, did indeed show something, all right: "SIGNAL NOT SUPPORTED". Well, terrific. It's getting something but can't handle the Amiga's RGB signal. Oh, well, it's a postitive sign, but not quite what I wanted to see! So I decided instead to just test the Amiga with the composite out signal for now and deal with monochrome momentarily. I took the VGA connector off and hooked the Amiga to my TV via composite. I flicked the switch again and...
It booted and was waiting for a disk!!
I was afraid of the disk drive possibly being bad after so many years, but I plunked in a few Amiga magazine cover disks I got with the system. CLUNK-CLUNK-CLUNK. The drive chugged along and happily read each and every disk I could throw at it!
So I am beyond elated! I essentially rescued a good working Amiga 500, and now I'm going to fix it up and happily set it up with a decent VGA monitor once I have a little more space! I have finally gotten a real, working Amiga... my childhood dream finally come true! And now I'm going to give this Amiga the love it deserves!