The Amiga 500, also known as the A500, was the first popular version of the Amiga home computer, "redefining the home computer market and making so-called luxury features such as multitasking and colour a standard long before Microsoft or Apple sold these to the masses.

"[2] It contains the same Motorola 68000 as the Amiga 1000, as well as the same graphics and sound coprocessors, but is in a smaller case similar to that of the Commodore 128.

[4] Although popular with hobbyists, arguably its most widespread use was as a gaming machine, where its graphics and sound were of significant benefit.

In mid-1988, the Amiga 500 dropped its price from £499 to £399 (https://amr.abime.net/issue_535_pages page 7), and it was later bundled with the Batman Pack in the United Kingdom (from October 1989 to September 1990) which included the games Batman, F/A-18 Interceptor, The New Zealand Story and the bitmap graphics editor Deluxe Paint 2.

By this time, the home market was strongly shifting to IBM PC compatibles with VGA graphics and the low-cost Macintosh Classic, LC, and IIsi models.

)[16] The system uses planar graphics, with up to five bitplanes (four in high resolution) allowing 2-, 4-, 8-, 16-, and 32-color screens, from a palette of 4096 colors.

The sound chip produces four hardware-mixed channels, two to the left and two to the right, of 8-bit PCM at a sampling frequency up to 28 kHz.

[20] The system displays video in analog RGB 50 Hz PAL or 60 Hz NTSC through a proprietary DB23M connector and in NTSC mode the line frequency is 15.75 kHz HSync for standard video modes, which is compatible with NTSC television and CVBS/RGB video, but out of range for most VGA-compatible monitors, while a multisync monitor is required for some of the higher resolutions.

Peripherals such as a hard disk drive can be added via the expansion slot and are configured automatically by the Amiga's AutoConfig standard, so that multiple devices do not conflict with each other.

Up to 8 MB[a] of so-called "fast RAM" (memory that can be accessed by the CPU only) can be added using the side expansion slot.

ABS degrades with time due to exposure to oxygen, causing a yellowing of the case.

Other factors contributing to the degradation and yellowing include heat, shear, and ultraviolet light.

32-bit CPU accelerators aren't limited by 24-bit addressing and can include up to 128 MB[a] of Fast RAM (and potentially more).

[a] The added memory is known as "Slow RAM", as its access is impacted by chip-bus bandwidth contention, while the chipset is not actually able to address it.

Newest (rev 8) A500s would share motherboard with A500+, and configure the expansion memory as CHIP by default.

However, Commodore UK refuted that figure and said that the entire Amiga line sold between four and five million computers.

Although officially introduced in 1992, some Amiga 500 units sold in late 1991 actually featured the revised motherboard used in the A500+.

[citation needed] Due to the new Kickstart v2.04, quite a few popular games (such as Treasure Island Dizzy, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, and SWIV) failed to work on the Amiga 500+, and some people took them back to dealers demanding an original Kickstart 1.3 Amiga 500.

It also encouraged game developers to use better programming habits, which was important since Commodore already had plans for the introduction of the next-generation Amiga 1200 computer.

Double Dragon 2 by Binary Design received an update for ECS machines with the "Amiga phase-alternated linescan version 4.01/ECS".

This solved compatibility issues with the graphics which appeared garbled on ECS machines, and it also slashed the in-game loading times from around 20 seconds to just over 6.