Tokyoscarab

This happened a little bit back, but I got the replacement keyboard for my 500 and it's really nice! The new keyboard mechanism is the model they put in the early 500s before Commodore started to cost reduce the 500 to be more competitive to other computers at the time. The big cost cutting measure they did was replace the original keyboard mechanism, which were literally taken out of the Amiga 1000s and were fully mechanical, and replaced them with spring and membrane style mechanisms. Another cost cutting measure they did was in the keycaps used in the new membrane design. The plastic in these is both different and the text was printed onto the keys. In the original mechanical keycaps, the keycaps were double shot during injection molding. This means they would do 2 different injections of different colored plastic into the same mold; once for the text and another for the off-white plastic. As such, the text will never rub off and this plastic also doesn't yellow compared to the later keycaps.

As people who follow me know, I bought an Amiga 500 at the tail end of last year. I never knew of them back in the day and only more recently looked into what they were and the rabbit hole became very deep! I got it knowing it would be a big project going in. This was even more the case since I bought it from the UK. It's been a long project, but it's been very fun and rewarding! Here's a list of things I had to do to the machine to get it working in the modern day and in the United States: