| Ok so it's worth noting that the AmigaOS has two completely separate branches in use today: 3.x and 4.x 4.x is targeted to amigas with PPC CPUs or PPC based accelerators (mid to late 90s accelertors and some newer things like the X5000) 3.x is targeted to amigas with m68k CPUS (all the commodore era machines) Both 3.x and 4.x are under active development today. The latest 3.x is AmigaOS 3.2.2. The latest 4.x is AmigaOS4.1 With regards support, the A500 is still the best supported Amiga. Its install base and current user base dwarves that of all the other models and accelerators. There were just so many more A500s sold than any other type of amiga. I would not be surprised if you told me that there 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more A500s than PPC amigas out there. So if you are developing for the amiga and want your software used by lots of folk then targeting the A500 will get it infront of the most eyeballs. Today though most people buy some kind of accelerator for their amiga and the Terrible Fire (TF536) or Individual Computers (ACA500plus) accelerator cards seem to be the most favoured modern choices. Neither of these choices are PPC based cards and the amiga community still favours m68k CPUs. WRT the battery, the standard A500 did not ship with a battery on the motherboard, only the A500+ did. Some RAM upgrade cards do have a VARTA battery and those could still damage the RAM upgrade card and should be removed. Sidenote: AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 are actually a kinda separate abandoned branch but features of these have been backported to the 3.2 branch. |