Oh, I also got a real Amiga 500 recently. Paid $329 for it, which is way too much, but the guy swore it worked, he was in Irving, and I was driving to L.A. that weekend to go to Mumford and Sons with my wife (this is a compromise that means I never have to go to Dave Matthews, which seems like a fair trade, to me...) Anyhow. So, I go down, drive the 45 minutes down to Irving, meet the guy and do the trade, he says, "My brother is the computer guy and he is deployed right now, so if there is any problem, let me know and I'll make it right." Get it home, plug it in, floppy reads me 30 year old copy of the iconic Juggler demo... but the keyboard won't work. Only the top row of keys respond. I bought an Amiga 500 because they didn't have real time clocks, so they don't have VARTA batteries, which are infamous for leaking and eating motherboards. When the keyboard didn't work, I turned it open and opened the trapdoor expansion, and there was a RTC memory card with a leaking VARTA battery that had vented up onto the connector for the keyboard membrane.

I bought a new keyboard membrane from the UK for $35... got the guy to refund me so my out of pocket cost was $179. Removed the leaky battery and washed everything down with vinegar, distilled water, and IPA. Assembled it all, and got it working. Then I bought a thing called a Gotek which is a floppy disk emulator. Allows you to hook up a thumb drive with up to 999 floppy disk images on it. Got myself a switch that allows you to chang the drive assignments of the external and internal floppy, because the floppy images want to be the first, internal drive (df0: in Amiga) not the external (df1:). Got an RF modulator and hooked it up by component in to an LCD TV. All told, about $330 into it... and here I am, on Uncensored, in the MiSTer FPGA Minimig Amiga core, while the real Amiga sits out on the other room looking really cool. If you want to relive your old classic retro machines - I can't recommend MiST, MiSTer and other FPGA platforms enough as the saner alternative to trying to keep 34+ year old machines alive and running.

The floppy disk emulator sounds like a really cool idea, because my actual floppies demagnetized long ago hahaha

Google Gotek. It works on multiple different retro platforms - you just have to flash it for the appropriate system. They mostly get used for Amiga and Atari ST platforms - but they're intended for Roland synthesizers, I believe.

Wait... that device converts your floppy interface to a USB interface? That's interesting.

The ones I've seen emulate a floppy drive using an SD Card, and have buttons to activate any of hundreds of floppy images stored on the card as the disk actually inserted in the drive. Then you can put the SD Card into a modern computer to load software onto it.

I don't think it emulates a full USB stack.

What's probably really cool is that the parts and tooling required to interface with old computers are dirt cheap now.