Your favorite classic Amiga expansion hardware?

[pjhutch]

Mine were the Blizzard 1230IV and Apollo1240 which made such an improvement to my A1200.

I really wanted a new gfx card, but the cost was too much to justify it (New Tower, IDE Adapter, new CDROM, Zip etc) and not enough s/w to make use of it...

[odin]

My first 80 megabyte 2,5" Conner hard disk for use in my A1200. I paid a whopping 600 HFL (~275EUR) for it back then (94? 95?).

But oh....the difference it made. Combined with a 28MHz 030 I actually could start using Workbench :-).


The worst? KCS PowerPC XT emulator board I bought for my A500. All of my friends had PeeCee's and I wanted to be 'compatible' so badly. In the end the XT emulation was useless (this was in the days of 386's). What a waste of precious money that was :-/.

[zipper]

The biggest improvement was as I moved from A500+Apollo50@25MHz+RocHard 170MB to A500 Micronik tower, Blizzard2060@50MHz (later 57-64 MHz), PicassoIV with enabled FliFi, 8xCD-Rom, HD-floppy, 3-4 SCSI HDs, Megachip2 and OS 3.1. It took about 6 months to build up to the spec, and the speed difference was impressing - at least tenfold. And about 100x compared to plain A500.

[drwho]

I had an Amiga 500 way back with one of those GVP SCSI boxes hanging off the side of it. I loved that thing. One of my best investments ever. :-D

The only thing that I can complain about is that it made the A500, which was already not very "desk friendly", really, really long. I had a hard time finding a stable place to put it with that box hanging off the side.

- Mike

[JimS]

drwho wrote:
The only thing that I can complain about is that it made the A500, which was already not very "desk friendly", really, really long. I had a hard time finding a stable place to put it with that box hanging off the side.

- Mike

You should have seen my A1000 with the Phoenix expansion box attached. It made the beast about 8" wider. I had a desk with a hutch which included a monitor stand just wide enough for the 1000 under it. I took out the center piece and cut off the bottom 3" to allow the connection to work. Some extra metal bracing kept the monitor shelf in place. Ugly, but it worked.

-Jim

[jjans]

I can relate to that as I ripped out the inards of an old 486 desktop, filled it full of hardrives and a cd-burner, and added it to my A530. Thank god for printer stands...

[peroxidechicken]

Datel Action Replay MkIII - those were the days...  

[JimS]

jjans wrote:
I can relate to that as I ripped out the inards of an old 486 desktop, filled it full of hardrives and a cd-burner, and added it to my A530. Thank god for printer stands...

Back in the Elder Days, a guy at the local user group had a Bill's boards expander for the A1000. This beast was essentially a passive Zorro & ISA backplane that hooked up to the A1000's side bus. It lived in a PC desktop case of it's own. Talk about an awkward arrangement.

-Jim

[Holley]

[d]Romantic Robot Multiface2 combined with an external 3" disk drive[/d] :-D

CV64, when combined with the neat built-in scan doubler, was an excellent upgrade to my A3000D.  Always thought the A530 was a really trick upgrade, possibly the best ever for any computer!

[Dan]

512kB trapdoormemory and the Chipram hack.

2 external DD-diskdrives, reduced floppy swaping greatly.

Wow, I feel old!!!

[Brian Hoskins]

First up would be my BlizzardPPC accelerator for the A1200. Following very closely behind, the MediatorPCI expansion board, which has completely transformed my Amiga giving it modern capabilties.

Thanks to the Mediator my miggy now has USB2.0, a fast 3D accelerated graphics card, a lovely sound card, reliable 10/100 ethernet, a TV card, and hopefully soon a hardware MPEG decoder for DVD!

Brian

[that_punk_guy]

The coolest thing I've actually owned was a GVP Impact II drive for my A500, ages ago.

[PMC]

That's the great thing about the Amiga, there are untold ways of spending cash to upgrade your machine ;-)

Has to be the Mediator.  It's probably the most innovative piece of hardware we've seen on this platform and has changed the way most of us use our machines at a stroke.  The difference even a 4Mb Virge makes to your Amiga is incredible.

[Brian]

Change is flying (tossing in my 2cents).

As many others I would vote for the turboboard to be the greatest uppgrade to an Amiga. There are alot of different boards out there and of cause CSPPC060 and BPPC060e+ hit the highest next to the different 060 solusions but even a 030/50 card with SCSI is a good uppgrade. 040 don't hit high enough due to the difficulties it's heatproblem brings along.

After turboboards the different PCI solusions out there are the most significant uppgrade to the classic Amiga allowing for newer, easier to get and faster gfx cards, netcards, soundcards and tvcards to name a few. Zorro is just outdated and full set of hardware for Zorro usually runs higher than the cost of a PCI solusion fully set (which is also better).

Third I would like to add harddrive expansion for the early classic models. When it came it was so hot one didn't dare of touching it... never less pay for it but hay it was hot! Mmmm... Thinking back to the times I drewled over my friends sweet sweet GVP530... ahhh...

[EnyGmaTiK]

Favourite ever:

A500 512k expansion RAM
it let me play all those great games!

Other favourite:

External Disk Drive for my A1200
yes is useless now, but i wanted it so much back in the days of my A500 that i didn't resisted to buy it now!  :lol:

Future favourites:

A Blizzard 1230/IV that i bought on e-bay (i didn't receive it yet!) and a 2.5" HDD for my A1200
 :-P

[T3000]

In my A2000 it was the Megachip.

a PicassoII made my 3000D like a new machine.

In my 3000Tower it the DPS Personal Animation Recorder and Sunrize Industries AD516 combo.

not to mention the Video Toaster

if I had the cash it would be the Video Toaster Flyer system.