Wicher 500i - classic turbo card for A500

[Pat the Cat]

How much?
I see it is mentioned as useful in amiga 1000, I wonder how kickstart would be handled.

Usual way. Hold between fingers and insert disk carefully.

Joke, sorry if you didn't laugh.

On topic - I am seeing a lot of bare A500 mothrboards on eBay lately. I guess the keyboards are getting hard to get fixed now. So it is nice to see someone still giving support.

[Pat the Cat]

What is a spi controller and what is the practical usage of it on an A500?

General purpose serial port for devices is my understanding.

Only high speed though - used a fair bit for ad hoc networking. Wireless and wired (wireless is probably more common). Bluetooth too.

VERY handy if you do crazy things with Arduino's etc.

Hooking up SD card reader/writers also becomes easier (and cheaper). Sometimes they come built into an LCD display with a touch screen. But only a few bucks for a simple SD card adaptor.

You can get new membranes for £23.50 including delivery.

http://www.sellmyretro.com/offer/details/%2Abrand-new%2A-commodore-amiga-a500-~~-a500%2B-keyboard-membranes-2871

OOh... I checked a few days ago when they mentioned new A1200 membranes! Couldn't find, thank you!

OK, got an A1000 keyboard I can hook up - but it's not ideal (even if they do seem to last forever).

[Pat the Cat]

In external version Wicher500 I connected RTC DS1306

I did not know SPI real time clock existed.

Nice fact about SPI devices - is already a lot of open source C code to support them.

So should be fairly straightforward to get Amiga drivers written.

I doubt SD card would be bootable, would be much much more difficult?

But cheap network or WiFi should happen pretty quick. Faster than PlipBox.

I did say thank you to TerribleFire for putting SPI on his accelerator, so thank you too Spidi. I think there are enough A500s out there to support the 2 different styles - TF is quicker but not so easy to get quantities of 68030 chips these days, especially at high speed.

[Pat the Cat]

Uncarefully written software, as usual. If done properly, the software has to check, and uses optimized functions where possible. This is not a choice the user should make.

"Nice software" with different versions for FPU type / processor type were seen as using less memory and system resources back then.

I am not saying you are wrong on this Thomas - rather, I am saying the goalposts have shifted a LONG way.

One phone tech request I had a to answer a fair bit was "can I have a switch to select any possible processor type." The answer I gave was "theoretically, before you switch on, but an accelerator card with all processor types would not fit inside the space available."

Things are a bit different today, but the contesting demands still remain..