Obsolete technology?

[ChaosLord]

Bearing all of this in mind, I can't understand the problems people are having getting hold of or making projects which are compatible with classic Amigas. I've now more or less given up on trying to get a hard drive which would fit my Amiga A500 Plus. It seems that not even Iomega Zip drives are compatible without a special interface. Surely, with enough electronics knowledge it should be possible to build a new Amiga hard drive controller

I had a hard drive + 4MB ram expansion on my A500 in the 1989-1991 timeframe.  They were produced by multiple manufacturers and many thousands were sold.  Why didn't u buy one?

[ChaosLord]

Stuff were incredibly expensive back then?

No it was super ridiculously cheap.

My A500 had 5 MEGABYTES of directly addressable ram + a hard drive.

My A2000 had 9 MEGABYTES of directly addressable ram + a ridiculous amount of HD storage.

And stereo DMA fed hardware double-buffered interrupt driven music.

And 32-bit multitasking.

Add up how much that cost to do on a Bill Gates compatible PC.  Around $8 billion (google translation: IMPOSSIBLE in 1989)

Now any price I paid was fantastically cheap.

[ChaosLord]

If you get a SCSI controller for your A500 then you can connect any SCSI 1 drive.  There is no reason to limit yourself to a ZIP drive.  The ZIP drives are not nearly as reliable as regular Quantum SCSI hard drives.

I have seen websites that sell old used SCSI drives for reasonable prices.

The only real trouble is waiting around for someone to sell your their old used SCSI controller.  I could sell you mine for cheap but it got stolen.  GRRRRRR!  A beautiful 4MB RAM + SCSI + Hard drive for Amiga 500 stolen by unappreciative thieves!  And they stole the A500 with 1MB chipram too! :evil:

If you just can't wait then you can buy an Amiga 3000 for a reasonable price.  They turn up for sale all the time.  They are just like an A500 except they have a much faster CPU and they have a free built-in superfast super high quality SCSI hard drive controller and they have a free built-in flickerfixer for connecting to cheap PC monitors and you can still connect it to your regular Amiga monitor at the same time.  And it has a detached keyboard.  And it has an FPU.  And it has expansion slots.  And it has a 135W powersupply.   And they have sockets right on the motherboard for 16MB fastram + 2MB chipram. :knuddel:

So if you really want an upgraded Amiga 500 all you have to do is buy an Amiga 3000.  Tada! :banana:

[ChaosLord]

In the event that you are dead set on expanding your A500 then you should keep an eye on this project:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=65047

Its an A500 IDE + other goodies expansion device that they are trying to make sometime.  Maybe it will get produced 6 months from now.  Maybe 2 years.  Maybe never.  You never can tell with these things.  But if they do get it into production then it seems like it is custom made just for you :knuddel:

[ChaosLord]

There is a guy who is currently producing a "virtual floppy" device.  I can't remember what it is called.  We were talking about it here just a few days ago.

It is some sort of digital memory card (4GB I guess?) that stores a giant pile of virtual floppy disks.  It would work for you 128x better than trying to use real floppies.  As all the "floppies" are right there inside your Amiga ready for instant loading or saving.

For making music on Amigas I would still prefer a real hard drive but the virtual floppy thing is something you should take a look at since it is something that you can supposedly buy right now.

[ChaosLord]

There is the HXC floppy. I'm not sure if that is what you are talking about though. Its kinda expensive... Might be cheaper to get a IDE/RAM expansion and just use whdload.

http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/

i ordered one but have not tried it yet.... looks cool

I guess that is the one...

Or maybe this one:
http://lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=13

I am a little unclear on the whole thing.  I guess I need to really hardcore study them.  I am thinking of buying a couple "just because its a kewl idea".

It would be an easier sell if they supported .hdf files or some kind of unlimited size floppy files.

You can format a RAD: disk with giant number of tracks.

There is no reason why a virtual floppy could not have 100,000 tracks = over 1GB.  AmigaOS 3.0+ (or was it 2.04+?) allows formatting floppies with FFS so you could get good speed and use the hxc as a hard drive!  Much more useful!

If it supported .hdf files then you could format a .hdf file with PFS3 and really zooom!

[ChaosLord]

There is the HXC floppy. I'm not sure if that is what you are talking about though. Its kinda expensive... Might be cheaper to get a IDE/RAM expansion and just use whdload.

http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/

i ordered one but have not tried it yet.... looks cool

I am thinking of getting 1 or 2.  Do u know if the model F cased version fits into a DF0: Floppy Drive Bay of an A3000?

[ChaosLord]

I thought I'd already explained. I know how to plug in an external floppy drive, but I don't know how to fit this device internally. Here's a blog entry about how to do it

http://www.amigalog.com/installing-the-hxc-floppy-emulator/

I don't feel that I could do that or should have to.

I read the blog entry and its way to hard for me to do that stuff to an A500.  I'm a lamer.  I would hafta hire someone to do that stuff for me.

Does anyone know if it is 128x simpler to put one of these Hxc floppy emulators in an A3000 DF0: Drive bay?  Or DF1: Drive bay if the A3000 has such a thing?
It seems like it should just plug right in and be super easy.

I have 2 A3000s with broken DF0:'s.  This would give me a floppy emulator and fix my broken A3000s at the same time!

[ChaosLord]

I've actually got one of these floppy emulator devices for the Atari 8 bit computer range, which just plugs in externally. The Atari 8 bit is the big or little brother of the Amiga, because Jay Miner worked on both of them and various concepts are similar. The plug is a special Atari SIO plug. If I could buy or make an adapter for the Amiga parallel or serial ports, then I may be able to use the same device with the Amiga, but with a different SD card.

If you connect it externally then it won't work very well.

The Amiga only boots up DF0: not DF1:

If you connect it externally then it becomes DF1: (or DF2: or DF3:) so it wouldn't autoboot and would lose a lot of its usefullness.

There is a  way in software to switch around the DF0: to the external drive.  But the HxC makers would have to figure out how to incorporate it into their software.  Which come to think of it they should do.  Then they could sell a purely external version for all us Amiga Lamers(tm)

[ChaosLord]

Another "problem" of the HxC is that it perfectly emulates a floppy drive.  It emulates it so perfectly that it emulates the speed too, apparently.  I read a bunch about it but never saw any mention of a turbo mode.  Darn.

I will probably still buy an HxC anway, just in case.