One of the best solutions I found.... (and I found two) to get CD ROM drives to work on An A500 is the following:
Get a DATAFLYER 500 (IDE, SCSI, or IDE+SCSI combo) off of EbAY next time u see one.
They usually have several of these. Or for that matter, any GVP accelerator provided it has scsi with it and the external SCSI port.
I use a Smart N Friendly CD-Writer External to switch back n forth between my PC, A3000 and A500+
I have a dataflyer combo for the A500+ with m-tec's 020 board.
The combo is good because not only do I have the cable/external connector in which to plug this into, but I also could.... if I wanted to. use a simple SCSI ribbon cable or even an IDE cable to use an IDE CD Rom drive.
Not only that, the other way I found is useful, is a Budda IDE board plugged into the very same Dataflyer-adapter. Because the Dataflyer's card can come out and go into a 3000 or 2000 or even a 4000's zorro slots.
Chances are if you are serious about adding a CD ROM drive to your A500, you might as well be hunting down two things for your 500.
1. An EAGLE TOWER CASE that an A500 motherboard can fit nicely into. I believe it comes with a zorro expansion slot to add zorro cards.
2. Make your own tower case, and then get a slingshot pro ( I believe it's called) One was on aminet this past week and I missed it! Grrr... This only has 3 card slots . But hey! thats great. That's a graphics card, a harddrive card and an 8mb RAM board baby!
toss in a CSA Derringer 030 @50mhz, and watch your IRC friends freak when you fly into chat on an ancient A500.
In fact, the best A500 system I ever encountered, was in an Eagle Tower Kit, with a Picasso II graphics card, a Dataflyer COMBO board for IDE+SCSI, an ASDG Dual Serial board, and an internal CSA Derringer @50mhz with 32mb RAM.
That was on an old A500+ with the full 2mb chip ram expansion.
Not bad for a "relic" It was surfing the net as late as last year.
Two CD rom drives were in it, one IDE and one SCSI writer.
So if you really want to hobby around, know that it "is possible"
