@ hazydave. Please tell me about these.

[tone007]

They certainly shows a downside to the A1200 design.  No external expansion port means you loose the internal expansion bay to the device.  Accelerator or CDROM would have been the choice to make.

I think it more shows a downside to the CD expansion's design.  Archos' PCMCIA CD drive and SquirrelSCSI addons used the PCMCIA slot (sounds like an external expansion port to me,) though of course they did come a bit later.

[tone007]

Now, yes, the PCMCIA slot is useful for CF and network cards.  Back then, it mostly sat idle if it wasn't being used for SRAM.  As for speed, the 16 bit interface is plenty fast for the CDROMs of that era, 300KB per second or so was about as fast as a 2X drive ran.  Using the CPU slot for a CDROM was complete overkill.