amiga 5oo :D

[skywalkgr]

Hello

A few years ago i bought an amiga 500 (stock with 512kb extra memory) in very good condition I would like to start using it, i bought a book to learn assembly language and i found from a friend the disks with devpac for kickstart 1.3 , i dont remember the version of the assembler exactly, but i dont think that it's matters.

I would like to put a hard disk to this wonderful machine. But without buying expensive accelerators that fits to zorro II slot. Is there a way i can do it for example with IDE68K? I would have problems booting workbench 1.3 from HD if i have kickstart 1.3? What is the maximum disk capacity that amiga 500 can see?

Thanks in advance
George

[skywalkgr]

Hi,

Your best way to upgrade an A500 I believe is to just get a cheap A590 or similar off eBay or Amibay or somewhere like that. I don't know the IDE68K intimately but I understand you need to make a little board to fit in the side if you want to boot from it.

Once you get an A590 or whatever (GVP make good ones too) you can always change the HDD. I don't know what the limit is, but it'll be less than 4GB, and to be honest on an A500 you're going to be pushing 400MB let alone 4GB - ideally get a nice little GVP HDD and a 1GB 50-pin SCSI drive and you're away.

Or if you're feeling really flush get a GVP A530.

I am looking for an a590 on ebay for long time now but with no luck. I like your idea about GVP HDD with scsi hd inside! Is it very hard or rare to find this item on ebay?

[skywalkgr]

I have two A500 stored somewhere and I plan to put ACA520 in it, once it becomes available.
(according to AF mag, ACA520 should have 14Mhz 68020+16M RAM + SD card slot etc...)

For sure this solution sounds really good, but when they are planning to make it available?

[skywalkgr]

I also have an a500 I'd like to put an ide controller in. Does anyone have contact info for the guy who was selling those add ide little boards?

I have to upgrade my rom chips first, but I think thats a great way to add ide to a 500, 2000 or 3000, and it would be internal.

I never liked those add on drives on the side of the 500, seems huge to me once installed, but maybe thats just my ocd or something.

Steven

I agree with you, hdd cases with or without accelerator cards on left of amiga they dont look nice at all.

[skywalkgr]

There are number of sidecar expansions for the 500.  Commodore made the A590 (SCSI hard drive, can have 2 Meg of fast ram option inside, acceleration?), A570 (CDrom drive. compatible with 500RX and Amitrix SCSI-TV, but not any acceleration.).  GVP made A500-HD+ (SCSI HD and fast ram), A530 (same, but with 68030 accel).  Supra made 500RX (upto 8 Megs of fast), 500XP (SCSI HD & fast ram), Turbo 28 accelerator (68000 clocked at 28 Mhz, cool).  It's a shame Supra never combined the last 2.  All of these show up eBay fairly often.

There were other brands as well, a few with IDE interfaces instead of SCSI.

Thank you so much for the informations i will search ebay/amibay right now

[skywalkgr]

Thank you everyone for the information you are sharing with me I will come back in a week to tell you what i've got

[skywalkgr]

This is one of my Amiga 500s

http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com/amiga/amiga_scuzz86.htm

This is one of my 500s with an internal hard drive

http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com/amiga/car_0608/car08401.jpg

And the sidecar is probably your best option

http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com/amiga/amiga_scuzz48.htm

What did you use to put intenal hard drive as shown on the second link? Is the hard disk bootable?