External CD-ROM for the Amiga 500....

[Tenacious]

I have never seen an Amiga with a CD connected thru the parallel port (common on old PCs) nor the disk drive port.  I haven't seen everything.  

To my knowlege, the only Amigas that can boot from CD are the CDTV, CD32, and A500 with an A570 CDRom sidecar (I have a setup like this .

It is my hope that someone will patch and update KS3.1 to also allow booting from CD and other media.  I wouldn't care if Amiga Inc approves or not.

[Tenacious]

I have a lot of affection for the A570, it was my first expansion beyond a second floppy and trap door memory.

It has some quirks:
 68010 is the only safe acceleration.  Adspeed appears to work for about a week, then kills the A570. All other accelerators have timing conflicts.
Supra's 500RX (FAST ram) is compatible.  I would bet the new, under-CPU FAST ram would work, too.
Works well with 1 MB CHIP ram conversion (also 2 MB CHIP ).
Has built-in audio mixer.
I run it with OS1.3 & OS2.1
Power the A570 first, then the A500.
A570 is NOT a SCSI CD drive or interface, but, a SCSI-TV add-on will allow addition of SCSI HD, ZIP, etc.
It will run almost all, if not all, CDTV titles.
If you can write bootable Amiga CDs, it will boot from them.  A large, custom OS with all apps and files on CD w/o HD is doable.
It has the same, very cool, audio CD player as CDTV built into rom.
From WB, it will work with other CD file systems.  I use the latest AsimCDFS.

[Tenacious]

Now the only question I have...since I really wanted to watch movies on my Amiga 500...I have done it already on A1200 but I like doing it on Amiga 500...I know HAM.RUN does the work...can I ran HAM movies on a 68000 processor at good speed or it is best that I go the route of 030? If the answer is 030..then the only configuration I can think that works best is to skip A570 all together and do 030 processor with external CD-ROM if I ever need to have external CD-ROM.

Go with the 030 capable system.  Working A570s are not plentiful.  SCSI-TV is probably rare.

[Tenacious]

I dabble with some other platforms as well.  Some 8-bit Apple stuff is now astronomical in price as are Hp's old rpn calculators and anything associated with their earliest microcomputers.  The day is coming when the once plentiful A500 will command big $$$, too.

Also, I've noticed a change on eBay lately.  There seems to be a growing number of sellers that are asking outrages prices for junk!  These are not auctions, they are "Buy It Now".  I sort of feel soiled after cruising eBay.  Lots of the net seems to be tranforming from a free flow of info to pay for everything.