A500 zorro to Buddha? possible?

[cv643d]

Hi,

I bought a couple of Amigas this weekend. I was positively surprised to find a 030 turbo board in one of the A500's i got.

I would love to have an internal IDE harddrive in this A500 and I toyed with the idea to build a Zorro interface and connect a Buddha Z2 card internaly in the A500.

Is this possible? Anyone connected a Buddha card to his homemade Zorro interface on an A500?

[x56h34]

I'm not sure about the actual Buddha card, but I have an "A500 side-slot to Zorro interface converter" and the Catweasel/Buddha combo ZII card works fine with it. Hard drives connected to the Buddha part work without problems.

[cv643d]

Thats nice.

I read a tutorial in Amiga Format about adding a Z2-like slot to an A500.

Is your converter a homemade hack?

[x56h34]

I am pretty sure that it was factory made. It's just an angled adapter pcb board with no casing or markings of any kind, however there is one small IC chip on it as well, which pretty much confirms that some company actually made this and not a home enthusiast. :-)

[cv643d]

whoa..  just what I need! Hope I can find one on ebay!

[zipper]

Search for Slingshot,
http://www.amiga-hardware.com/

[Tahoe]

You could also search for the ICD AdIDE 40 which is an IDE controller which connects to your 68000 CPU socket. The are said to work when placed underneath your turboboard, however you could be taking a gamble....

[Wol]

Hi Cv643d,


A diagram of A500 86 pin to Zorro2 on it's way to your
web site e-mail address now.



Wol.

[cv643d]

Thank you!

The ICD solution would be great, but it is probably hard to find :cry:

[orange]

how about that IDE hack from aminet, its fairly simple to make it (called A500IDE, IIRC) and works fine. It lacks autoboot but otherwise its really nice, and very very cheap..

[cv643d]

To bad it is not auto-boot. I am going to ditch the internal floppy drive and run a harddrive there instead.

[patrik]

@cv643d:

Use a 2.5" harddrive, it will fit without problems inside, without having to remove anything.


/Patrik

[doctorq]

@cv643d

If you are going to get yourself one of those Zorro converters, why not stick an X-Surf in there instead of the Buddha, and use the 2.5" port for the harddrive, and get the A500 online at the same time??? Must admit, I can't remember if the IDE ports on the X-Surf has autoboot support, but I think it does.

[Argus]

@doctorq

Nice idea, but they don't autoboot.  Still he could have a boot floppy in df0: with the drivers and startup-sequence to run a harddrive off the XSurf...kind of like an old A1000.

If polled I/O transfers to harddisk and autoboot is all you want, just make a homemade ISA-Zorro hack a la the Slingshot and slap an old DataFlyer SCSI, IVS, ICD, Supra or other SCSI 1 controller off the 86-pin expansion port.  This works and would give you an autoboot harddrisk and scsi cdrom access.  Later an accelerator, clockport adapter or other could be added internally to the 68000 socket.  Or if you could find one, an ICD AdRAM 540 or Expansion Systems Baseboard would give you 4MB fast ram in the A500 belly slot.

Jens (Individual Computers) btw is supposedly making an A500 version of the Buddha controller, but it's not available yet, afaik.

[alexh]

If you are lucky enough to ever find one get an ICD Trifecta EC 500.

It's an A500 IDE controller that connects to the side edge connector. It has good styling (same shape as A500) and it has  8Mbyte FAST RAM and is the fastest IDE drive for the A500 reaching peak speeds exceeding the Zorro theoretical limit of 3.5Mbyte/sec using "hidden DMA transfers"!