A500 hard disk addon rarity

[scumble]

I just dug out my old A500+ out of a cupboard, as I'm moving residence, and thought about doing something with it. I haven't used it for at least 5 years, but it's not a bad little computer in many ways.
A hard disk of some description seems most useful, but it seems you can't get hold of any of the old GVP expansions. ICD make a similar thing, but it's expensive.
I'm thinking I might as well get hold of an A1200 with a hard drive for the kind of money involved...

I'm a UK resident by the way...

and hello too

[redrumloa]

eBay eBay eBay:-)

[Cyberus]

@scumble

Hi,
As for those GVP cards, I think you'd be able to find one easily. I have three Impact Series II at home myself (although admittedly two of them are just the cards without the casing). Keep an eye on ebay as the previous poster suggested, or put a Wanted ad in the classified section here or at  Amibench

As for picking up an A1200, that's up to you, and perhaps depends on what you wanna use the 'puter for. I regret buying the A1200s I have in some ways, as its far easier to get carried away upgrading them and spending a fortune before you know it!
In a lot of ways, I think the A500 is the best machine Commodore made - spares are ten a penny, loads of different expansions, extremely advanced for its time.  The only problem being that it doesn't have the graphics capabilities the AGA machines (A1200 and A4000) have, and can be quite limited by the amount of RAM you can add (usually not more than about 9,10 MB total). Also accelerators for the A500 are few and far between, and in my experience, when you DO see them on ebay or whatever they fetch quite a price.

Sorry, went off rambling there. If you just want to use your A500+ again, then look out on ebay for a GVP Impact Series II controller. If you want to get into the Amiga properly as a hobby, buy yourself an A1200, but beware you may find yourself towering it, buying accelerators, SCSI interfaces, hard drives, CD drives, sound cards, graphics cards... and then of course all this for a machine that is in effect years out of date    :-(

Oh, and have a look here to see what's available:
www.amiga-hardware.com

[scumble]

I did in fact see a couple on ebay just now. It's just painful using a single floppy drive - I don't know how I put up with it before, but I did. The only thing that seems slow on it is the loading time.

If I got an A1200, I'd be more interested in having a compact machine. I've got a big box with a PC in it already. You can fit an accelerator card in there without rebuilding around the motherboard.

[scumble]

In case anyone's interested, I did in fact manage to buy and IDE controller with a 500Mb drive installed, which should be perfectly adequate.

I think I'll stay away from the A1200 money pit for now  ;-)