A500 HDD? How to do it?

[kidkoala]

@countzero

i commented on the scsi controller DIY because someone else mentioned it, wasn't you..

and like i said, i don't think he wants to solder and stuff he want the easy way to the solution. though i personally find modding/hacking fun to.

haha italians are always fishy aren't they? like i said my links are examples, buy it or leave it.

@circlip

there are also towers meant for the 1200 but now we are talking money again so i won't go into that.

i think your best options are get the cheapest sidecar you find for the 500 that seems like it's in ok shape, ide or scsi, doesn't matter hehe:)
and maybe get a little extra ram for it, also cheap (for the small upgrades at least).

or, get a whole 600 cheap and put a cheap 2.5" hdd or CF card in it. you can probably get the ram upgrade for the 600 used on ebay as well, might save you some dollars. i know i did..

here's all ebay country-links for you if you want to do some heavy searching i usually just check the biggest countries.. amiga.com does _not_ cover all countries or even all items in the biggest countries.
Ebay country links

@thread

btw if he goes for the hhd in 500 solution, don't he need the 2.05 or 3.1 rom upgrade as well? 1.3 doesn't support hdd? that's not expensive anyway..

[orange]

you are better off buying A1200, they are not rare and some people would like to get rid of them, forget ebay and do a local search.

[countzero]

1.3 kickstart does support harddrives (autobooting) however partition size is quite limited. some people claim to have agb partitions under 1.3, my personal experiences I could never get a 200 mb partition on a 1gb scsi hdd get to work. under winuae, it seemed to work fine (with 1.3 kickstart, 1.3 workbench) when I go to real amiga, it always corrupted when I put some files after a certain limit. Therefore I strongly suggest going 2.05 or 3.1.

[kidkoala]

@orange

hehe who tosses 1200's around cheaply and locally?
please tell me cause then i'd like one of those

[DoogUK]

i'm selling a supradrive 500xp hard disk and ram expansion for the 500, although shipping to Oz would be pricey from england .

[kidkoala]

not that i'm the one to bid on it, but how much do you want for it?

[circlip]

@rkauer if you're still around...

Is the circuit for the IDE pcb complicated? My soldering isn't up to par, but I've made some basic stuff in the past. I've had a look in the readme files from the lha file on aminet, and stuff didn't make much sense to me, as I've never had to deal with HDD's on an Amiga. Plus it said about determining the base address with dip switches... I got no idea how I would go about that.

Circlip

[DoogUK]

@kidkoala...its not on fleabay...i'm open to offers

[pyrre]

EDIT:

Duplicate post

[orange]

@circlip
I made that one using Aminet instructions, when it was double sided. It should be much easier now, that its single sided PCB. But the author himself says its just a 'hack'. The main problem with it, in my opinion, is that it has no extra RAM and you need that badly on a500.. The other small problem is that its not autoconfig, at least version I used.
Most difficult part is obtaining side expansion slot connector (86pin IIRC)
There is another project on Aminet with IDE, RAM, ROM from Russia but its way more complicated.

forget e-matrix unless you're millionaire..

A1200 is still your best option (unless A500 is very important), it really shouldn't be so hard to find one for someone in Europe and connected in a way to EU.
Look for it in "Amiga countries" like England and Germany, they are probably full of them.

[kidkoala]

@pyrre & orange

read the thread before posting, eh?

i already posted the E-matrix link _and_ told him it's very expensive..
and i already posted this "a 1200 is said to be the best choice for classic gaming/general amiga-fiddling by many"

@circlip

..but my personal choice in your context would be the 600, if you want to switch the machine out at all (cheapest option would still be an A500 sidecar with extra ram or 512kb chipram upgrade imho, since he already has the machine for it), because the 600 has a much smaller footprint, and the 1mb upgrade you need is available used on ebay, eg. here 1mb upgrade w/clock, and here . that gives you 2mb chip wich is what you need for most old games. another reason for buying the 600 over the 1200 is that the 1200's tend to be stuffed with expansions or peripherals that make them expensive, whereas 600's are often plain or with a 1mb ram expansion and/or hdd/cf card, wich is just what you need! like this one 600 on Ebay.de w/cf

..and forget about do it yourself projects, if you want the fastest and simplest way of getting to your solution, use Ebay, things are easy to find, and are there right now. just find the right stuff at the right price, and if the item doesn't ship to your country, ask seller, they often agree on sending anyway. Searching through newspapers every day and driving around finding fleamarkets is just wasting time for that small chance of finding anything useful in good shape imho.

That said, you should post a "want to buy" with the stuff you'd like on all amiga forums like amiga.org, amigaworld.net and amigans.net, and watch the classifieds sections for interesting things. the chance that someone has a cheap 600/1200 there is pretty good..
a plus of buying the a1200 would be that it comes with 2mb chipram already installed, wich is nice, and that it has the aga chipset, but most games that you stumble onto in classic gaming are not aga, they are ocs like your A500 has, or ecs like the A600 has.

it's not an easy question to answer really, depends on what you want to do, what you want to play, and the money involved..but now you've got some background info.

[pyrre]

@ kidkoala

You are very found of the A600.... :-D

If he buys an A600 he still has the problem of kickstart incompatibilities. And would need a degrader, I do not know how easy those are to get your hands on.
And the A600 has ECS... For those rare games requiring OCS.

In the A500 he will not have those problems, not to that degree at least. And sidecars tends to pop up on ebay every now and then. However, tha choise is still his...
But a favour for sidecar is it can be put in any A500, not just the one he has now...

[Ral-Clan]

Kidkoala.

You are aware that IDE expansions for the A500 are very few, if almost non-existant, aren't you?  Almost every side-car expansion for the A500 was SCSI.

Of course there's the Zorro II adaptor for the A500's expansion port, so that an IDE card can be used, but this is almost harder to find.

[mrmkl]

Some updates for the "a500ide" project: http://www.iki.fi/mkl/ide/ (I should probably update the lha-package on Aminet, too.)
There is also two other IDE-interface boards there.
 

[kidkoala]

@pyrre

hmm,what do you mean kickstart incomp.? can't the 2.05 rom use 1.3 games? i think most can be run with 2.05? (wich is what the A600 has as standard). however if he wants to install hdd and use probably os3.1 it is recommended to upgrade rom (kickstart) to 3.1, like i did a few years ago.

as for ocs games, those are not rare i think? there are tons of ocs games, ecs games are the rare ones, correct me if i'm wrong.
besides you can set the A600 in ocs mode from the bios if you have an ecs incomp. game, or i guess you can run some kind of software from amigaos to fix incomp. (or run a whdslave?)

while you mention the A500, wich is ocs only, and cannot run ecs games,so the A600 is more classic-gaming-ready

@ral-clan

this is broughtup earlier in the thread. while saying that ide-sidecars are almost non-existant i think is a bit harsh i follow several ebay-countries regularly and have seen the go now and then..

[pyrre]

while you mention the A500, wich is ocs only, and cannot run ecs games,so the A600 is more classic-gaming-ready

I have never encountered a game that do not work on A500, except for AGA games though... And that was before i got the 500+, my old A500 was a A500 kick 1.2 0,5/0,5 MBram.
And it played ALL the games i ever tried on it (-AGA)...

I shoot muself in the foot... I have become very unsertain about what was rare... ECS games i guess is the rare ones...

I have kick 2.04 in my 500+, and i have not found the OCS possability...

I am confused. Until a year ago it was 10 years since last i used any amiga.... And i started back up again with the A1200, exactly where i left it...