Amiga 1000 Expansion Options

[Amigamia]

Hello folks,

So I bought an Amiga 1000 with no kb or mouse (It came with this cable that connects to a PC parallel port?). I used to have an Amiga 500 in the past so I don't know much about the 1000. Searching on the web for ways to expand it I came across a few things. The phoenix board, which is very hard to find for sale (fully populated), The Rejuvenator, which is rare as a dodo bird, and then I noticed this comment "Many boards designed for the A500 works perfectly in the A1000, either connected to the side expansion port or to the 68000 socket". But how? Which ones? Does anyone have any knowledge of which is the best to use? I would love to use one which gives an option to add an IDE or SCSI interface so I can use a hard drive. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

[KThunder]

The adspeed accelerator and other accelerators which plug into the 68000 socket work correctly for the most part. The a1000 has a daughter board that gets in the way of some things.

There are hacks for adding roms and stuff too. The side expansion on the 1000 is identical to the 500 but it is on the opposite side. so any device connected to it (hard drive adapters, ram expanders, accelerators) will be backwards. Which isn't usually a problem.

BTW your avatar picture thingie is quite stress releaving

[gertsy]

Dunno about the A1000, but your Avatar could upgrade her top.

[smerf]

Hi,

@Amigamia,

OK, I used to have a A1000, on the front panel in the center is a removable piece of plastic, under this you can put either a 256k or a 512k expansion board. On one side of the Amiga 1000 there is a slot for an expansion buss, there should be a long slender piece of plastic that can be removed to show this port. Here I used a Phoenix 2 megabyte ram expansion card and a Supra hard drive board. If you take off the top cover on the inside you will see the 68000 chip, by following the instructions of the boards manual you can plug in various different boards, but watch what you buy some of the boards need the sockets on which other boards plug in. For IDE I would check out Buddha to see what they have, for scsi, I liked the Supra and probably go with that even today. The 68000 plug ins, the rom board is nice but I cannot remember the name, it came with roms so you could ditch the kickstart disk and also added I believe one meg of memory. I liked the 2 meg expansion board and kept my Kickstart disk, it kept other computer people from getting into my Amiga because I always kept my Kickstart disk with me. Hoped some of this helped.

By the way when I moved from Florida up to Pennsylvania for my new job, I forgot that my A1000 was out in the garage, I told my wife to throw out all the old computers in the garage, and guess what she did and my C64, C128 and all the software.

Well so is life.

smerf

[TrevorDick]

You might want to ask Steve Jones of Cluster UK (and iMica/AROS) fame.  He has an expanded A1000 with internal HDD (laptop type) and many other features.  You will need an i/o extender (just an i/f connector really) to use Zorro II card in the side expansion port.  We connected a GVP 2008 HC+8 with 8MB ram and SCSI HDD for his presentation of the A1000 running the Jay Miner interview at the upcoming VCF Exhibition at Bletchley Park next weekend.

TrevorD

[KThunder]

the one accelerator i mentioned above is adspeed, by ICD, they also make adide and adscsi. If you can find them these are really good because they are very very small.

I had a ram expander in one of my 1000s called the insider2meg by dkb. That worked really well but I had to add a 68000 socket extender to use it. The extender is like a 68000 socket with really long pins. some other accelerators use a similar device.

[JimS]

On my 1000 I used to have an external case called the Phoenix Toolbox. It had two Zorro II slots, where I had a CBM 2058 RAM card and a Trumpcard SCSI controller... with a whopping 40MB HD. ;-)  Over on Aminet there are plans for a do-it-yourself single Zorro slot adapter that works on the 1000. I also had the DKB kwikstart internally so I could skip the Kickstart disk and autoboot directly to the HD.

[Amiga_Nut]

You don't say if it is a 512 or 256k machine. First and most important thing to get if you have a 256k A1000 is the 256k upgrade cartridge that fits behind the panel next to the floppy. This is a chipram upgrade and 256k only of chip ram is pretty broken.

Any of the CSL or PP&S 030/020 internal accelerators will work too, but if you see one for sale and it has no 32bit ram don't buy it as it is useless.

[Amigamia]

Thanks guys! It has one of those memory expansions in the front under the plastic cover so I assume it is the 256K one. All those expansions you guys mention are hard to find on ebay or other places. Any place where I can still find parts for sale? My main goal is to somehow add a drive so I can store games on it with WHDload.

[tone007]

Argh.  A1000 is the worst possible choice for WHDload, 512KB chip is a real pain to deal with.

[Amigamia]

Argh.  A1000 is the worst possible choice for WHDload, 512KB chip is a real pain to deal with.

Really? Not even with a memory expansion? What would be the best setup?

[tone007]

I'm going on the assumption that a game that requires 1MB chipram won't WHDLoad on a system with less than that, but now that I think about it I'm not 100% sure WHDLoad can't use some of your fastram for that. I'd assume no, but I'm sure there's an expert around who could confirm either way.

KS2.0 or higher is also required for WHDLoad, so that's one more step you'd have to take on the A1000 to even try it, though it doesn't seem too tough to do.

I always seemed to have the best luck with WHDLoad on 2MB chipram machines, whether an A500+ or an A1200/A3000/A4000.  68000 isn't ideal for some WHDLoad stuff either, '010 is the minimum if you'd like to be able to quit your current game without rebooting, and certain WHDLoad games I've tried used utilities that seemed to require an '020, never looked too far into that one though.  Stuffing an '030 accelerator in one of my 500's took care of some of those issues.