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We Must Save These Amiga 500 Hard Disks | Part 1| Trash to Treasure
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- Äas pĆidĂĄn 14. 08. 2024
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Commodore Amiga Hard Disk time today! Unobtainable upgrades on my budget back in the day but now we have three examples in varying conditions that deserve our attention, let's test them out before we consider restoring them.
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âChapters
00:00 Intro
01:55 Who are PCBWay.com
02:20 Commodore A590 Hard Disk
06:25 Testing the A590 Hard Disk
11:05 Commodore Amiga GVP Hard Disks
13:34 Testing the GVP
17:56 What next for our Amiga disks?
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I love the Amiga version of a Rick Roll there. That's just awesome.
The Haddaway startup is frankly genius.
making things like this on my computer made me feel like a hacker when i was a kid.
Based Ian. Trolling from a distance in time.
these are the most beautiful things EVER - they transformed my life. that is not an exaggeration btw they really did, i was so inspired by 'computing' with my GVP 52MB HDD + 4mb additional ram, the power i felt being able to do so much felt like i could own the world. i've had a successful career in software ever since, and it was set in stone the moment i got one of these when i was about 12
Absolutely. The first time my Amiga booted from one of these blew my mind. Great times!
If was the C64 in 1984 that set the course of my life as a successful software engineer. Thanks mom and dad for buying it for us kids for Christmas!
the Amiga market would of been completely different if all amiga had hard disk, they are completely different machine's with hard disk it was one of down falls, of the machine it could limp on well with out one, even the first mac's could doing small stuff, but try doing that with a PC, any more than dos prompt was as much you could get, and when window came along it was starting to look silly windows1 posable about, version 2 more than floppy drive, barely possibly and when 3 came on the seem, there was no chance with floppy at all, and yet an amiga, could still stand it ground with on one floppy drive, and they could support 3 more floppy drives at the same time, for when one floppy wasn't cutting it? so unless you where time is money sort of person, you just limped on with floppy's, and the fact your machine would work almost or fast or faster than the average PC of the got lost? simple unscientific test boot to desktop's times, PC could easily that minute or two, where as Amiga with a fully bloated OS with all the bell and Wessels, 20 , 30, 40 second, if that, with really stripped down os, 2 or 3 second could easily be archived?
They were great looking the gvps but so much money or that least hard drives were. I paid ÂŁ179 for my amiga 1200s 20mb hard drive even a few years later. Why was everything so expensive at this tine?
Yes! Yes, indeed. My first Amiga was an A500. When I got an A590, I had NO IDEA how fast my machine actually was! Loved it. Still have it, somewhere.
My granny was frightened of anything that was called computers, so that's definitely true, lol
And what is love? The RMC cave taking care of all that old hardware!
Mine thought that computer viruses could infect you because, you know, virus and all that.
Mine was never scared of computers, she just refused to use one she felt she had no use for one, same with owning a cell phone. I took care of mine in her last few years, and did everything she needed to have done on a computer, or phone for her of course this was the late 00's.
My granny would have been frightened by a XZ81 so I guess GVP was right ;-)
Maybe it's just me, but when you typed in the long string of "ooo" it brought a smile to my face and then once your pressed enter and the speech synthesis did it's thing, I couldn't stop giggling. They used to be so much fun, especially the early ones with basic AI you tried to talk to.
This Ian character really haddaway with amigas.
Two drums and a cymbal fall off a cliff âŠđ
Groan...
A clear case that looked like the original case would be cool to show off the internals to curious museum goers.
I remember buying a used Amiga package in 1995, by that time they could be picked up pretty cheaply and it came with a GVP HD+. I'd previously had an A500 and an A500+ and remember the disk swapping days well! I had always lusted after a HDD too and being able to play Monkey Island 2 without swapping floppies was beyond awesome.
I do miss those days when we had to swap the floppies and excitement what's the next big thing this brings. you would've known that when game comes on 2 disks it must be good, 4 - must be awesome and on 11 or 12 disks like MI2 it had to be magical
Going from floppies to an HD was kinda mind blowing at the time. It wasn't really until SSDs came along that I went wow! again. They were bleedin' pricey too, at least at first!
You can quite possibly fix that first disk by lubricating the stepper motor. They dry up easily and are easily accessible for lubrication from the outside of the disk. I've had luck with this for drives of that age myself.
My family had an A500 very early on, it was a computer I respected and loved. The more I learn about them now, the clearer it is that these were well ahead of their time. Music production, arcade gaming, productivity; these computers were strong in all areas. The PC won out in the end but for many of us, nothing beat the Amiga back in the day.
I lusted after the both the GVP drives back in the day, too, and was lucky enough to pick up one of each a few years back. The A530 even has a 286 card in it. However, my most treasured A500 expansion was a Roctec RocHard 500 with a 40 MB drive and 2 Mb RAM that I ordered from Power Computing (by fax) and had sent all the way to Western Australia. It cost nearly AUD800, equal to over 1500!!! in todayâs money.
I used to have one an HD+ - 52mb with 1 meg of ram I remember spending ages setting up my workbench environment on it with a dock in toolmanager. It made the amiga into my first truly usable computer. There was no comparison between an Amiga with a hard drive and one without. The only downside was the noise...
if the western digital drive is not fried those drives with external stepper are usually easily revived by giving the steppermotor a drop or two of oil.
My first thought when I heard it spin up is how nice it sounded. No head banging, grinding, or whining. I'm curious if it could at least be autopsied
Wow the switch! That wouldnât have been on my first to check items! Well done!â€
It would be on mine. Switches, connectors and generally stuff that has to deal with people always fail first.
@@benbaselet2026 Only last heat when I fixed a DDR sheâs compute did I have two broken switches (video is on this channel). And I was amazed because in 34 year of electronics Iâd never had a switch fail - let alone two. And I guess technically here the idiotic connector failed but even then that would not have been my first call of business.
I wouldâve measured the scsi d0 and CI and IO pins were alternating. Since the disk spun up and didnât show up Iâd figured something wrong with the bus. Could be as benign as bad termination or cable.
I wouldnât even know what this switch does, do you? I find it silly to have big switch that can detach the devices from the bus on the front.
Well done on the switch, glad you didnât emulate the fire.
Christmas isnât too far away. Keep your tree WATERED!
Haddaway on startup is just too awesome. Respect. Amiga Rulez.
That HD8+ brings back memories. Mine had "only" 2MB FastRAM in it (2MB felt like a huge amount to me) and I believe the HDD was ~120MB. It made my Amiga feel so much more like a "professional" computer than my friends' stock Amigas (well, stock with 512kb memory upgrade of course). The guy I bought the HD8+ from had just upgraded to the model with the 40MHz '030 in it, so I got it at a good price. I also remember my friends slightly dissing me for my huge external floppy drive (the A1010), but I had the last laugh on that one, because mine ALWAYS worked, and their smaller form factor 3rd party drives tended to be lower quality and sometimes struggle to read some disks. Those were fun times.
Great video. I had the A590 back in the day (20MB). My friends had the GVP (50MB). However, the A590 allowed you to put kickstart 2 ROM files on there and boot into 1.3 or 2.0!
I quite like the idea of an Amiga Hard drive in a 70s style Orange case.
I lusted after the 030 model of GVP HD for years.
I now own one of the Amiga hard drive solutions. As with you my budget could not stretch to purchasing one of these beauties. The family needed food on the table and a roof over their heads.But nearly 40 years on the unanswered memories have been filled. Does it make me feel 25 years old again . No but as my mum said to me when I was a lad "good things come to those you wait" God bless you mom and "party time" has arrived for me . Thank you for opening the gate and letting out the great memories I shall treasure them till I go mad or die which ever comes first.
My parents bought me one of those GVPs with 8 MB ram and 128MB drive (iirc) when I was 14. I'm pretty sure I've never before or since been happier with a gift i got. And it's probably what got me into programming and computing in general shaping the rest of my life. I still have it - in a box somewhere...
Oooooh the memories. The sound of that RLL drive in the A590, I remembered it almost like it was yesterday. I used to marvel that the stepper motor had its spindle exposed! I never expected to hear that sound again. Fantastic stuff! My friend had the GVP (not sure if it was the Plus or 8). I coveted how the GVP followed the lines of the Amiga back then. I still do today. Don't hurt me. That is love.
In 1991 nobody I knew had one of these (or even a PC with a HDD for that matter) - also remember asking a friend what a 'Hard Disk' was that I was seeing advertised with some amiga bundles. I could finally afford one early 1996 - a 200mb unit for my A1200 (still works!!!) Unbelievable how everything has changed in a little of 30 years
That might be the best "bad news" I've ever heard from a tech restoration video.
3:58
i love this back in the day sense of humor, marking on silkscreen saying "amnesia" for no amount of ram expansion
Around 32 years ago I owned a very good and reliable Amiga 500 hard disk. The brand was SupraDrive Amiga 500XP by Supra Corporation. It was 52MB in capacity and it also had RAM expansion. It was made in the US and built like a tank.
I had these as teen back in the early 90s. I actually never knew it had memory on the hardrive caddy. I still remember how expensive 20mb drive use to cost. crazy how technology has progressed in short time. I wish Amiga would of lived on. I taught myself programming with my amiga. Now I work in the game industry. I always look back at Amiga.
On a similar note, way back when I had a 486 running Windows 3.11, I had the Miami Vice theme tune on my start-up sequence. 1 minute each time I booted into Windows
I had a...strange HD for my Amiga 500. I bought it secondhand through a BBS listing in my area in 1989 or so, and it came in 2 parts: a sidecart that contained only the SCSI interface and boot-roms, and the drive itself was in a HUGE boxlike container connected to the SCSI sidecart by a thick cable, and was SO loud when powered on the fan overpowered the sound of a vacuum cleaner and accessing the drive was so loud that you could hear it chittering like a typewriter literally 2 rooms away. There was also some kind of conflict with Kickstart 1.3 and this drive's boot-rom so that when starting up from HD it would hang on a grey screen for a full minute before finally loading Workbench. The only good thing was that booting from floppy bypassed this automatically for loading games from floppy. I installed every multi-disc monster like Ultima VI on the HD of course, to save my sanity. I don't believe there was any room for RAM expansion on this HD, I suspect it was something cobbled together as soon as Kickstart 1.3 was released and thus a very early HDD product for the A500. I ended up selling the entire Amiga setup to finance my first PC in 1991 or so. I wish I could have afforded to keep it.
The GVP hard drive transformed my Amiga usage - bought a 52Mb drive in 90/91 (which annoyingly didn't work with the 4MB expansion I bought two weeks before)...I remember filling that drive within about 6 weeks and then bought another GVP with a 120Mb drive and 4MB RAM, VXL030 accelerator and 2Mb 32bit RAM and it was an amazing transformation (and also wallet draining). Worth every penny though!
I have to admit I laughed my head off at the musical start-up and your reaction, lol. That was funny as hell!
Ah the GVP A530, stuff of dreams indeed!
I sent the GVP HD8+ in about four years ago so lovely to see it make an appearance. The original hard drive was made by Quantum and was 170MB and had 161MB of space when formatted! I bought the Apple SCSI 250MB drive off Ebay years ago but I remember having problems that weren't related to the faulty game switch. It cost me something like ÂŁ340 - ÂŁ380 in 1994 without any memory!
I got quite a bit of life out of it when I got my A1200 as well. There was a time when 2.5" hard drives were really expensive and I didn't want to put a 3.5" hard drive inside, the Zappo PCMCIA hard drives weren't available at the time either. My dad made me something called a ParNET cable. I'd have my Amiga A500 setup with the actual GVP hard drive in this video and my friend did me a disk which would mount the hard drive and share it down the parallel port to my A1200 and I got something like 50k per sec. Happy days :)
What is love. seeing a working A590 and Hard Disc . Don't hurt me. When your beloved PSU pops.
My mum's partner back in the day bought a HD+ with the full 8 megs and a 80MB drive. I always wondered how much it set him back in 1992 and now I have a fair idea. I sold it back in 2000/1 and I do occasionally wonder if it is still in use by someone. It was a great if noisy unit, although I did want a 530+.
I never owned the hard drive but I still have my optical drive. What a game changer that was back in the day. I got it off a guy that only had it a couple of months for ÂŁ20.
So I made this upgrade a few years back using a GVP A530. Had a lot of fun with that, but one thing that always bothered me was if i wanted to switch SD cards I had to take it all apart. If your 3D printing shells. maybe add a slot for a SD card extension? Would be a lot more covenant.
"Baby don't hurt me" was coming from the power supply. ;-)
Great video as always.
Now I need a ZuluSCSI to add to my HD8+ if only to quieten the noise from the drive in mine. Thanks for providing proof the Zulu will work just fine.
Hey @rmc
A small hint (timestamp 7:31), A few years ago i saw a method to get those drives working again. The drive sounded to me like the stepper motor for the heads (black small motor housing) just stuck. The lubrication converts into some kind of glue after all this years. try cleaning the driveshaft and put some new lubrication onto the drive shaft. that might bring the drive back to life again. I fixed 2 amiga hdds with that method and a mfm hdd from a pc.
I got my A590 thanks to some mistakes made by Kay&Co sales staff, who had two of them amongst a pile of Canon bubble printers at their disposal shop.
The Canon printers were being sold for ÂŁ150, and all the boxes had ÂŁ150 price stickers on them - so I got the A590 for that price - despite it being ÂŁ499.99 in the catalogue.
I populated the RAM slots with "spare" RAM from the parts bin at work, where I was working for the R&D department, programming EEPROMs at the time.
A few years later, the same parts bins supplied a 200 MB "MFM" HDD.
At one point, my boot-up sound was a 1 minute recording of a DC10 landing - put on to "Own" a friend who kept coming around and going straight for the Amiga without even bothering to see if I was awake (shift work). Wired via a QED passive pre-amp, to a 110watt (RMS) Crimson Electric power amp and some big Wharfedale speakers.
The amp was set to max - I found him cowering under the table, thinking a large plane was about to crash into the house.
My A500/A590 is still in my loft - I keep meaning to bring it down and see if it still works.
Ohhhh, the memories come flooding back. Like most I couldnât afford one of those HD beauties either.
The sound of the harddrive whirring, buzzing and clicking away is part of the experience.
I remember that edition of 'Amiga Shopper' - I'm certain I used that when deciding what A500 HD to buy. Settled on the A590 in the end, still have it and it still - just!!! - works. When it wants to!
I still have that edition, along with several more. Great memories when skimming back through them.
3 Amiga hard drive expansions clearly is love and now you're swapping them out for ZuluSCSI's, they will hurt you no more.
Oh, the memories. I remember how excited I was when mine came in the mail.
Wow the memories! I had the GVP Series II HD+ with 50MB HD, 2MB RAM, and the PC286 board. I think I paid $500 in maybe 1992 for everything but the 286 card. I don't recall what I paid for that, I needed it to run a FORTRAN compiler for a math class at school. It was only a few years later that I sold it all and bought a 486DX2/66 PC...I regret selling it to this day!
Best part of the video 10:21, so satisfying đ
Really enjoyed that, I always wanted the version with the 030 accelerator. Which I picked up a few years ago. I even managed to get the 286 add-on for it last year. I'd have had any of the others as well, but when you're dreaming of kit you will never own you may as well dream big.
I never saw one of these outside of shops and magazine adverts. Around 98 I bought a 1gb pc drive and used that instead, the workbench install disk wouldn't work and I had to change the program in shell to get it to install. I remember installing everything I could and using apps like directory opus like they were designed for. I really miss my a1200, apart from the HD and extra disk drives, it had an official monitor and extra ram with a processor speed upgrade, printer. When I went to uni I'd left it all boxed in cupboard in my room, I came back and it had gone. My dad had given it charity shop and wouldn't even apologise saying I wasn't using it, the most frustrating part the charity didn't sell on electronics and would have just binned it. I know have retropi with amiga emulation and also pimiga but it's not the same. The amount of videos I see about the amiga and I instantly miss what once was.
Holy moly, that's a great machine to lose. When I went to uni, I really enjoyed playing on the A1200 when I came home for the summer. In the second year I bought a PC for uni (not sure I got much use out of it apart from playing games!) and when I next came home, my A1200 had suffered the same fate as yours. 120mb HDD and a RAM expansion we bought the machine with (may have been 2mb or 4mb, can't remember).
In the early 90s, my friend and I used my Amiga 500 to write our ezine. I remember the third issue was completed and the hard drive crashed and we lost it all and had to start over. Maddening, but those were great times.
Wow, the memories! I have one of these, 40MB HDD, the 286 card with MS-DOS installed to one of the HDD partitions, and 4MB fast RAM added. Plus the SCSI ports on the back got lots of use when I added a Zip Drive.
As I recall, the speed of the HDD was said to be 3MB/s. But I don't recall where I read or was told this, and I had no tool to put that to the test.
My A500+ eventually ceased booting, but I think it was around 1999 at this point so I didn't have much practical use for it anymore. I wonder if it was a faulty switch also?
Hehe I posted my comment then scrolled down and saw yours and thought it was mine. I had the 286 card as well. Was a great machine.
â@@StevenBloomfield Wow!
Not quite the same but when I worked in a computer shop in the early 90s I got an 80Mb HDD for my Amiga 1200 and it transformed using the machine. I was (and still am) a coder and made music and art, and being able to load everything super fast and not have to swap disks around was just amazing. Plus I installed Super Stardust and Alien Breed Tower Assault on it :-)
I had the SupraDrive 40MB on my A500 when I was in the Navy stationed in Japan. I believe it had an additional 2MB of RAM as well.
Vladislav? ;)
Yes, that song is a true ear worm. I lusted after one of those drivesfor my 500 back in the day, and I am looking forward to the next instalment.
Had the HD+ with a 52 MB Quantum drive, and also added 2 MB RAM in there. Oh, and I yanked out the fan to reduce the noise, worked like a charm. A friend of mine had the A530 with the 68030 CPU, and a second daisy chained drive just lying on top, no cover or anything. Good times.
For a while I had an A500 with kickstart 1.3/2.0 and the HD8+. It used to belong to a musician. The disk was the 45MB and it made such a difference to the speed of the 500. I really really regret giving it away now.
@8:58 thank you for that. I liked the video for the Magic Smoke!
I used to have a SCSI in an 8088 PC That I got used and it had issues on being recognized due to issues in that old PC case not having enough on the 12V line to it. I changed to a better power supply and it worked when it could spin the platters. You did say it didn't have enough power in the ' test brick ' so if you can find something that can do higher amps on the 12V line, it may actually work. This was definitely an interesting look into older tech and how they did black magic to get external storage into systems that were not designed to use the storage of the ' Big Iron ' systems and may have influenced what we have today for storage.
Ian was clearly the name of the third Butabi brother as played by Jim Carrey on SNL missing from the Night at the Roxbury movie.
I didn't realise the hard drives failed so often. My old dinosaur drives still seem to work fine so far.
I ended up with 2 HDD units over the years. Both had the Quantum Fireball 52. That was never going to cut the mustard so I fitted them out with 1GB drives which was huge at the time. MUUUUCH better!
I'm from the US, and I kept my Commodore 128 well into the early 90's before jumping to a used 386 DOS PC with 20MB HD, and was like Holy Hell yeah compared to having to wait for a 1571 floppy disk to load.
I bought one of those Hard Drives for my Amiga 500... if I recall correctly, it was $600 for a 20MB (MB, not GB) in the 1990s... that was quite expensive, but a huge upgrade at the time.
I had an ancient 40 MB Seagate HD on my 1000 that was donated by a customer who updated to a 105 MB Quantum. It suffered from something we called "stiction" where the heads stuck to the surface when the drive spun down. I could get it started by poking the spindle on the bottom of the drive with a small screwdriver. I mention this because when stalled, the spindle motor could be drawing more power and overloading the power pack.
There is an A500 HD8+ Series II sitting behind me as we speak - like you, I was far too poor (well, far too young!) to afford one back in the day, so when one popped up on eBay, I couldn't resist. I've been searching for the GVP PC286 card since..
God I LOVE those GVP hard drives. My dad had got one for his A500 back in the early 90s, complete with 4MB of RAM and the 286 expansion. The disk itself had gone completely bad by maybe 2006 or so but with a SCSI2SD it's humming along quite happily these days.
I remember seeing people with the A590 at copy parties early on in my life as an Amiga 500 owner, being so jealous of them. Later on I did get an HD of my own, a Trumpcard 500, it was a blocky thing that didn't really follow the form of the Amiga at all, leaving me once again somewhat jealous of my friends who all got GVP drives (or at least something that looked very much like it), but still, it got the job done, which I guess was the most important part :)
Unfortunately, when I decided to dust of the old Amiga a few years ago the HD was one of the many things that didn't work properly, I did get the computer to recognize it once, but after that there was just nothing, not sure if it was the port on the Amiga or the Trumpcards controller that wasn't working. I did have an old SCSI card in one of my old PCs though so at least I managed to mount the disk there and extract all the data from it, so now I have an image file that I can use from an emulator, would've been a shame losing most of my old source code from the Amiga era.
Kudos to these engineers as these cases/drives are much smaller than the Supra Drives I had for my. Atari 8bit and ST
Nice video. I really wish the ST was given a side bus like the Amiga 500, and at the same time I wish the A500 had a DMA HDD port like the ST. Hmmm
Around 1991 I bought an ACSI to SCSI converter built in a 50 pin external SCSI plug. Inside it used an FPGA which was cutting edge technology back then. It cost ÂŁ100. Luckily the first hard drive I bought was one of the few used hard drives I have bought which actually worked. I think that it was a 20MByte.
Boot up a PC with Linux and run ddrescue to try to make image of the disc that failed to read, will show if it is possible to easy get the data from the drive. Don't forget to check SCSI termination settings as those can mess things up if set the wrong way.
Wow, this was a blast from the past, I had GVP A500-HD+ back in the days. The first game I played from it was Willy Beamish from Dynamix (Sierra).
That game took 12 floppy disks, and the speed loading it from HDD was amazing at the time.
What is love? The HD8 i owned back in the day! Thanks for the cool video!
I have a GVP HD8+ that I bought 1992 with a Quantum 120MB drive and 2MB Ram. I paid 7500 SEK for it back then. It's still working perfectly except for the RAM that seems to have failed.
Don't worry, I've made a backup of it in case the drive eventually fails.
Amiga is love. Amiga is life.
You really get your hands on some cool old gear.
I grew up with PC's, so the Amigas etc I love to eat h and learn about the other machines I'd only heard.of growing up.
Back in the day I had friends with pcs but I had an amiga, apart from pc having a HD as standard the amiga kicked there backsides in every other way. I was devastated when commodore went bust and just disappeared.
@@sambra1979 you are right that the amiga was better, but by the time when Commodore went bust, the PC had catched up and with (S)VGA and a proper soundcard was the machine for the future. I was lucky enough to have access to both (we owned a Pc and my best friend had an amiga 500 and later a 1200. We loved both machines and could compare them.
Had a GVP around 1991 with 52MB HD, and 2MB RAM, upgraded the 500 with Kickstart 2.0.
These prices tell us exactly why the PC took over in the early 90's. In early 93 I wanted to buy an Amiga 1200 but buy the time I added a hard drive, a decent monitor and printer etc to an Amiga 1200 it was starting to cost 486 money. In 1989 I suppose an amiga with one of these hard drives had ones wouldn't have cost that much more than a 386 with VGA and a hard drive if at all so it made sense in 1989/90.
I remember when I managed to get a HD for my A500... That 40 *MB* disk was life changing!
I had a 40mb one that my parents got me as a present and I loved it. But being a stupid kid I managed to mess up so many sectors that the disk was barely useable.
@@IdiotRace how did you manage to damage it?
I think I had the one on the left back in 1992. I also had 4MB of ram installed in it as well as a 50MB SCSI drive and loved it. Also, this, to me, was the golden age of computing. :) I am a hands on IT professional for the last 23 years but this era was uniquc.
Good video! I have the GVP A530 Turbo with the 286 board. Just ordered a ZuluSCSI to get it back up and running with a new power supply
Thanks, these really bring back memories. I had entirely forgotten about these hard drive expansions and in particular that some of them had CPU accelerators as well.
While these were around the Amstrad PC users were installing Hard Cards, another computing blast from the past.
I only ever saw one of these once, but it did look a bit like the future.
These days I rock an A1200 with accelerator, 8mb and an internal 3" 260 Mb hard drive - but those HDs for A500s still manage to look snazzy...
I LOVED my A500+ HDD. It had a 60MB HDD and 8MB memory. 8 MB !! It attached tto the side port. I had a megalosound sampler and a video capture interface. OH, AND a MIDI interface. Marvellous. Saadly the HDD power supply died. I still have it somewhere. I'll have to dig itt out!! :)
Me too when I looked at the magazines back in the days, i dreamt to have one of these, the gvp with the accelerator 030 too was nice
Oh how I wanted one of these. A 20 mb drive cost more than my A500+ but there were always ads in Amiga Power teasing these beauts
I had an Archos Overdrive for my A1200 back in the day... completely changed the computing experience. Booting up into workbench was so fast compared to using a floppy, and all of a sudden my multi-disk games (Monkey Island 2 and Fate of Atlantis) were so enjoyable to play again.
Interesting stuff, looks like your 3D printed case is already pre-yellowed :D
Power supply lets the magic smoke out, ah well these things happen, but when Haddaways What Is Love plays every time rebooting an Amiga, that's unbearable :D
The ultimate retrobrighting challenge đ
So glad I found this CZcams channel - I use to have an Amiga 500 when i was a school kid - Mine came with Shadow of the Beast with a T-Shirt in it - Very hard game as you only had one life - The soundtrack to the game was amazing - Specially that the game came on two floppy 1.44MB disks - Which means the 20MB Hard drives - would hold about 15 / 18 games i guess - I use to read Amiga Format - I loved that computer use to make my own games too -
Using Amos and i used Action Replay too -
I also had the CB64 - really enjoying your videos -
Do you have a BBC Model B computer - I use to have a game called Revs on it -
I also had an Atari 400 - Have you done any videos on that computer ? - That was my very 1st computer - :)
Good memories! That SOTB T-shirt is very collectible these days. Iâve not covered the 400 but youâll find a series on the 800XL. Welcome to The Cave!
Lovely, I fondly remember these as my grandpa had a late interest in computers (and luckily for me, the Amiga :) ). I recently let my A1200 be recapped and the internal harddisk was rescued, but according to the recapper, barely holding on. :) Fjew
When I first had my A500 those were insanely out of my budget (was only 8 or 9), , but later on I got hold of a second hand GVP w/o RAM, using the money earned on my paper round.
Anyway, I was still drooling over the 8+ with a 286 card... but those were still crazy expensive, and once I could finally afford it, the 286 cards were nowhere to be found... I remember imagining how cool it would be to be able to run two different computers in one.
So, instead I spent my saved up money on second hand CD32, SX-1, 8 MB RAM module and a 340MB laptop IDE HDD instead. That ended up being a quite good workstation after all.
Fast forward to today, I have a Pi400 that runs lots of different systems and runs circles around any of the Amigas available back then.
One could say that a MiSTer would be cooler, but in comparison it's a tad expensive, and it seems to require more maintenance, having to update cores as they're developed. That happens in the background without any interaction with the emulators. Besides, I like the integrated keyboard design, reminds me of my A500 đ
I had a HD+ a few months before it was officially released, and it cost me nothing. I was at a computer convention and was among half a dozen or so people chosen to do some testing for them, and we were allowed to keep them.
I have a couple videos on my channel for the Zulu and SCSI2SD that definitely follow the âdonât do as I do.â Glad you had better luck than me, even with your melt down, heh.
That first HD unit where psu had meltdown - it is possible that HD was not getting enough power to operate correctly. May be a good idea to try again with a stronger psu and measure voltages to make sure they are within spec.
LOL Amnesia! Love it. However, that's a fun joke, not serious in the slightest, I don't think Amiga Shopper would approve.
I think you should leave "What is love?" On that Amiga for people to experience when they visit the cave, haha.
Great episode. I never had a hard disk for my Amiga 500, just the basic 500, it's such a shame that first disk you tried didn't work, and you blew the power supply! That was painful.
Keeping Hadaway enabled is part of computer preservation. Along with some resident program that causes a reboot once every few minutes.
When I got my 500+ I bought one of these with 8MB of ram and I think the 52MB hard drive. It was my investment into learning 3D animation while I studied advertising. Brilliant system. I lusted after the accelerator version as well.
Great stuff it would be so cool not only to save these but also to make New ones in the same format but with a lot more speed and capacity.
@@drphilxr Actually adding an IDE68k+8MB Fast RAM (or an accelerator card) you have the trapdoor expansion free. You can print a modified trapdoor cover to hold an IDE2CF or IDE2SD slightly tilted, so you can access CF or SD from the underside without openening the Amiga to swap the cards. You can also integrate switches there (f.e. switch kickstart).
These old expansions are realy cool for retro feeling, if you owned one of these back in the days. Also they are great for not-accelarated Amigas, as they use DMA. But they make the Amiga less handy, so I prefer internal solutions (I only had big box Amigas back in the days, A2000 and A4000, so no Retro Feeling for me anyway with theese external solutions).
Anyway, if you want the old external solution for Retro Feeling, with SCSI2SD, there should be added a sound solution, making the coresponding sound of an old harddisk (sychronised to HD-LED to make head moving klicks of course). Maybe with volume adjustment to just get a bit of retro feeling without Tinitus...
My first harddisk was for my Amiga 500. It was 105 mb (yes, mb) and cost $750. I loved it! Thought I had all the room in the world. lol.
Until 1988 DOS only supported 32MByte partitions. The only people using hard drives larger than 100MBytes would have been data centres. In 1991 the company I work for bought three 330MByte drives costing ÂŁ3000 each. They were close to being a two man lift as well.
@@MrDuncl It was 1991 and it was 105 mb. There are some references to hard drives of this size (and more) online. Feel free to check this out yourself. Thanks.
@@bubblehead78 Yes. I was talking about pre 1988 regarding the 100MByte drives. Drive technology was advancing rapidly in the 1990s.