Cheap mass storage on A500/500+/1000/2000
 

I apologise if this is in the wrong section.

I was watching a video about a mass storage device for the Apple IIGS which is now available, can use USB flash drives and is relatively inexpensive - the Booti, video linked to below for anyone curious.

It got me thinking. Yes, the 600/1200/3000/4000 and tower versions where applicable all have inbuilt controllers (either IDE or SCSI in the case of the 3000), but what about the 500, 500+ and 2000?

Sure, there are options for adding HDDs or other storage, and using something like Compact Flash or whatever with an adapter, but if you don't already have one of these options, they're a bit expensive.

Surely it would be possible to create an inexpensive device along the lines of the Booti that connects via the Zorro or Zorro II expansion bus - I know the Zorro and Zorro II buses are very much alike and a simple adapter can be used to make Zorro II devices work with a 500/500+/1000. Given anything with a Zorro 3 expansion bus will have IDE or SCSI, it seems to me it would only need to be Zorro/Zorro II.

Video I mentioned about the Booti: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJwdbrkOMXI

Aca500+ is a great solution to this problem, including legit 3.1KS and WB 3.1 as well as other goodies for a very fair price.

Irixlabs has a Zorro II SD card reader. They make some solid gear in my experience.

Edu Arana recently completed the parallel port SD card reader project that was featured here by its original author some years ago.

edit: Seems Irixlabs has made a comeback, at least their website is working again and I found stock expected on some Amiga stores.

Booti appears to be a floppy emulator. I guess it's not that different than a Gotek, which is quite affordable.


You are right though, the A500 expansion port could be used for a HDD expansion (and has been in the past) but I'm not sure how much utility it would be without additional ram. You wouldn't have WHDload for example.

You can do all kinds of other things than WHDLoad on the Amiga though. I do agree that adding more RAM makes these things nicer, but you can get many things done (one at a time) with 512/512k.

Nope, HDD emulator, limited to 32MB per "device" due to limitations in the Apple IIGS, but you can have a number of these devices, S7D1 to S7D11. Even the A1000 or KS 1.2 would be able to have larger devices.

How much use it would be depends on what you want to do. Sure WHDLoad wouldn't be practical, but it would be useful for someone who wants to run say DPaint and have that and Workbench and anything else you want stored on the virtual HDD...

The Amiga's floppy connector is so slow that it's not very nice as mass storage. I think there were some tests done with a Gotek and either FF or HxC, but as far as I remember it, the performance was quite terrible. Well, floppy speeds.

What about the 'sdbox' solution? That looks really interesting and useful.

https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=102642

Ah, actually the Edu Arana one is an sdbox implementation. I guess the previous project just disappeared when its author lost interest.

Yes, exactly, which is why I posted this, as speeds with a device like this should be much better than the speed of a device plugged into the floppy drive interface or the parallel port. I'd say it would be as fast as the Amiga can work with the data, as I doubt a plan 7MHz 68000 could work at the full speed the Zorro bus can work at. And neither the 68000 or the Zorro bus would max out the speeds of most of the devices likely to be used with it.

That does look interesting, but what I'm proposing would be an autoconfig device and should be able to boot when used with Kickstart 1.3 or later, and should be much quicker.

Somebody could/should clone something like the M-TEC AT-500:

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/mtecat

I've got one of these and it is nearly perfect - it's got IDE, memory and a kickstart switcher. The only thing I wish it had was a switch to disable the memory (but there are jumpers for that, so I could add a switch myself, I suppose)

DMA seems to be underrated. Back in the day, the A590 and GVP Series II controllers easily did 1.5MB/s using DMA on a 68000 based machine. :-) With Guru ROMs, you could get close to the Z2 maximum of 3.5MB/s.

But hardly anyone does DMA expansions (it is not easy) and hardly any A500 CPU socket turbo supports DMA from the ZorroII bus.

Multiple internal IDE + RAM solutions exist for the 68000 socket.

Externally you could search for a HC508, which has all that + a fast 68000 on top.

Thanks, the HC508 does look interesting! (It doesn't have a Kickstart switcher, though)

EDIT: Oh, I see it does have 512K Flash ROM for a Kickstart.

Leave 1.3 on your motherboard and have 3.1 in the 508's ROM and you can toggle the kickstart from the boot menu.

Yeah, I saw that after my comment.

There is also the Classic 520 - which provides a 680EC20 CPU:

https://amigastore.eu/722-classic-52...celerator.html

Most of the A500 HDD expansions had simm slots for RAM expansion. My GVP HD8+ with 80Mb HD had a whopping 4Mb in it. This would have been 1993 maybe.

You want something like this?
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=76866

That's pretty neat, but not quite what I mean. If I had the required knowledge and skills, I'd knock together something myself, because surely if a device for the Apple II can be made so inexpensively and looking reasonably simple, the same sort of thing could be made for our beloved Amiga. And to address what some have said about RAM, yes, perhaps this could be included, as my understanding is that adding RAM would be simple, but this would raise the cost and complexity.

The mrmkl IDE68K is the cheapest "high speed" mass storage option for the A500. It adds an IDE interface and can be combined with MEM68K for 8MB of FastRAM. If you can find someone selling them today they were about £80 for the two. It is completely open source so in theory someone could manufacture their own.