What is cheapest hard drive option for the A500?

[Schoenfeld]

@Fuzzball
Don't go for "cheap", but for "value for money". The A500 is indeed the cheapest Amiga you can find, and it practically never requires refurb work such as re-capping: The old DIL technology is way less demanding on the components than the reflow soldering process of an SMD oven, which is what A600 and A1200 are suffering from.

Further, the ACA500plus only "looks" expensive at first sight. If you factor in system cost (price of Amiga plus price of this card), you're likely already at a lower price point than an A1200 or A600+memory expansion + CF card adapter (plus the effort of opening the machine for installation).

In terms of compatibility, the ACA500plus allows you to switch Kickstarts and CPU speed as your program(s) need it. You will hardly find any 1990s title that you can't get to work on an A500 with ACA500plus, and you will hardly need to spend any extra money on that system - except if you've tasted blood and want to dive deeper with networking and an even faster CPU (which is likely, but doesn't happen to everyone).

The problem with any lower feature set is that you'll be disappointed at some point. When I've made the first ACA500 in 2013, my prime goal was low price (79,- EUR back then), but I got LOTS of criticism for not-enough-RAM, lack of hot-plug support on the AUX CF slot and the low speed.

When I made the ACA500plus in 2016, I wouldn't have thought that this will be built many years into the future, practically without change. I guess the secret is that it's a very complex thing that is very easy to handle: Very few entry hurdles for beginners, but all options available for expert users and those who evolve into the latter.

If you go for cheap (like memory+IDE), you'll end up buying more equipment (cable, CF card adapter), but will have to abandon that as soon as you only want a single feature on top of that - for example if you want to connect your A500 to the net, you'll have to work with tinker-solutions like Plipbox, or go with the X-Surf-500, which is a low-cost add-on for the ACA500 and ACA500plus - but doesn't work without that accel.

Jens
(obviously biased...)

[Fuzzball]

Related to all this, I decided just to try out a similar config on Mister FPGA (yes I have a Mister but it doesn't give me the nostalgia of using my Amiga 500 which is why I am looking to get a real one). An A500 setup with a 1.3 kickstart patched with scsi support and a hard drive setup. I installed Monkey Island to it using the hard drive installer it has. When running the game it comes up with out of memory error. So I up the chip ram to 1Mb and still get out of memory error. I set chip ram to 1Mb and Fast ram to 8mb. Still out of memory error. I had to up the chip ram to 1.5mb in order for it to run.

The thing is my understanding is you can't have more than 1mb chip ram in a A500. So how did I ever run this game from a hard drive back in the day? I don't even remember having a 512kb expansion in the trapdoor let alone modding it somehow to show as chip ram.

@schoenfeld - I will never want to connect to the net. I want it simply to use how I used it back in the day which was pretty basic stuff except I was the only one of my friends lucky enough to have a hard drive for it back in the day. Even then I never used WHDLoad or anything like that. I just installed WB1.3 on it and a few games that supported installing to hard drive. I don't want any more than that. Buying a ACA500Plus which will cost me more than the A500 seems complete overkill for me. However, I do want a solution that resolves the above issue but the cheapest solution that will definitely solve it. I definitely never modded my A500 back then. I never even opened it. I am also pretty sure I never had a memory expansion in the trapdoor because I do remember later on getting a PC emulator board in there and never had to remove anything. How I got Monkey Island to run off HDD I just can't remember.

Update:
Well I purchased an A500 so I'm fairly committed now. However, my first upgrade (after receiving it and checking it all works) will be to get some sort of Gotek device, preferably an external one as long as the floppy drive works. Then it will be showing my son the greatest computer of all time (in my biased opinion).

The hard drive upgrade will come some time after that so I have some time to decide which way to go. Having forgotten to consider that I also want a Gotek, the ACA500Plus is probably far too expensive.

[Schoenfeld]

Originally Posted by Fuzzball

So how did I ever run this game from a hard drive back in the day?

You were probably running your WB with fewer colours (4 colours were standard for WB1.3). This saves a lot of chip ram.



Jens

[alexh]

Originally Posted by Fuzzball

The thing is my understanding is you can't have more than 1mb chip ram in a A500.

A500+ could have 2MB

Originally Posted by Fuzzball

So how did I ever run this game from a hard drive back in the day?

As already noted it will be your Workbench setup eating all your ChipRAM. Back in the day you would have had to tweak your setup to get it to work. e.g. add one of the "addXXk" programs to the Monkey Island IconX script (e.g. add36k)

[Liqourice]

Back when I was on my A500 with only 1 MB Chip and harddrive (GVP with 4MB Ram) I usually set WB to 4 colours to save chip ram for those games that were hard to start otherwise. Worked just fine.