A2000 Upgrade Info and Advice Needed Please

Hi Everybody

First post from me so hope i'm in the right place, i'm an amiga nutjob who once owned a simple A500 back in 1992 with an external drive and a 1084 monitor, sometime I added a homebrew hard drive to the side with (gasp) 32mb! I used to write demo's and intro's and was a big fan of loads of games and lost many a week to Pinball Dreams and IK+ and had the pleasure of meeting Archer Maclean at R3Play last November. Sometime in 199? I packed it up into storage and got it out a few times over the years and recently it came back out for a new years eve retro games party and it all still worked!

Anyway, I always wanted an A2000, a friend had one but I could never afford one and recently i've been rekindling my love of all things Commodore and i've just acquired an A2000 with monitor and GVP card inside from eBay. The package is in transit as of today due for delivery tomorrow so I want to gather some advance advice and info.

I'm an A2000 newbie realistically, I don't know the system board or what you can and can't put inside but I know it's got a GVP card with a 50mb drive onboard and by the looks of the screenshots a RAM upgrade as well.

It only has one internal floppy drive so I want to add a second, i've found some on vesalia's website - question 1, are they easy to install or what 'gotchas' should I beware of - cables etc?

Also, what size hard drive can I get upto? I heard a rumour that you can only go as far as about 4gb on those cards or some limitation of the system architecture - eBay has some drives in the less than 10gb SCSI category that might look suitable.

What kind of drives did the A2000 GVP cards take? 68pin? 3.5in or 5.25in?

So, given I can get a suitable drive, what tools will I need to prep the drive and install workbench?

I really am sorry if this has all been asked before I just didn't know the search terms so what I looked for didn't turn up answers that were useful. It there are already topics on here, just links to them would be fantastic or any other info.

Thanks in advance.

James

[dannyp1]

I'll start you off with this. If you really need 2 floppy drives you may want the 2nd to be an external. I say this because depending on the GVP card you are getting you may want to locate your Harddrive where the 2nd floppy would go internally.

When the computer arrives check to see what version of rom it has. You will probably want to make sure it is version 3.1 so that you can run OS 3.1 at a minimum.

Your GVP card should be a 50 pin scsi and 3.5 inch drives work fine.

Thank you, i was thinking the 5.25 bay might be a viable candidate with a bracket but after checking it works i'll open and photo the insides.

From the screenshots in the auction it looks like kickstart 1.3 and workbench installed currently but the package has a 2.04 rom with it which i was consideribg putting on a rom switcher board, i know i can only boot 1 wb from the hd, having both gives me backwards compatibility for games/demo's

[johnim]

hi remove the internal battery as they are time bomb ready to rot the motherboard unless its been changed to the coin type. the gvp cards have 25pin scsi external plugs so you can any extnal scsi device eg cdrom harddrive. the slots inside are zorro 2 so most cards will work. like the picasso2 for graphics

[cosmicfrog]

and without an accelarator you can only have 8Mb of ram

while you got the case open see what ver mobo you have lets hope its not a 4 as you will only have 512Mb of chip ram

basicaly think of the 2000 as a 500 but with zoro and cpu slots and on board clock

[Loedown]

Originally Posted by northern_retro

I'm an A2000 newbie realistically, I don't know the system board or what you can and can't put inside but I know it's got a GVP card with a 50mb drive onboard and by the looks of the screenshots a RAM upgrade as well.

It only has one internal floppy drive so I want to add a second, i've found some on vesalia's website - question 1, are they easy to install or what 'gotchas' should I beware of - cables etc?

Also, what size hard drive can I get upto? I heard a rumour that you can only go as far as about 4gb on those cards or some limitation of the system architecture - eBay has some drives in the less than 10gb SCSI category that might look suitable.

What kind of drives did the A2000 GVP cards take? 68pin? 3.5in or 5.25in?

So, given I can get a suitable drive, what tools will I need to prep the drive and install workbench?

James

Depending on what you want to do, the internal PSU isn't massively powerful, mine started to flake out when I had a GVP accelerator, two floppies, two hard drives and a CD-RW. I've since updated it to an ATX PSU and no more problems.

I updated to Kickstart 3.1 and Workbench 3.1, I don't need KS1.2 / 1.3

Upgraded the memory to 16Mb via the accelerator card ( '030 Combo )

CF Cards x 2 by using SCSI to IDE converters, the SCSI in the A2000 is 50 pin IDC style internally and 25 pin D type externally. In all my years of Amiga use I never clocked up more than 100Mb of internal data, so 4Gb is easily enough and with the two CF cards, it has a capacity of 8Gb total. Depends on what you want to do with it really.

Depending on which GVP card you have, it should be able to take 8Mb of ram using 1Mb 30 pin simms and a 4Gb HDD, bigger hard drives can be used with special software, the limit becomes multiple Gb, I don't know if the old 137Gb clip is a limitation or not?

The A2000 is a great machine, very expandable and options are good, if you don't need the RTC, just remove the battery or replace it with the coin cell / diode mod, I can help you with more instructions.