18 Oct
2009
18 Oct
'09
10:12 p.m.
On 10/17/09, Curt @ Atari Museum <curt at atarimuseum.com> wrote:
Yeah yeah, I know.... What does an Atari guy need
with an Amiga HD.
I have a ton of Lynx developer disks...
Neat.
...all in Amiga format that I need to
read and I have an Amiga 1000, so to make things easier I'd like to add
a Hard Drive onto it for doing the OS load up, using the Cloanto tools
and transfer those disks over to my PC.
If only you had a newer model than the A1000...
Now for a guy who 20 years ago used to get involved in
the numerous
Atari vs. Amiga battles, I find it interesting that there are more hard
disk interfaces for the ST's then you can count, yet for the life of me,
I can't seem to clearly find any Amiga 1000 hard drive interfaces with
the exception of the Pheonix motherboard replacement. Anyone on the
list who's an Amiga fan know exactly where I can find a hard disk
solution for the Amiga (commercial or homebrew) that is still actively
and easily available.
That last part is the kicker - actively and easily available. Back in
the day, there were many A1000 SCSI and "other" interfaces (I have
several on the shelf here). While the A1000 was the ascendant model
for years, it didn't take too many hardware advances in the other
models to really leave the A1000 behind. I held off as long as
possible with a Rejuvinator, so that when I finally retired my A1000
(purchased in 1986) from daily use, it had three add-in patches of
memory (total of 1MB of CHIP, and 3.5MB of FAST), a clock-calendar,
and a SCSI interface.
I think once the A3000 came out, most original A1000 owners had
multiple Amigas. The A1000 plummeted in resale value, so it was
easier to stow it in a closet or give it away - especially if the
keyboard was damaged. Also, lots of A1000s were "traded in" for C=
deals on newer machines. There were different terms for different
deals, but relinquishing the cover of the original owners manual or
handing in the keyboard were two of the techniques to prevent
double-dipping.
Since your stated goal is reading in 880K Amiga floppies, it's
probably easier to find a newer Amiga than to find an A1000 hard disk.
Some A500 disks will work, though you have to install them facing to
the rear. The A590 happens to have room for up to 2MB of RAM as well
(using common 256Kx4 DIP chips), and it rarely hurts to have some
extra memory. I don't recall if the A590 will physically fit because
of case issues, but the interface is pin-for-pin compatible if you can
get around any physical interference problems.
If you can find an A590, you might as well get an A500 to go with it,
unless you happen to have any interesting A1000 peripherals you want
to keep.
Oh... and in case you have older Kickstart disks for your A1000,
version 1.3 is the oldest AmigaOS that can autoboot hard disks. Not
sure if you know that already, but it doesn't hurt to mention it just
in case.
If, as you said later, you can score an A2000, the problem gets
simpler. GVP and Amiga A2091s are somewhat common in used A2000s. I
still have GG2 Bus+ cards if you wanted to put a network interface
into an A2000, but there are cheaper ways of getting bulk data off of
your Amiga to another machine (Kermit, for example, or UUCP - I've
used both quite often in the past).
-ethan