A Modern SSD in a Gaming Computer From 1987?!
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- Опубліковано 24 сер 2019
- Follow along as I attempt to install and configure a modern Solid State Storage device (SD Card) in my vintage Amiga 500, a powerful gaming computer from 1987. I'm being a little loose with my usage of the term "SSD" but it technically fits - compared to the old, slow mechanical drive I start with in this video, this SD card is lightning fast and has no moving parts. I hope you enjoy, and please leave any questions or comments below!
- More info about the Amiga 500: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_500
- Buy your own SCSI2SD: store.inertialcomputing.com
- All about the game featured at the end of the video: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of... - Наука та технологія
Just a couple of notes for those who weren't around or technically inclined.
1st (and out of order to the video) Anti static bags are conductive so don't use as an insulator. Some more so than others depending on the type but make it a rule don't use to insulate.
In 1985 when the A1000 was released hard drives were not very common on systems in the home due to them being very expensive. However by 1987 hard drives were becoming the norm on both PC and Mac (although both systems were still available without hard drives as they were still rather expensive) and as such in 1987 when the A500 was released the A2000 was also available which was a big box Amiga (much like the PC form factor) and it included a hard drive as standard. The A500 was a system aimed at the cost conscience person so adding the cost of a hard drive would have taken it out of that bracket.
The PC card that could be added to the GVP card was not a complete PC on a card. It was a 286 CPU and some memory, with the Amiga handling the ports (serial, parallel etc...) IO, Video graphics, sound and additional memory. It allowed the Amiga to run PC software code natively on the card, with the Amiga emulating the rest of the PC while still being able to run Amiga software at the same time.
I'm unsure about the GVP drive detection and partitions but the FFS (Fast File System) in the OS should be able to see up to 4GB (although I think I remember there being something quirky about going over 2GB) However PFS (Professional File System) goes much larger, faster and more reliable (if a file gets corrupted in FFS the whole drive needs to be verified while PFS handles it much better and quicker)
Workbench 1.3 had a Hard drive install disk (separate from the OS) available which would have installed the OS using the GUI. The complete OS was on 2 Discs (3 including the HDD install disc)
Wrong, the A2000 didn't include a hard drive as standard. You're thinking of the A2000HD.
@@endwigast5212 - Ok man but no need to be rude, perhaps he didn't know, but now we do thanks to you. :D I has an A1000, an A500, and an A2000 and remember adding a hard drive which made everything run so much faster.
@@BillAnt I'll be rude if I damn well please.
@@endwigast5212 My understanding was that all A2000's came with a HDD and the difference in the name was that the 2000HD were standard HDD sizes direct from Commodore (although the HD designation was never used consistently). This was due to the fact that HDD prices at that time fluctuated wildly so the 2000HD cost a set amount as Commodore had sourced the HDD's while dealers had to source there own HDD's in the non HD version of the 2000. While the A1500 was a rebadged (not always) A2000, not sold with the SCSI card (not always) or any HDD (not always) so the A1500 had 2 x FDD no HDD as standard and in typical style you could add an HDD if you liked.
I also read that some dealers were removing the HDDs when it was profitable to do so and sell them on, but they weren't supposed to.
The case design of the A500 looks much more endearing than the A1200 to me.
I had A1200 and I think that A500 looked nicer with all the smooth edges. Also the case seemed to be made of better quality materials compared to A600 and A1200 Amigas.
@@mattx5499 Absolutely true for me.
@@mattx5499 - The A500 looked and felt sturdier, and of course the great memories. The A1200 came out too late, never picked one up. Had the original A1000, A500, and A2000, then stopped playing with them in the early 90's.
I can respect that ,it's a matter of style choice. I personally preferred the more compact but more expandable A1200 and rode around London with it in my backpack. But there are crazy people that like the A600 but we all know they need help.
I had a Amiga 500 just like your own ... :) Except I didn't have the external HDD and memory module - I only ever had the memory expansion board ( with a on-board clock that never worked from what I recall, but didn't care much about it anyways then ), and a external floppy. So many memories from that computer, so many awesome games ... Thank you for this really fantastic video! Having a HDD then was a dream that never became a reality for my Amiga, It was so nice seeing how that experience might have been !
Aww man, thank you for this lovely comment! I know my videos are pretty basic / amateurish, but if I can help even one or two people reconnect with some happy memories it's all worthwhile.
I had the original rectangular metal box GVP hard drive when it first came out running my BBS off of it. Later on they switched to the sleeker plastic enclosure, got one of those too. I still have them somewhere stashed away, I'm afraid to look. hehe
Congratulations buddy!!! SD Card! I never thought it would be happened! You done!
mad really the original amiga 500 only had 256MB of ram before they added the extra 256 .. when i worked as programmer in a software house 256MB version we got first to write products on until they got the 512+512 (1MB) version with WB 3.1 those were the days
A500 had a minimum of 512KB (you could add extra via the trapdoor or expansion port) the A1000 was released with 256KB and had a front panel that you could add an additional 256KB (Jay Minor insisted this be added when he was overruled by commodore) you could also add additional memory via the expansion port.
@@daishi5571 - Also the A500 mem expansion added the battery backed up date/clock feature. And of course the battery has leaked long ago for those who haven't replaced it since the early 90's. heh
@@BillAnt At least it wasn't the worst system of doing battery backup for the clock, that would be the standard no name AA battery I have seen those in other computers and I even saw one that was leaking in a brand new PC (actually the whole shipment needed the batteries replaced and muggings here did it, 100+ PC's)
Great video! I need one of these cards.
Thank you for the video! Just a technical correction - it is not battery 'acid', it is the battery 'alkaline' substance that causes corrosive damage. This is an important distinction when looking for something to neutralise it.
Great point! I'll try to keep that in mind going forward - thanks for teaching me something valuable :-)
@@TheRetroRoadshow some folks use White Vinegar then flush with rubbing alcohol. Others use deputed citric acid - lemon juice?
@@TheRetroRoadshow - Besides the GVP hard drives, don't they have modern bootable SDcard adapters for the Amiga A500 and others as an external add-on which supports higher than 16GB capacities? It would be interesting to make a video about them.
hey, thanks for upload!.its a great idear a SSD with Amiga. all my trys are failed...but i try your method...🙂
sorry for my bad english and.i wish a nice xmas and a happy new jear...PS: great channel! your krautrockt!er from germany.. 🙂
Nice. I bought so many Amigas over the years planning to do similar upgrades and just haven't made the time to do it.
Nice. I did nearly the same in my Amiga about 15 Years ago with CompactFlash cards ;)
After upgrading it as far as I could, I ended up putting my 68060 Amiga 1200's electronics into a tower case with a 500MB HDD and CD-ROM.
Guru Mediation Error. Lol. Oh I miss that.
Gosh I hated that screen... hehe
I did the same thing with my supra 500 XP hard drive. I picked up a romulator that has a micro sd card for the rooms so you can boot with from images like 1.3 2.1 3.14 etc very cool stuff for my old amiga . I just got the indevison chip to go from ocs to ecs and a modern VGA monitor at 60 hz.
4:20 No, not "all of" the CGI. The CGI for the pilot episode was rendered on couple of A3000s. Later on when the series got picked up and they had a budget they used DEC Alpha machines, which was state of the art at the time in early 90s.
@mikeforester3963 - In addition to being used for the pilot episode, Amigas were used for the first season of the TV series as well.
I got my self a ACA 500+ if you have a A500 or A1000. You get two CF card slot 8mb ram and a 68000 CPU that can be set to 42mzh.
I'll definitely check that out!
Great job
Great video man! Yes, I think you're stretching calling a SD an SSD. I have a couple of those SCSI2SD's as well, and there's a magnitude or two difference in terms of speed with that combination. Of course you'd run into other bottlenecks well before you got up to the maximum speed capable of a real SSD.
I recently put a SATA SSD into a Windows XP desktop, and that was pretty amazing! Even though that maxed at 133MB/s.
I had completely forgotten about that Beethoven Ode to Joy demo! I remember seeing that as a kid and being so impressed at the quality of the audio! I still am!
Great job. Look forward to others!
Yeah, that’s fair. I’m using “SSD” in the strictly-technical sense that it is a form of electronic storage with no moving parts, but I agree, any modern SSD is gonna run rings around an older 512mb SD card.
@@TheRetroRoadshow Yeah, I don't think the SCSI2SD does us any favors in terms of performance either. I've used them in more modern systems and the performance is still lackluster. Way better than messing around with floppies! Thanks again
SSD means solid state drive. SD cards are solid state storage and in the adaptor is is treated as a drive. Hence SSD solution using an SD card.
I'm pretty sure that was Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" (had to look that up). I only recognize it because my Dad used listen to "Switched on Bach", one of the first big MOOG synthesizer albums way back in the day.
I played an absurd amount of Rise of The Dragon in the 1990's.
Hahah ME TOO!
Cool video! Aca500plus seems like a way easier way to go honestly tho. If you like a real project, this certainly is one!
Or upgrade the ChipMem on an 500 revision 8a.1 like I did. And I upgraded the ChipMem on my rev 6a as well. 😁 That 6a is now inside a PC desktop case. (None of that tower stuff)
This system just blows my old Spectrum 48k out of the water. Loading games from audio cassette tapes was an exercise in patience.
MrGeorocks OMG I know what you mean. When I was a kid I had a cassette tape drive for my TRS-80 Color Computer, and I distinctly remember the agony of waiting FOREVER for a crappy clone of Joust to load, only for it to error out and crash. Misery!
Fortunately for me, the only time I experienced the Speccy loading times was when playing on it at my mate's house, so we played and talked while waiting for the games to load.
Loading a game is a blessing compared to having to code it yourself from magazines lol
@@360Fov for about a month I didn't have a cassette recorder for my Dragon 32, so I had to program from magazines anything I wanted to play. And my dad made me turn the computer off at night, so the next day I had to start all over again. I learned programming real fast.
Still the best machine on earth today, over 30 years old and still ready for future tech to work with it, Only Amiga makes It Possible.... back when you insert a disk and away you go, no firmware update crap, no download extension files, just what you would expect from a device, you buy something it should be right to go out of the box, buy a new computer or laptop today, your spending a good hour on setting up files download updates and blah blah blah, even speed wise, your up and running playing awesome games on the Amiga while your pc boots on and off with updates and system file updates,.
in 1990 I bought a brand new GVP Impact 2 with 52mb quantum HDD and 8 MB fast ram, cost me a grand!
Nice vid... interesting about the amiga from a US perspective being from the UK...
That game at the end, Rise of the Dragon was it? That looks amazing. I've never heard of it either, I would probably have loved that back in the early 90s when I had my amiga. This means I need to find my ebayed a600 and install it on the flash card, my new mission.
It's great to see some love for the original amigas, they can be expensive to work on but I'd hate them to end up in landfill. The GVP SD card drive idea is very clever!
Or get Rise of The Dragon for MS-DOS, with 256 colour VGA graphics.
@@MarkTheMorose naaaah. Amiga is my one true love. Well, maybe Guinness is first, but Amiga is definitely in the top ten.
the ram expansion has a battery on it for the clock and it may have leaked on the ram board causing some problems
Commodore renamed the Amiga to the Amiga A1000 after the A500 came out, because it was a cost reduced version.
That was my understanding, but I have seen a photo of an early A1000 box with the designation A1000 so I'm not so sure now that marketing didn't already decide that.
I think the limit is in the GVP rom as mine will go a lot larger with the supra 500xp sidecar drive
Where it gets really crazy with amiga history. They used amiga 4000 in the making of titanic!!!! One of them was moving cammeras around with scripts. and another one had a digital video capture card wich was used to test shots (they record certan shots to the digital video cos' it had perfect freezeframe and they could double check how models and the like where looking)
workbench 2 with the new roms after booting from the install floppy had an 'install' icon where you could install workbench and all the extras to a HDD after prepping
Not a good idea to use the antistatic bag: they're conductive.
I know I am kinda randomly asking but do anybody know a good website to watch new tv shows online ?
@Messiah Wesley i would suggest Flixzone. Just search on google for it :)
@Messiah Wesley i use flixzone. Just search on google for it =)
Awesome video! Where did you get your Amiga 500 from? I would love to own one, but I know that they were a lot more popular in Europe then they were here.
They were huge here in the UK and in Germany. I had a 500 and later a 1200.
Neat fantastic going so interesting questionn you have this on a sd card what if you found away to run it on a modern pc on a virtual desktop is this possible and if you had there was a USB device connected to the current computer you could probably transfer to a dvd via a portable dvd drive if possible?
My C64 was king in the early 80s. lol "Press play on tape" and a 300 baud modem for the win.
Nice video, although the Amigabasic demos was not the best way to demo the amazing Amiga features in animation and sound! Amigabasic without compiling is awfully slooooow. It's good to know that GVP was founded by former Commodore personnel (engineers & sales & marketing), and their product were absolutely terrific, better than Commodore itself sometimes (or most of the times). Cheers, M
Put an turbocard in it, newer kickrom, whdload, makes him to a very fast gamechanger
But Nice that this scsi host can Handle with an ssd, an speed test with sysinfo would be very interesting
The most speed i was get in real with a hardrive an a gururom was 6~8 MB so in this tolerancepart
When I had an Amiga 1200, and installed an CF card in there with a size of 32GB, the OS refused to even format the bigger partition because there was not enough ram. I realized later that this had something to do with allocated block sizes. Only after installing ACA1233 Turbo card with 64MB ram it was able to format that partition. So maybe your Amiga 500 simply has not enough ram to recognize more of the drive. But that's just a guess.
The 1000 was just called the Amiga until after the 500 and 2000 came out.
Yep the A1000 was originally called "The Amiga by Commodore" in 1985
The 1000 only became the 1000, after the release of the 500 and 2000. Before that, the 1000 was called Amiga and not Amiga1000.
it was announced as the amiga from commodore...
@@doctorsocrates4413 Yes. Exactly what I wrote.
greetings first thank You for the video... I have just bought an amiga 500, i want this machine to work with hard drive, i mean i want to go in to workbench and choose any game and able to run it. I know some amiga games supports hard drive installation but not the majority of them, i dont want any psychical disk swapping neither gotek kind of solution. What would be your solution for this kind of scenario?
I think you might be limited to 512MB in AmigaOS 1.3 . I can use 2GB partitions in AmigaOS 3.X on my Amiga 2000. You'd need to replace the the Kickstart 1.3 rom to the 3.1 one to upgrade.
Great info, thanks. I actually have a KS 3.1 ROM and a ROM Switcher, but it's (slightly) incompatible with my particular A500 motherboard revision and would require some delicate soldering to get working. Given that my soldering skills are terrible and I don't want to kill my A500, I'm working on an alternate solution, which will be featured in an upcoming video :-)
you might need to update the ROM for the controller card, seen some on ebay but if the gvp is stock that's prolly where the limitation lays at.
Wow.
A 2GB SD used as a 512MB should last 4x as long because of flash wear leveling. So it's not really wasted.
You could have used a piece of cardboard as insulation between the card + main board.
I have SD Cards in my 600 & 1200s --- had CF previously but they died.
As there is the "Lazarusstorm" to install a Pistorm externaly on an A500 maybe the Lazarusstorm PCB can be modified to fit inside the GVP SCSI-Case? With the harddrive replaced, there should be plenty of space inside.
On the other hand, as Pistorm brings RAM and storage itself, this might sound stupid - but on the other hand, at least you could still use the SCSI-bus for connecting a SCSI-CD-Drive or SCSI-Scanner.
Can this mod be done with an Amiga A590 hard drive also ?
I don't have one to test with myself, but I don't see why not - SCSI could be quirky, but it should work fine
I know this video is old but the way you install workbench on to the amiga, was to run the Install file, in one of the folders on the disk, so you get to go through settings and set locale ect... .
So if memory is correct only the A2000 with WB1.3 shipped with the WB>HDD install disc as standard. A500 with WB1.2 never shipped a WB>HDD and early A500's when WB1.3 and KS1.3 shipped were also missing the disc as it was something the HDD interface manufacturer would ship. Later I did see A500's with the WB>HDD install disc. WB2.0 onward came with the install disk.
this is a perfect Amiga 500 where did u buy it from? also is it brand new? thanks.......
in New College Swindon once, in 1992 or 1993 my friend bought in his Amiga 500 Plus but i never saw it much in use (theres an emulator for msdos 1.2 emulator which emulates the Amiga 500 or 2000 with rom 33.180 yep (its online ) somewhere......
UAE was the first Amiga emulator and was released in 1995, except it really wasn't as other than display the Amiga kickstart screen it did nothing. It took another 2 years (so 1997) and a high-end PC to run some games and programs (far from all) at the speed of the lowest end Amiga (and it was finicky) and another 3 years (around 2000) to get a great, stable and faster than Amiga emulator. WinUAE (UAE fork) is amazing, fast but even in 2024 is still in development as there are still few things to fix.
@@daishi5571 yep many thanks.......... but .......... there was an Amiga emulator for msdos back in 1992 simply called emulator.exe and when run it shows the hand holding a disc (workbench disc) is this real or fake?? thanks..............
@@ms-ex8em It would have to be fake (I saw several even when the Amiga was still in production) as UAE is known to be the first (despite starting as fake) Usable Amiga Emulator.
Haha, had forgotten all about that Bach demo. Nice.
You should skip the fastpreep and use HDtools instead and use a 3.1 or 3.2 Kickstart rom that supports larger drives.
Dont set it the flash size larger than 4GB then you should flash it to additional drives. You have to put sector size to 512 when flashing but then you format you can use 4096. Best of luck
Could that module you took out of your AMIGA have been causing a conflict with interrupts.
Il controller GVP e' stupendo.la scheda sd va fissata al telaietto come si deve,con viti e distanziali,non la devi lasciare cosi,volante.perche il led power dell'A500 non si accende?,non mi sembra di averlo visto acceso
a SCSI2SATA adapter will allow you to use a SSD drive in your adapter unit for your COMMODORE AMIGA.
I know I am late to the party but your A500 has KS1.3 in it... if I remember correctly KS1.3 can't use larger storage mediums than 512MB...
If yiou really want to pimp your A500 then you should check out the Vampire 500 V2...
the 68 prozessor is on board from the sega megadrive..or?!?
Yes the 68000 processor in the Amiga is the same as the one in the Megadrive. The architecture of the systems are very different beyond that.
That unit looks like a Amiga A600
used electrician tape the area where it will sit you will create an insulated area for your board to sit on. not rocket science
Your memory expansion probably has a battery damage, they are all leaking now and killing the platines. That leads to crashes and unstable behavior.
21:40 a rubber matt.
i have the same problem the HD dies. my GVP have 4mb few days i buy 8mb simm and waiting the simms!! i hope i can use a hd on it.
You might have corrected this since posting but an SD card is NOT the same as an SSD. Its something that really winds me up more than it should, but I guess that's coz I'm a nerd
I hear what you’re saying, but I’m using the term accurately here. I think we both totally agree that in a modern computer, a modern “SSD” is a very different animal than an SD card, but they’re both solid state (ie non-spinning-metal) drives :-)
@@TheRetroRoadshow absolutely, they are both solid state but only one is an SSD. Great video by the way!
Had Commodore invested more into gaming and acquired quality game titles and game developpers, instead of shitty US GOLD..it might have lasted a bit longer..up to 2000. It was more powerful than 16 bit consoles..it's a 32-bit computer system, which means it was powerful enough to beat 16-bit console like genesis and snes at the time. Poor marketing on the part of Commdore really killed a very good system.
I don't think they advertised at all in the states. that we had someone who had a clue (David P In GB) it would have survived The US side of the C= was clueless.
@Stella-ri5ex - WRONG. Stock A500, A600, A1000, and A2000 all had a Motorola 68000 CPU running at 7.09/7.16 MHz. The Sega Genesis was already a half-step better with a Motorola 68000 CPU running at 7.6 MHz. The Genesis has gaming graphics that are better than OCS Amigas, with better sprites, tiles, and better scrolling. And whereas OCS Amiga typically displays up to 32 colours on regular game screens without using resource-intensive tricks, the Genesis displays up to 61 colours without tricks. Yes, OCS Amiga can display 64 colours in EHB and 4,096 colours in HAM mode, but those are almost never used because they're not optimal for action-oriented games.
.
The SNES displays 256 colours from a palette of 32,768 - so its onscreen colours and palette are both eight times more than the Amiga's. And just like the Genesis, the SNES sprites, tiles, and scrolling put the Amiga to shame.
.
Please stop calling basic OCS Amiga a 32-bit computer system. It's a 16/32-bit system at best. If you call basic OCS Amiga a 32-bit system, you must also call the Genesis a 32-bit system. They both use the same processor!
SD card is not SSD. SATA2SCSI maybe chinesse adapter is real on Ali.
64GB storage is not RAM, those phones has 2-8GB RAM.
who told you Amiga was gaming computer ?
Antistatic bags are electrically conductive so don't do it.
SSD? Where? Clickbait.
Sure, SD cards aren't marketed as "SSD's" but that's precisely what they are - solid state drives, as opposed to mechanical "spinning rust" drives. Just because an SD card doesn't use an M.2 or SATA connector doesn't make it any less of a solid state drive!
@@TheRetroRoadshow You cannot call an SSD as an SD because they do not have the same controllers and above all the same connections, this is the last thing, it is important, you cannot use a SATA or M.2 SSD in an SD slot etc. not even a SATA SSD you cant connect to an M.2 SSD slot and both are SSDs, so calling a memory card an SSD is clickbait whether you want to admit it or not.
If you get a SATA or M.2 SSD adapter for the Amiga then you can make a video without fooling anyone into thinking they can use their PC SSD in the Amiga, thanks.
a sd card is not a ssd, its a very cheap unreliable flash drive.
Well, try buying SCSI HDD in 2022 which will be more reliable.
sd ~= ssd
Gaming computer? Pffff....