these are the most beautiful things EVER - they transformed my life. that is not an exaggeration btw they really did, i was so inspired by 'computing' with my GVP 52MB HDD + 4mb additional ram, the power i felt being able to do so much felt like i could own the world. i've had a successful career in software ever since, and it was set in stone the moment i got one of these when i was about 12
the Amiga market would of been completely different if all amiga had hard disk, they are completely different machine's with hard disk it was one of down falls, of the machine it could limp on well with out one, even the first mac's could doing small stuff, but try doing that with a PC, any more than dos prompt was as much you could get, and when window came along it was starting to look silly windows1 posable about, version 2 more than floppy drive, barely possibly and when 3 came on the seem, there was no chance with floppy at all, and yet an amiga, could still stand it ground with on one floppy drive, and they could support 3 more floppy drives at the same time, for when one floppy wasn't cutting it? so unless you where time is money sort of person, you just limped on with floppy's, and the fact your machine would work almost or fast or faster than the average PC of the got lost? simple unscientific test boot to desktop's times, PC could easily that minute or two, where as Amiga with a fully bloated OS with all the bell and Wessels, 20 , 30, 40 second, if that, with really stripped down os, 2 or 3 second could easily be archived?
They were great looking the gvps but so much money or that least hard drives were. I paid £179 for my amiga 1200s 20mb hard drive even a few years later. Why was everything so expensive at this tine?
My granny was frightened of anything that was called computers, so that's definitely true, lol And what is love? The RMC cave taking care of all that old hardware!
Mine was never scared of computers, she just refused to use one she felt she had no use for one, same with owning a cell phone. I took care of mine in her last few years, and did everything she needed to have done on a computer, or phone for her of course this was the late 00's.
Maybe it's just me, but when you typed in the long string of "ooo" it brought a smile to my face and then once your pressed enter and the speech synthesis did it's thing, I couldn't stop giggling. They used to be so much fun, especially the early ones with basic AI you tried to talk to.
I remember buying a used Amiga package in 1995, by that time they could be picked up pretty cheaply and it came with a GVP HD+. I'd previously had an A500 and an A500+ and remember the disk swapping days well! I had always lusted after a HDD too and being able to play Monkey Island 2 without swapping floppies was beyond awesome.
I do miss those days when we had to swap the floppies and excitement what's the next big thing this brings. you would've known that when game comes on 2 disks it must be good, 4 - must be awesome and on 11 or 12 disks like MI2 it had to be magical
Going from floppies to an HD was kinda mind blowing at the time. It wasn't really until SSDs came along that I went wow! again. They were bleedin' pricey too, at least at first!
My parents bought me one of those GVPs with 8 MB ram and 128MB drive (iirc) when I was 14. I'm pretty sure I've never before or since been happier with a gift i got. And it's probably what got me into programming and computing in general shaping the rest of my life. I still have it - in a box somewhere...
My family had an A500 very early on, it was a computer I respected and loved. The more I learn about them now, the clearer it is that these were well ahead of their time. Music production, arcade gaming, productivity; these computers were strong in all areas. The PC won out in the end but for many of us, nothing beat the Amiga back in the day.
On a similar note, way back when I had a 486 running Windows 3.11, I had the Miami Vice theme tune on my start-up sequence. 1 minute each time I booted into Windows
I lusted after the both the GVP drives back in the day, too, and was lucky enough to pick up one of each a few years back. The A530 even has a 286 card in it. However, my most treasured A500 expansion was a Roctec RocHard 500 with a 40 MB drive and 2 Mb RAM that I ordered from Power Computing (by fax) and had sent all the way to Western Australia. It cost nearly AUD800, equal to over 1500!!! in today’s money.
I used to have one an HD+ - 52mb with 1 meg of ram I remember spending ages setting up my workbench environment on it with a dock in toolmanager. It made the amiga into my first truly usable computer. There was no comparison between an Amiga with a hard drive and one without. The only downside was the noise...
You can quite possibly fix that first disk by lubricating the stepper motor. They dry up easily and are easily accessible for lubrication from the outside of the disk. I've had luck with this for drives of that age myself.
That HD8+ brings back memories. Mine had "only" 2MB FastRAM in it (2MB felt like a huge amount to me) and I believe the HDD was ~120MB. It made my Amiga feel so much more like a "professional" computer than my friends' stock Amigas (well, stock with 512kb memory upgrade of course). The guy I bought the HD8+ from had just upgraded to the model with the 40MHz '030 in it, so I got it at a good price. I also remember my friends slightly dissing me for my huge external floppy drive (the A1010), but I had the last laugh on that one, because mine ALWAYS worked, and their smaller form factor 3rd party drives tended to be lower quality and sometimes struggle to read some disks. Those were fun times.
if the western digital drive is not fried those drives with external stepper are usually easily revived by giving the steppermotor a drop or two of oil.
I never owned the hard drive but I still have my optical drive. What a game changer that was back in the day. I got it off a guy that only had it a couple of months for £20.
I now own one of the Amiga hard drive solutions. As with you my budget could not stretch to purchasing one of these beauties. The family needed food on the table and a roof over their heads.But nearly 40 years on the unanswered memories have been filled. Does it make me feel 25 years old again . No but as my mum said to me when I was a lad "good things come to those you wait" God bless you mom and "party time" has arrived for me . Thank you for opening the gate and letting out the great memories I shall treasure them till I go mad or die which ever comes first.
Great video. I had the A590 back in the day (20MB). My friends had the GVP (50MB). However, the A590 allowed you to put kickstart 2 ROM files on there and boot into 1.3 or 2.0!
@@benbaselet2026 Only last heat when I fixed a DDR she’s compute did I have two broken switches (video is on this channel). And I was amazed because in 34 year of electronics I’d never had a switch fail - let alone two. And I guess technically here the idiotic connector failed but even then that would not have been my first call of business. I would’ve measured the scsi d0 and CI and IO pins were alternating. Since the disk spun up and didn’t show up I’d figured something wrong with the bus. Could be as benign as bad termination or cable. I wouldn’t even know what this switch does, do you? I find it silly to have big switch that can detach the devices from the bus on the front.
Oooooh the memories. The sound of that RLL drive in the A590, I remembered it almost like it was yesterday. I used to marvel that the stepper motor had its spindle exposed! I never expected to hear that sound again. Fantastic stuff! My friend had the GVP (not sure if it was the Plus or 8). I coveted how the GVP followed the lines of the Amiga back then. I still do today. Don't hurt me. That is love.
Hey @rmc A small hint (timestamp 7:31), A few years ago i saw a method to get those drives working again. The drive sounded to me like the stepper motor for the heads (black small motor housing) just stuck. The lubrication converts into some kind of glue after all this years. try cleaning the driveshaft and put some new lubrication onto the drive shaft. that might bring the drive back to life again. I fixed 2 amiga hdds with that method and a mfm hdd from a pc.
In 1991 nobody I knew had one of these (or even a PC with a HDD for that matter) - also remember asking a friend what a 'Hard Disk' was that I was seeing advertised with some amiga bundles. I could finally afford one early 1996 - a 200mb unit for my A1200 (still works!!!) Unbelievable how everything has changed in a little of 30 years
My mum's partner back in the day bought a HD+ with the full 8 megs and a 80MB drive. I always wondered how much it set him back in 1992 and now I have a fair idea. I sold it back in 2000/1 and I do occasionally wonder if it is still in use by someone. It was a great if noisy unit, although I did want a 530+.
Really enjoyed that, I always wanted the version with the 030 accelerator. Which I picked up a few years ago. I even managed to get the 286 add-on for it last year. I'd have had any of the others as well, but when you're dreaming of kit you will never own you may as well dream big.
Wow, the memories! I have one of these, 40MB HDD, the 286 card with MS-DOS installed to one of the HDD partitions, and 4MB fast RAM added. Plus the SCSI ports on the back got lots of use when I added a Zip Drive. As I recall, the speed of the HDD was said to be 3MB/s. But I don't recall where I read or was told this, and I had no tool to put that to the test. My A500+ eventually ceased booting, but I think it was around 1999 at this point so I didn't have much practical use for it anymore. I wonder if it was a faulty switch also?
I sent the GVP HD8+ in about four years ago so lovely to see it make an appearance. The original hard drive was made by Quantum and was 170MB and had 161MB of space when formatted! I bought the Apple SCSI 250MB drive off Ebay years ago but I remember having problems that weren't related to the faulty game switch. It cost me something like £340 - £380 in 1994 without any memory! I got quite a bit of life out of it when I got my A1200 as well. There was a time when 2.5" hard drives were really expensive and I didn't want to put a 3.5" hard drive inside, the Zappo PCMCIA hard drives weren't available at the time either. My dad made me something called a ParNET cable. I'd have my Amiga A500 setup with the actual GVP hard drive in this video and my friend did me a disk which would mount the hard drive and share it down the parallel port to my A1200 and I got something like 50k per sec. Happy days :)
The GVP hard drive transformed my Amiga usage - bought a 52Mb drive in 90/91 (which annoyingly didn't work with the 4MB expansion I bought two weeks before)...I remember filling that drive within about 6 weeks and then bought another GVP with a 120Mb drive and 4MB RAM, VXL030 accelerator and 2Mb 32bit RAM and it was an amazing transformation (and also wallet draining). Worth every penny though!
Great video as always. Now I need a ZuluSCSI to add to my HD8+ if only to quieten the noise from the drive in mine. Thanks for providing proof the Zulu will work just fine.
I had these as teen back in the early 90s. I actually never knew it had memory on the hardrive caddy. I still remember how expensive 20mb drive use to cost. crazy how technology has progressed in short time. I wish Amiga would of lived on. I taught myself programming with my amiga. Now I work in the game industry. I always look back at Amiga.
I remember that edition of 'Amiga Shopper' - I'm certain I used that when deciding what A500 HD to buy. Settled on the A590 in the end, still have it and it still - just!!! - works. When it wants to!
So I made this upgrade a few years back using a GVP A530. Had a lot of fun with that, but one thing that always bothered me was if i wanted to switch SD cards I had to take it all apart. If your 3D printing shells. maybe add a slot for a SD card extension? Would be a lot more covenant.
Around 32 years ago I owned a very good and reliable Amiga 500 hard disk. The brand was SupraDrive Amiga 500XP by Supra Corporation. It was 52MB in capacity and it also had RAM expansion. It was made in the US and built like a tank.
Vladislav? ;) Yes, that song is a true ear worm. I lusted after one of those drivesfor my 500 back in the day, and I am looking forward to the next instalment.
Thanks, these really bring back memories. I had entirely forgotten about these hard drive expansions and in particular that some of them had CPU accelerators as well.
I never saw one of these outside of shops and magazine adverts. Around 98 I bought a 1gb pc drive and used that instead, the workbench install disk wouldn't work and I had to change the program in shell to get it to install. I remember installing everything I could and using apps like directory opus like they were designed for. I really miss my a1200, apart from the HD and extra disk drives, it had an official monitor and extra ram with a processor speed upgrade, printer. When I went to uni I'd left it all boxed in cupboard in my room, I came back and it had gone. My dad had given it charity shop and wouldn't even apologise saying I wasn't using it, the most frustrating part the charity didn't sell on electronics and would have just binned it. I know have retropi with amiga emulation and also pimiga but it's not the same. The amount of videos I see about the amiga and I instantly miss what once was.
Holy moly, that's a great machine to lose. When I went to uni, I really enjoyed playing on the A1200 when I came home for the summer. In the second year I bought a PC for uni (not sure I got much use out of it apart from playing games!) and when I next came home, my A1200 had suffered the same fate as yours. 120mb HDD and a RAM expansion we bought the machine with (may have been 2mb or 4mb, can't remember).
I had a...strange HD for my Amiga 500. I bought it secondhand through a BBS listing in my area in 1989 or so, and it came in 2 parts: a sidecart that contained only the SCSI interface and boot-roms, and the drive itself was in a HUGE boxlike container connected to the SCSI sidecart by a thick cable, and was SO loud when powered on the fan overpowered the sound of a vacuum cleaner and accessing the drive was so loud that you could hear it chittering like a typewriter literally 2 rooms away. There was also some kind of conflict with Kickstart 1.3 and this drive's boot-rom so that when starting up from HD it would hang on a grey screen for a full minute before finally loading Workbench. The only good thing was that booting from floppy bypassed this automatically for loading games from floppy. I installed every multi-disc monster like Ultima VI on the HD of course, to save my sanity. I don't believe there was any room for RAM expansion on this HD, I suspect it was something cobbled together as soon as Kickstart 1.3 was released and thus a very early HDD product for the A500. I ended up selling the entire Amiga setup to finance my first PC in 1991 or so. I wish I could have afforded to keep it.
I used to have a SCSI in an 8088 PC That I got used and it had issues on being recognized due to issues in that old PC case not having enough on the 12V line to it. I changed to a better power supply and it worked when it could spin the platters. You did say it didn't have enough power in the ' test brick ' so if you can find something that can do higher amps on the 12V line, it may actually work. This was definitely an interesting look into older tech and how they did black magic to get external storage into systems that were not designed to use the storage of the ' Big Iron ' systems and may have influenced what we have today for storage.
I got my A590 thanks to some mistakes made by Kay&Co sales staff, who had two of them amongst a pile of Canon bubble printers at their disposal shop. The Canon printers were being sold for £150, and all the boxes had £150 price stickers on them - so I got the A590 for that price - despite it being £499.99 in the catalogue. I populated the RAM slots with "spare" RAM from the parts bin at work, where I was working for the R&D department, programming EEPROMs at the time. A few years later, the same parts bins supplied a 200 MB "MFM" HDD. At one point, my boot-up sound was a 1 minute recording of a DC10 landing - put on to "Own" a friend who kept coming around and going straight for the Amiga without even bothering to see if I was awake (shift work). Wired via a QED passive pre-amp, to a 110watt (RMS) Crimson Electric power amp and some big Wharfedale speakers. The amp was set to max - I found him cowering under the table, thinking a large plane was about to crash into the house. My A500/A590 is still in my loft - I keep meaning to bring it down and see if it still works.
Oh, the sweet moment, when I first started with a HD+ and a Quantum 105Mb Harddrive. 😊 That was a glimpse into the future…faster than any PC my friends had.
God I LOVE those GVP hard drives. My dad had got one for his A500 back in the early 90s, complete with 4MB of RAM and the 286 expansion. The disk itself had gone completely bad by maybe 2006 or so but with a SCSI2SD it's humming along quite happily these days.
LOL Amnesia! Love it. However, that's a fun joke, not serious in the slightest, I don't think Amiga Shopper would approve. I think you should leave "What is love?" On that Amiga for people to experience when they visit the cave, haha. Great episode. I never had a hard disk for my Amiga 500, just the basic 500, it's such a shame that first disk you tried didn't work, and you blew the power supply! That was painful.
Wow, this was a blast from the past, I had GVP A500-HD+ back in the days. The first game I played from it was Willy Beamish from Dynamix (Sierra). That game took 12 floppy disks, and the speed loading it from HDD was amazing at the time.
stepper motor on the WD drive needs lubricated. then get it to actuate a bunch and it'll come right back. those drives are rock solid so long as you lubricate up the stepper.
I picked up a GVP HD+ a couple of years ago, and it didn't initially work. I then bought an Individual ACA-500 and haven't explored the GVP since. May well dig it out again.
Had the HD+ with a 52 MB Quantum drive, and also added 2 MB RAM in there. Oh, and I yanked out the fan to reduce the noise, worked like a charm. A friend of mine had the A530 with the 68030 CPU, and a second daisy chained drive just lying on top, no cover or anything. Good times.
I think I had the one on the left back in 1992. I also had 4MB of ram installed in it as well as a 50MB SCSI drive and loved it. Also, this, to me, was the golden age of computing. :) I am a hands on IT professional for the last 23 years but this era was uniquc.
I had an Archos Overdrive for my A1200 back in the day... completely changed the computing experience. Booting up into workbench was so fast compared to using a floppy, and all of a sudden my multi-disk games (Monkey Island 2 and Fate of Atlantis) were so enjoyable to play again.
Boot up a PC with Linux and run ddrescue to try to make image of the disc that failed to read, will show if it is possible to easy get the data from the drive. Don't forget to check SCSI termination settings as those can mess things up if set the wrong way.
wow. so much new tech since then; would be great to have a modern HD solution allowing memory upgrades & switchable KickStarter versions ? could it be usable on A600 & A1200 ?
I ended up with 2 HDD units over the years. Both had the Quantum Fireball 52. That was never going to cut the mustard so I fitted them out with 1GB drives which was huge at the time. MUUUUCH better!
You really get your hands on some cool old gear. I grew up with PC's, so the Amigas etc I love to eat h and learn about the other machines I'd only heard.of growing up.
Back in the day I had friends with pcs but I had an amiga, apart from pc having a HD as standard the amiga kicked there backsides in every other way. I was devastated when commodore went bust and just disappeared.
@@sambra1979 you are right that the amiga was better, but by the time when Commodore went bust, the PC had catched up and with (S)VGA and a proper soundcard was the machine for the future. I was lucky enough to have access to both (we owned a Pc and my best friend had an amiga 500 and later a 1200. We loved both machines and could compare them.
I bought one of those Hard Drives for my Amiga 500... if I recall correctly, it was $600 for a 20MB (MB, not GB) in the 1990s... that was quite expensive, but a huge upgrade at the time.
Not quite the same but when I worked in a computer shop in the early 90s I got an 80Mb HDD for my Amiga 1200 and it transformed using the machine. I was (and still am) a coder and made music and art, and being able to load everything super fast and not have to swap disks around was just amazing. Plus I installed Super Stardust and Alien Breed Tower Assault on it :-)
The cave, my light in the dark,thanks for sharing your amazing finds and restoration. Some of my restoration came to life with your advice. I hope to see someday your cave, take care, f
Wow the memories! I had the GVP Series II HD+ with 50MB HD, 2MB RAM, and the PC286 board. I think I paid $500 in maybe 1992 for everything but the 286 card. I don't recall what I paid for that, I needed it to run a FORTRAN compiler for a math class at school. It was only a few years later that I sold it all and bought a 486DX2/66 PC...I regret selling it to this day!
Lovely, I fondly remember these as my grandpa had a late interest in computers (and luckily for me, the Amiga :) ). I recently let my A1200 be recapped and the internal harddisk was rescued, but according to the recapper, barely holding on. :) Fjew
For a while I had an A500 with kickstart 1.3/2.0 and the HD8+. It used to belong to a musician. The disk was the 45MB and it made such a difference to the speed of the 500. I really really regret giving it away now.
There is an A500 HD8+ Series II sitting behind me as we speak - like you, I was far too poor (well, far too young!) to afford one back in the day, so when one popped up on eBay, I couldn't resist. I've been searching for the GVP PC286 card since..
one of my first hard drives was similar to this one. My very first one was a seagate st225 20MB. I love Westop Digital ;) 350£ was a lot at the time... Wonderful episode! thanks for showing these drive extensions. Amiga was not popular in my country back then, it was either a Bulgarian Apple][ clone, an IBM XT clone or a real IBM or Apple][.
I only ever saw one of these once, but it did look a bit like the future. These days I rock an A1200 with accelerator, 8mb and an internal 3" 260 Mb hard drive - but those HDs for A500s still manage to look snazzy...
I had an ancient 40 MB Seagate HD on my 1000 that was donated by a customer who updated to a 105 MB Quantum. It suffered from something we called "stiction" where the heads stuck to the surface when the drive spun down. I could get it started by poking the spindle on the bottom of the drive with a small screwdriver. I mention this because when stalled, the spindle motor could be drawing more power and overloading the power pack.
i had a a590 it was a great update, I would liked those GVP drives with an accelerator builtin too i think?, but they were silly money at the time. They were the first time I noticed how pricey commodore amiga hardware was compared to PC equivalents :-(
In the early 90s, my friend and I used my Amiga 500 to write our ezine. I remember the third issue was completed and the hard drive crashed and we lost it all and had to start over. Maddening, but those were great times.
Wow memories. I had a GVP and put my own 40mb HD in it. think it had 4mb ram. I ended up putting it in a small PC tower that sat next to A500+ with 2 more SCSi drives in (had a CD drive too). It was great sport to buy second hand PC bits and try to get them working. Had a tape backup drive, 5 1/4 inch SEAGATE 30mb behemoth. Had to make my own SCSI cables. Tought me loads about SCSi though.
So glad I found this UA-cam channel - I use to have an Amiga 500 when i was a school kid - Mine came with Shadow of the Beast with a T-Shirt in it - Very hard game as you only had one life - The soundtrack to the game was amazing - Specially that the game came on two floppy 1.44MB disks - Which means the 20MB Hard drives - would hold about 15 / 18 games i guess - I use to read Amiga Format - I loved that computer use to make my own games too - Using Amos and i used Action Replay too - I also had the CB64 - really enjoying your videos - Do you have a BBC Model B computer - I use to have a game called Revs on it - I also had an Atari 400 - Have you done any videos on that computer ? - That was my very 1st computer - :)
I still have my 49Mb GVP HD+ with 2Mb RAM. I was thinking about replacing the HD in it, so I'll be very interested in seeing the Zulu work in one. My A500 is KS1.2 so I use a GVP boot disk to boot from the HD.
You should be able to track down a 1.3 KS no? I've got a ROM switcher in one of mine with a 1.3 and 2.0 chip in it. The other machine just the 1.3. I've only ever seen 1 1.2 machine but that was my cousins machine who got one pretty early.
@@iVTECInside I actually have a 1.3 and put it in a couple of years ago just to try it, but it seemed wrong as I'm very pleased to have got an early Amiga with the amazing Hi-Tek keyboard with C= key, so I didn't like to change the KS on it. I want it original. I don't mind changing the HD in the GVP though. I suppose I could put a ROM switcher in it. That would still be acceptable to me.
I remember those drives well and thought the GVP one was much better but never got one as I took the upgrade path to an Amiga A2000 and later the A4000 with all the internal upgrade goodness.
I can't remember where I saw this trick (Adrian's Digital Basement, maybe?), but is it worth putting one drop of oil in to the side of the stepper motor on that Western Digital drive? Even just as a preventative maintenance thing.
I love the Amiga version of a Rick Roll there. That's just awesome.
these are the most beautiful things EVER - they transformed my life. that is not an exaggeration btw they really did, i was so inspired by 'computing' with my GVP 52MB HDD + 4mb additional ram, the power i felt being able to do so much felt like i could own the world. i've had a successful career in software ever since, and it was set in stone the moment i got one of these when i was about 12
Absolutely. The first time my Amiga booted from one of these blew my mind. Great times!
If was the C64 in 1984 that set the course of my life as a successful software engineer. Thanks mom and dad for buying it for us kids for Christmas!
the Amiga market would of been completely different if all amiga had hard disk, they are completely different machine's with hard disk it was one of down falls, of the machine it could limp on well with out one, even the first mac's could doing small stuff, but try doing that with a PC, any more than dos prompt was as much you could get, and when window came along it was starting to look silly windows1 posable about, version 2 more than floppy drive, barely possibly and when 3 came on the seem, there was no chance with floppy at all, and yet an amiga, could still stand it ground with on one floppy drive, and they could support 3 more floppy drives at the same time, for when one floppy wasn't cutting it? so unless you where time is money sort of person, you just limped on with floppy's, and the fact your machine would work almost or fast or faster than the average PC of the got lost? simple unscientific test boot to desktop's times, PC could easily that minute or two, where as Amiga with a fully bloated OS with all the bell and Wessels, 20 , 30, 40 second, if that, with really stripped down os, 2 or 3 second could easily be archived?
They were great looking the gvps but so much money or that least hard drives were. I paid £179 for my amiga 1200s 20mb hard drive even a few years later. Why was everything so expensive at this tine?
Yes! Yes, indeed. My first Amiga was an A500. When I got an A590, I had NO IDEA how fast my machine actually was! Loved it. Still have it, somewhere.
The Haddaway startup is frankly genius.
making things like this on my computer made me feel like a hacker when i was a kid.
My granny was frightened of anything that was called computers, so that's definitely true, lol
And what is love? The RMC cave taking care of all that old hardware!
Mine thought that computer viruses could infect you because, you know, virus and all that.
Mine was never scared of computers, she just refused to use one she felt she had no use for one, same with owning a cell phone. I took care of mine in her last few years, and did everything she needed to have done on a computer, or phone for her of course this was the late 00's.
My granny would have been frightened by a XZ81 so I guess GVP was right ;-)
Maybe it's just me, but when you typed in the long string of "ooo" it brought a smile to my face and then once your pressed enter and the speech synthesis did it's thing, I couldn't stop giggling. They used to be so much fun, especially the early ones with basic AI you tried to talk to.
I remember buying a used Amiga package in 1995, by that time they could be picked up pretty cheaply and it came with a GVP HD+. I'd previously had an A500 and an A500+ and remember the disk swapping days well! I had always lusted after a HDD too and being able to play Monkey Island 2 without swapping floppies was beyond awesome.
I do miss those days when we had to swap the floppies and excitement what's the next big thing this brings. you would've known that when game comes on 2 disks it must be good, 4 - must be awesome and on 11 or 12 disks like MI2 it had to be magical
Going from floppies to an HD was kinda mind blowing at the time. It wasn't really until SSDs came along that I went wow! again. They were bleedin' pricey too, at least at first!
My parents bought me one of those GVPs with 8 MB ram and 128MB drive (iirc) when I was 14. I'm pretty sure I've never before or since been happier with a gift i got. And it's probably what got me into programming and computing in general shaping the rest of my life. I still have it - in a box somewhere...
I have to admit I laughed my head off at the musical start-up and your reaction, lol. That was funny as hell!
My family had an A500 very early on, it was a computer I respected and loved. The more I learn about them now, the clearer it is that these were well ahead of their time. Music production, arcade gaming, productivity; these computers were strong in all areas. The PC won out in the end but for many of us, nothing beat the Amiga back in the day.
On a similar note, way back when I had a 486 running Windows 3.11, I had the Miami Vice theme tune on my start-up sequence. 1 minute each time I booted into Windows
I lusted after the both the GVP drives back in the day, too, and was lucky enough to pick up one of each a few years back. The A530 even has a 286 card in it. However, my most treasured A500 expansion was a Roctec RocHard 500 with a 40 MB drive and 2 Mb RAM that I ordered from Power Computing (by fax) and had sent all the way to Western Australia. It cost nearly AUD800, equal to over 1500!!! in today’s money.
A clear case that looked like the original case would be cool to show off the internals to curious museum goers.
I used to have one an HD+ - 52mb with 1 meg of ram I remember spending ages setting up my workbench environment on it with a dock in toolmanager. It made the amiga into my first truly usable computer. There was no comparison between an Amiga with a hard drive and one without. The only downside was the noise...
You can quite possibly fix that first disk by lubricating the stepper motor. They dry up easily and are easily accessible for lubrication from the outside of the disk. I've had luck with this for drives of that age myself.
That HD8+ brings back memories. Mine had "only" 2MB FastRAM in it (2MB felt like a huge amount to me) and I believe the HDD was ~120MB. It made my Amiga feel so much more like a "professional" computer than my friends' stock Amigas (well, stock with 512kb memory upgrade of course). The guy I bought the HD8+ from had just upgraded to the model with the 40MHz '030 in it, so I got it at a good price. I also remember my friends slightly dissing me for my huge external floppy drive (the A1010), but I had the last laugh on that one, because mine ALWAYS worked, and their smaller form factor 3rd party drives tended to be lower quality and sometimes struggle to read some disks. Those were fun times.
if the western digital drive is not fried those drives with external stepper are usually easily revived by giving the steppermotor a drop or two of oil.
My first thought when I heard it spin up is how nice it sounded. No head banging, grinding, or whining. I'm curious if it could at least be autopsied
I never owned the hard drive but I still have my optical drive. What a game changer that was back in the day. I got it off a guy that only had it a couple of months for £20.
I now own one of the Amiga hard drive solutions. As with you my budget could not stretch to purchasing one of these beauties. The family needed food on the table and a roof over their heads.But nearly 40 years on the unanswered memories have been filled. Does it make me feel 25 years old again . No but as my mum said to me when I was a lad "good things come to those you wait" God bless you mom and "party time" has arrived for me . Thank you for opening the gate and letting out the great memories I shall treasure them till I go mad or die which ever comes first.
Haddaway on startup is just too awesome. Respect. Amiga Rulez.
Great video. I had the A590 back in the day (20MB). My friends had the GVP (50MB). However, the A590 allowed you to put kickstart 2 ROM files on there and boot into 1.3 or 2.0!
Wow the switch! That wouldn’t have been on my first to check items! Well done!❤
It would be on mine. Switches, connectors and generally stuff that has to deal with people always fail first.
@@benbaselet2026 Only last heat when I fixed a DDR she’s compute did I have two broken switches (video is on this channel). And I was amazed because in 34 year of electronics I’d never had a switch fail - let alone two. And I guess technically here the idiotic connector failed but even then that would not have been my first call of business.
I would’ve measured the scsi d0 and CI and IO pins were alternating. Since the disk spun up and didn’t show up I’d figured something wrong with the bus. Could be as benign as bad termination or cable.
I wouldn’t even know what this switch does, do you? I find it silly to have big switch that can detach the devices from the bus on the front.
Well done on the switch, glad you didn’t emulate the fire.
Christmas isn’t too far away. Keep your tree WATERED!
16:15 Would be even funnier it you heard 'Never gonna give you up' every time :P
Oooooh the memories. The sound of that RLL drive in the A590, I remembered it almost like it was yesterday. I used to marvel that the stepper motor had its spindle exposed! I never expected to hear that sound again. Fantastic stuff! My friend had the GVP (not sure if it was the Plus or 8). I coveted how the GVP followed the lines of the Amiga back then. I still do today. Don't hurt me. That is love.
Hey @rmc
A small hint (timestamp 7:31), A few years ago i saw a method to get those drives working again. The drive sounded to me like the stepper motor for the heads (black small motor housing) just stuck. The lubrication converts into some kind of glue after all this years. try cleaning the driveshaft and put some new lubrication onto the drive shaft. that might bring the drive back to life again. I fixed 2 amiga hdds with that method and a mfm hdd from a pc.
In 1991 nobody I knew had one of these (or even a PC with a HDD for that matter) - also remember asking a friend what a 'Hard Disk' was that I was seeing advertised with some amiga bundles. I could finally afford one early 1996 - a 200mb unit for my A1200 (still works!!!) Unbelievable how everything has changed in a little of 30 years
I lusted after the 030 model of GVP HD for years.
My mum's partner back in the day bought a HD+ with the full 8 megs and a 80MB drive. I always wondered how much it set him back in 1992 and now I have a fair idea. I sold it back in 2000/1 and I do occasionally wonder if it is still in use by someone. It was a great if noisy unit, although I did want a 530+.
Best part of the video 10:21, so satisfying 😉
I quite like the idea of an Amiga Hard drive in a 70s style Orange case.
Thanks
Really enjoyed that, I always wanted the version with the 030 accelerator. Which I picked up a few years ago. I even managed to get the 286 add-on for it last year. I'd have had any of the others as well, but when you're dreaming of kit you will never own you may as well dream big.
Oh, the memories. I remember how excited I was when mine came in the mail.
Wow, the memories! I have one of these, 40MB HDD, the 286 card with MS-DOS installed to one of the HDD partitions, and 4MB fast RAM added. Plus the SCSI ports on the back got lots of use when I added a Zip Drive.
As I recall, the speed of the HDD was said to be 3MB/s. But I don't recall where I read or was told this, and I had no tool to put that to the test.
My A500+ eventually ceased booting, but I think it was around 1999 at this point so I didn't have much practical use for it anymore. I wonder if it was a faulty switch also?
Hehe I posted my comment then scrolled down and saw yours and thought it was mine. I had the 286 card as well. Was a great machine.
@@StevenBloomfield Wow!
I sent the GVP HD8+ in about four years ago so lovely to see it make an appearance. The original hard drive was made by Quantum and was 170MB and had 161MB of space when formatted! I bought the Apple SCSI 250MB drive off Ebay years ago but I remember having problems that weren't related to the faulty game switch. It cost me something like £340 - £380 in 1994 without any memory!
I got quite a bit of life out of it when I got my A1200 as well. There was a time when 2.5" hard drives were really expensive and I didn't want to put a 3.5" hard drive inside, the Zappo PCMCIA hard drives weren't available at the time either. My dad made me something called a ParNET cable. I'd have my Amiga A500 setup with the actual GVP hard drive in this video and my friend did me a disk which would mount the hard drive and share it down the parallel port to my A1200 and I got something like 50k per sec. Happy days :)
Fantastic bits of kit. Something so 90's about these matching external hard drives that fit into the shape of the machine.
The GVP hard drive transformed my Amiga usage - bought a 52Mb drive in 90/91 (which annoyingly didn't work with the 4MB expansion I bought two weeks before)...I remember filling that drive within about 6 weeks and then bought another GVP with a 120Mb drive and 4MB RAM, VXL030 accelerator and 2Mb 32bit RAM and it was an amazing transformation (and also wallet draining). Worth every penny though!
Great video as always.
Now I need a ZuluSCSI to add to my HD8+ if only to quieten the noise from the drive in mine. Thanks for providing proof the Zulu will work just fine.
3:58
i love this back in the day sense of humor, marking on silkscreen saying "amnesia" for no amount of ram expansion
I had these as teen back in the early 90s. I actually never knew it had memory on the hardrive caddy. I still remember how expensive 20mb drive use to cost. crazy how technology has progressed in short time. I wish Amiga would of lived on. I taught myself programming with my amiga. Now I work in the game industry. I always look back at Amiga.
@8:58 thank you for that. I liked the video for the Magic Smoke!
This Ian character really haddaway with amigas.
Two drums and a cymbal fall off a cliff …😊
Groan...
I remember that edition of 'Amiga Shopper' - I'm certain I used that when deciding what A500 HD to buy. Settled on the A590 in the end, still have it and it still - just!!! - works. When it wants to!
I still have that edition, along with several more. Great memories when skimming back through them.
Ah the GVP A530, stuff of dreams indeed!
So I made this upgrade a few years back using a GVP A530. Had a lot of fun with that, but one thing that always bothered me was if i wanted to switch SD cards I had to take it all apart. If your 3D printing shells. maybe add a slot for a SD card extension? Would be a lot more covenant.
Around 32 years ago I owned a very good and reliable Amiga 500 hard disk. The brand was SupraDrive Amiga 500XP by Supra Corporation. It was 52MB in capacity and it also had RAM expansion. It was made in the US and built like a tank.
Ohhhh, the memories come flooding back. Like most I couldn’t afford one of those HD beauties either.
Vladislav? ;)
Yes, that song is a true ear worm. I lusted after one of those drivesfor my 500 back in the day, and I am looking forward to the next instalment.
Thanks, these really bring back memories. I had entirely forgotten about these hard drive expansions and in particular that some of them had CPU accelerators as well.
While these were around the Amstrad PC users were installing Hard Cards, another computing blast from the past.
Good video! I have the GVP A530 Turbo with the 286 board. Just ordered a ZuluSCSI to get it back up and running with a new power supply
I never saw one of these outside of shops and magazine adverts. Around 98 I bought a 1gb pc drive and used that instead, the workbench install disk wouldn't work and I had to change the program in shell to get it to install. I remember installing everything I could and using apps like directory opus like they were designed for. I really miss my a1200, apart from the HD and extra disk drives, it had an official monitor and extra ram with a processor speed upgrade, printer. When I went to uni I'd left it all boxed in cupboard in my room, I came back and it had gone. My dad had given it charity shop and wouldn't even apologise saying I wasn't using it, the most frustrating part the charity didn't sell on electronics and would have just binned it. I know have retropi with amiga emulation and also pimiga but it's not the same. The amount of videos I see about the amiga and I instantly miss what once was.
Holy moly, that's a great machine to lose. When I went to uni, I really enjoyed playing on the A1200 when I came home for the summer. In the second year I bought a PC for uni (not sure I got much use out of it apart from playing games!) and when I next came home, my A1200 had suffered the same fate as yours. 120mb HDD and a RAM expansion we bought the machine with (may have been 2mb or 4mb, can't remember).
I had a...strange HD for my Amiga 500. I bought it secondhand through a BBS listing in my area in 1989 or so, and it came in 2 parts: a sidecart that contained only the SCSI interface and boot-roms, and the drive itself was in a HUGE boxlike container connected to the SCSI sidecart by a thick cable, and was SO loud when powered on the fan overpowered the sound of a vacuum cleaner and accessing the drive was so loud that you could hear it chittering like a typewriter literally 2 rooms away. There was also some kind of conflict with Kickstart 1.3 and this drive's boot-rom so that when starting up from HD it would hang on a grey screen for a full minute before finally loading Workbench. The only good thing was that booting from floppy bypassed this automatically for loading games from floppy. I installed every multi-disc monster like Ultima VI on the HD of course, to save my sanity. I don't believe there was any room for RAM expansion on this HD, I suspect it was something cobbled together as soon as Kickstart 1.3 was released and thus a very early HDD product for the A500. I ended up selling the entire Amiga setup to finance my first PC in 1991 or so. I wish I could have afforded to keep it.
I used to have a SCSI in an 8088 PC That I got used and it had issues on being recognized due to issues in that old PC case not having enough on the 12V line to it. I changed to a better power supply and it worked when it could spin the platters. You did say it didn't have enough power in the ' test brick ' so if you can find something that can do higher amps on the 12V line, it may actually work. This was definitely an interesting look into older tech and how they did black magic to get external storage into systems that were not designed to use the storage of the ' Big Iron ' systems and may have influenced what we have today for storage.
I had the SupraDrive 40MB on my A500 when I was in the Navy stationed in Japan. I believe it had an additional 2MB of RAM as well.
The sound of the harddrive whirring, buzzing and clicking away is part of the experience.
Kudos to Ian, a man of taste.
What is love? The HD8 i owned back in the day! Thanks for the cool video!
That might be the best "bad news" I've ever heard from a tech restoration video.
I got my A590 thanks to some mistakes made by Kay&Co sales staff, who had two of them amongst a pile of Canon bubble printers at their disposal shop.
The Canon printers were being sold for £150, and all the boxes had £150 price stickers on them - so I got the A590 for that price - despite it being £499.99 in the catalogue.
I populated the RAM slots with "spare" RAM from the parts bin at work, where I was working for the R&D department, programming EEPROMs at the time.
A few years later, the same parts bins supplied a 200 MB "MFM" HDD.
At one point, my boot-up sound was a 1 minute recording of a DC10 landing - put on to "Own" a friend who kept coming around and going straight for the Amiga without even bothering to see if I was awake (shift work). Wired via a QED passive pre-amp, to a 110watt (RMS) Crimson Electric power amp and some big Wharfedale speakers.
The amp was set to max - I found him cowering under the table, thinking a large plane was about to crash into the house.
My A500/A590 is still in my loft - I keep meaning to bring it down and see if it still works.
Oh, the sweet moment, when I first started with a HD+ and a Quantum 105Mb Harddrive. 😊 That was a glimpse into the future…faster than any PC my friends had.
God I LOVE those GVP hard drives. My dad had got one for his A500 back in the early 90s, complete with 4MB of RAM and the 286 expansion. The disk itself had gone completely bad by maybe 2006 or so but with a SCSI2SD it's humming along quite happily these days.
LOL Amnesia! Love it. However, that's a fun joke, not serious in the slightest, I don't think Amiga Shopper would approve.
I think you should leave "What is love?" On that Amiga for people to experience when they visit the cave, haha.
Great episode. I never had a hard disk for my Amiga 500, just the basic 500, it's such a shame that first disk you tried didn't work, and you blew the power supply! That was painful.
Amiga is love. Amiga is life.
Wow, this was a blast from the past, I had GVP A500-HD+ back in the days. The first game I played from it was Willy Beamish from Dynamix (Sierra).
That game took 12 floppy disks, and the speed loading it from HDD was amazing at the time.
stepper motor on the WD drive needs lubricated. then get it to actuate a bunch and it'll come right back. those drives are rock solid so long as you lubricate up the stepper.
Thanks for another great video!
I picked up a GVP HD+ a couple of years ago, and it didn't initially work. I then bought an Individual ACA-500 and haven't explored the GVP since. May well dig it out again.
Had the HD+ with a 52 MB Quantum drive, and also added 2 MB RAM in there. Oh, and I yanked out the fan to reduce the noise, worked like a charm. A friend of mine had the A530 with the 68030 CPU, and a second daisy chained drive just lying on top, no cover or anything. Good times.
I think I had the one on the left back in 1992. I also had 4MB of ram installed in it as well as a 50MB SCSI drive and loved it. Also, this, to me, was the golden age of computing. :) I am a hands on IT professional for the last 23 years but this era was uniquc.
I had an Archos Overdrive for my A1200 back in the day... completely changed the computing experience. Booting up into workbench was so fast compared to using a floppy, and all of a sudden my multi-disk games (Monkey Island 2 and Fate of Atlantis) were so enjoyable to play again.
Me too when I looked at the magazines back in the days, i dreamt to have one of these, the gvp with the accelerator 030 too was nice
Kudos to these engineers as these cases/drives are much smaller than the Supra Drives I had for my. Atari 8bit and ST
Boot up a PC with Linux and run ddrescue to try to make image of the disc that failed to read, will show if it is possible to easy get the data from the drive. Don't forget to check SCSI termination settings as those can mess things up if set the wrong way.
Had a GVP around 1991 with 52MB HD, and 2MB RAM, upgraded the 500 with Kickstart 2.0.
wow. so much new tech since then;
would be great to have a modern HD solution
allowing memory upgrades &
switchable KickStarter versions ?
could it be usable on A600 & A1200 ?
I ended up with 2 HDD units over the years. Both had the Quantum Fireball 52. That was never going to cut the mustard so I fitted them out with 1GB drives which was huge at the time. MUUUUCH better!
I had one of these on the A500 as a kid, I thought it was the ducks guts and the extra RAM was awesome. Loved it.
You really get your hands on some cool old gear.
I grew up with PC's, so the Amigas etc I love to eat h and learn about the other machines I'd only heard.of growing up.
Back in the day I had friends with pcs but I had an amiga, apart from pc having a HD as standard the amiga kicked there backsides in every other way. I was devastated when commodore went bust and just disappeared.
@@sambra1979 you are right that the amiga was better, but by the time when Commodore went bust, the PC had catched up and with (S)VGA and a proper soundcard was the machine for the future. I was lucky enough to have access to both (we owned a Pc and my best friend had an amiga 500 and later a 1200. We loved both machines and could compare them.
I bought one of those Hard Drives for my Amiga 500... if I recall correctly, it was $600 for a 20MB (MB, not GB) in the 1990s... that was quite expensive, but a huge upgrade at the time.
Not quite the same but when I worked in a computer shop in the early 90s I got an 80Mb HDD for my Amiga 1200 and it transformed using the machine. I was (and still am) a coder and made music and art, and being able to load everything super fast and not have to swap disks around was just amazing. Plus I installed Super Stardust and Alien Breed Tower Assault on it :-)
The cave, my light in the dark,thanks for sharing your amazing finds and restoration. Some of my restoration came to life with your advice. I hope to see someday your cave, take care, f
Wow the memories! I had the GVP Series II HD+ with 50MB HD, 2MB RAM, and the PC286 board. I think I paid $500 in maybe 1992 for everything but the 286 card. I don't recall what I paid for that, I needed it to run a FORTRAN compiler for a math class at school. It was only a few years later that I sold it all and bought a 486DX2/66 PC...I regret selling it to this day!
Lovely, I fondly remember these as my grandpa had a late interest in computers (and luckily for me, the Amiga :) ). I recently let my A1200 be recapped and the internal harddisk was rescued, but according to the recapper, barely holding on. :) Fjew
For a while I had an A500 with kickstart 1.3/2.0 and the HD8+. It used to belong to a musician. The disk was the 45MB and it made such a difference to the speed of the 500. I really really regret giving it away now.
There is an A500 HD8+ Series II sitting behind me as we speak - like you, I was far too poor (well, far too young!) to afford one back in the day, so when one popped up on eBay, I couldn't resist. I've been searching for the GVP PC286 card since..
one of my first hard drives was similar to this one. My very first one was a seagate st225 20MB. I love Westop Digital ;) 350£ was a lot at the time... Wonderful episode! thanks for showing these drive extensions. Amiga was not popular in my country back then, it was either a Bulgarian Apple][ clone, an IBM XT clone or a real IBM or Apple][.
I only ever saw one of these once, but it did look a bit like the future.
These days I rock an A1200 with accelerator, 8mb and an internal 3" 260 Mb hard drive - but those HDs for A500s still manage to look snazzy...
What is love. seeing a working A590 and Hard Disc . Don't hurt me. When your beloved PSU pops.
I had an ancient 40 MB Seagate HD on my 1000 that was donated by a customer who updated to a 105 MB Quantum. It suffered from something we called "stiction" where the heads stuck to the surface when the drive spun down. I could get it started by poking the spindle on the bottom of the drive with a small screwdriver. I mention this because when stalled, the spindle motor could be drawing more power and overloading the power pack.
Great video! =) takes me back to the ol pappers when the only thing I could do is to dream that I had one.
i had a a590 it was a great update, I would liked those GVP drives with an accelerator builtin too i think?, but they were silly money at the time. They were the first time I noticed how pricey commodore amiga hardware was compared to PC equivalents :-(
In the early 90s, my friend and I used my Amiga 500 to write our ezine. I remember the third issue was completed and the hard drive crashed and we lost it all and had to start over. Maddening, but those were great times.
Keeping Hadaway enabled is part of computer preservation. Along with some resident program that causes a reboot once every few minutes.
Wow memories. I had a GVP and put my own 40mb HD in it. think it had 4mb ram. I ended up putting it in a small PC tower that sat next to A500+ with 2 more SCSi drives in (had a CD drive too). It was great sport to buy second hand PC bits and try to get them working. Had a tape backup drive, 5 1/4 inch SEAGATE 30mb behemoth. Had to make my own SCSI cables. Tought me loads about SCSi though.
I think at one point you're referring to the A530. I actually have one somewhere in deep storage. Gotta dig that thing out.
So glad I found this UA-cam channel - I use to have an Amiga 500 when i was a school kid - Mine came with Shadow of the Beast with a T-Shirt in it - Very hard game as you only had one life - The soundtrack to the game was amazing - Specially that the game came on two floppy 1.44MB disks - Which means the 20MB Hard drives - would hold about 15 / 18 games i guess - I use to read Amiga Format - I loved that computer use to make my own games too -
Using Amos and i used Action Replay too -
I also had the CB64 - really enjoying your videos -
Do you have a BBC Model B computer - I use to have a game called Revs on it -
I also had an Atari 400 - Have you done any videos on that computer ? - That was my very 1st computer - :)
Good memories! That SOTB T-shirt is very collectible these days. I’ve not covered the 400 but you’ll find a series on the 800XL. Welcome to The Cave!
I still have my 49Mb GVP HD+ with 2Mb RAM. I was thinking about replacing the HD in it, so I'll be very interested in seeing the Zulu work in one. My A500 is KS1.2 so I use a GVP boot disk to boot from the HD.
You should be able to track down a 1.3 KS no? I've got a ROM switcher in one of mine with a 1.3 and 2.0 chip in it. The other machine just the 1.3. I've only ever seen 1 1.2 machine but that was my cousins machine who got one pretty early.
@@iVTECInside I actually have a 1.3 and put it in a couple of years ago just to try it, but it seemed wrong as I'm very pleased to have got an early Amiga with the amazing Hi-Tek keyboard with C= key, so I didn't like to change the KS on it. I want it original. I don't mind changing the HD in the GVP though.
I suppose I could put a ROM switcher in it. That would still be acceptable to me.
Awesome as always ;) love your work!
I remember those drives well and thought the GVP one was much better but never got one as I took the upgrade path to an Amiga A2000 and later the A4000 with all the internal upgrade goodness.
I can't remember where I saw this trick (Adrian's Digital Basement, maybe?), but is it worth putting one drop of oil in to the side of the stepper motor on that Western Digital drive? Even just as a preventative maintenance thing.