Amiga Hardware Upgrade Options

From Classicamiga

Revision as of 01:50, 26 November 2008

Over the years many different models of Amiga were released. Commodore and third party hardware developers utilised every possible idea to add hardware upgrades and expansions for all models of Amiga to expand them with more ram, faster processors, harddrives, sound cards, network cards.. etc.

This section of the classicamiga Wiki will explore the variety of expansions available to show some of the possibilities available to get the most from each model of Amiga.

Amiga 1000

A2000/A1500/A2500

A500/A500+

A600

Commodore Amiga A600

The A600 is probably the least expandable Amiga model of them all. Its small and compact size has the advantage of taking up less room than any other model, while retaining the same features and capacities of the older A500+ model. There are however still quite a few upgraded that can be added to the A600 to expand it.

Expansion Ports

• Trapdoor Memory slot

The trapdoor slot is designed specifically for the A601 1MB Chip ram expansion card. This upgrades the A600 to 2MB of chip ram which is very useful for productivity software. However most games will not require this much ram unless installed to HD.

• Internal 2.5" IDE Port

This port is designed for a laptop style 2.5" Harddrive. To use this port the A600 must have a kickstart 2.05 rom version 37.350 or a 3.1 rom fitted. The earlier A600 kickstart 2.05 roms had bugs that restricted or prevented HDs from being used with the IDE port ( Version 37.299 has no support for the IDE port, and version 37.300 only allowed a maximum of a 40MB HD to be used).

It is also possible to utilise the A600's IDE port beyond just using it for a harddrive.

• IDE Compact Flash Card Adapter - You could use one of these instead of a HD as a sold state HD. Also making it easy to take the CF card out of the A600 and access its contents from your PC using WinUAE.
• Buffered IDE interface - Fit one of these to the A600's internal IDE port and use it with the IDEFix'97 software. You can then connect more than one device to the IDE port at the same time.
• Atapi/IDE CD-Rom or Laptop CD drive - The A600's case can easily be customised to fit a laptop style slim CD-Rom drive inside the case. Use a laptop CD-Rom drive alongside a buffered IDE interface and HD to really give the capacities of the A600 a boost, by instantly giving it the additions of an HD and a CD-Rom drive.

• PCMCIA slot

The 16-bit Type II PCMCIA card slot on the left-hand side of the A600 can be used for a selection of upgrades for the A600. Newer 32-bit CardBus or PC Cards are however incompatible. Available expansions for the A600's PCMCIA card slot include:

• 1-4MB PCMCIA SRAM Card - This will give the A600 1-4MB of Fast ram. Combine this with the 1MB trapdoor expansion and you can expand the A600 up to a total of 6MB ram (2MB Chip + 4MB Fast ram).
• CD-Rom Controller (Archos CD-Rom drive)
• External Harddrive (Archos External HD)
• SCSI Controller (Squirrel SCSI card)
• Sound Sampler
• Video Digitiser
• Network Card (both wired and wireless)
• Dial up Modems
• Compact Flash memory card adapters

Many of these devices were not originally released specifically for the A600, but were PC laptop devices which have since been made to work with the A600 using free third party drives available on Aminet. This means that many of them are now easily available at low prices these days.

Custom upgrades

In addition to the upgrades possible with the A600 using the built in expansion ports, some third party developers also created upgraded that connected directly to the A600's motherboard, allowing upgrades beyond the original design of the A600.

• Accelerators

A1200

A4000

CDTV

CD32