Amiga Hardware Upgrade Options

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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.
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.
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Please select the model of Amiga you wish to see the expansion possiblilities for:
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*[[A1000 Upgrade Options|Amiga 1000]]
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*[[A2000 Upgrade Options|A2000/A1500/A2500]]
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*[[A500 Upgrade Options|A500/A500+]]
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*[[A600 Upgrade Options|A600]]
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*[[A1200 Upgrade Options|A1200]]
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*[[A4000 Upgrade Options|A4000]]
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*[[CDTV Upgrade Options|CDTV]]
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*[[CD32 Upgrade Options|CD32]]
==Amiga 1000==
==Amiga 1000==

Revision as of 02:22, 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.

Please select the model of Amiga you wish to see the expansion possiblilities for:

Contents

Amiga 1000

The Amiga 1000 (also referred to as the A1000) was the first Amiga model every produced and is more limited in expansion capabilities compared to later Amiga models. However some expansion is possible.

Expansion Ports

  • Sidebus Expansion

Custom Upgrades

  • Accelerators

Other Upgrades

Also usable on the A1000 is most Amiga hardware that can be connected via the RBG Video, Joystick, Floppy drive, Parallel or serial ports of the Amiga as the A1000 shares exactly the same ports as all other models of Amiga. These ports were often used to connect external floppy disk drives, sound samplers, video digitisers, scanners, midi devices, printers... etc.

However please note that the A1000's parallel and serial ports are the reverse of later models. With the parallel port being male instead of female, and the serial port being female instead of male. Therefore to use some hardware you may need to get a gender changer for the A1000's ports before the hardware can be connected.

A2000/A1500/A2500

Expansion Ports

Custom Upgrades

  • Accelerators

Other Upgrades

Also usable on the A1000 is most Amiga hardware that can be connected via the RBG Video, Joystick, Floppy drive, Parallel or serial ports of the Amiga as the A1000 shares exactly the same ports as all other models of Amiga. These ports were often used to connect external floppy disk drives, sound samplers, video digitisers, scanners, midi devices, printers... etc.

A500/A500+

Expansion Ports

  • Sidebus Expansion

Custom Upgrades

  • Accelerators

Other Upgrades

Also usable on the A500 is most Amiga hardware that can be connected via the RBG Video, Joystick, Floppy drive, Parallel or serial ports of the Amiga as the A1000 shares exactly the same ports as all other models of Amiga. These ports were often used to connect external floppy disk drives, sound samplers, video digitisers, scanners, midi devices, printers... etc.

A600

Commodore Amiga 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
As standard CPU accelerators are not possible to add to an A600 because it is one of the only models of Amiga that doesn't provide an expansion port capable of accessing the main Amiga hardware to connect additional processors. However by fitting a piggy back connector over the A600's original motherboard mounted 68000 processor hardware developers managed to provide accelerators for the A600. These include the following:
  • Apollo 620 - A 68020 accelerator running at 20MHz or 25MHz with a FPU at the same speed as the CPU. And support for up to 8MB Fast ram. This accelerator is not PCMCIA friendly so needs to have a jumper set to 4MB to limit the fast ram of PCMCIA cards are going to be used.
  • Apollo 630 - A 68030 accelerator running at 40MHz or 50MHz with an optional FPU at the same speed. And support for up to 32MB of fast ram. This accelerator is PCMCIA friendly so should work with PCMCIA cards. This accelerator might however have problems working with revision 1.3 A600 motherboards.
  • DCE Viper 630 - A 68030 accelerator running at 33MHz, 40MHz or 42MHz with an FPU running at the same speed. And support for 4 or 8MB of fast ram. This accelerator is PCMCIA friendly.

Other upgrades

Also usable on the A600 is any Amiga hardware that can be connected via the RBG Video, Joystick, Floppy drive, Parallel or serial ports of the Amiga as the A600 shares exactly the same ports as all other models of Amiga. These ports were often used to connect external floppy disk drives, sound samplers, video digitisers, scanners, midi devices, printers... etc.

A1200

Expansion Ports

Custom Upgrades

  • Accelerators

Other Upgrades

Also usable on the A1200 is most Amiga hardware that can be connected via the RBG Video, Joystick, Floppy drive, Parallel or serial ports of the Amiga as the A1000 shares exactly the same ports as all other models of Amiga. These ports were often used to connect external floppy disk drives, sound samplers, video digitisers, scanners, midi devices, printers... etc.

A4000

Expansion Ports

Custom Upgrades

  • Accelerators

Other Upgrades

Also usable on the A4000 is most Amiga hardware that can be connected via the RBG Video, Joystick, Floppy drive, Parallel or serial ports of the Amiga as the A1000 shares exactly the same ports as all other models of Amiga. These ports were often used to connect external floppy disk drives, sound samplers, video digitisers, scanners, midi devices, printers... etc.

CDTV

Expansion Ports

Custom Upgrades

  • Accelerators

Other Upgrades

CD32

Expansion Ports

Custom Upgrades

  • Accelerators

Other Upgrades

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