User avatar
Nick

Posted Thu Jul 30, 2020 6:30 am

Hey all,

Could somebody tell me what is needed to be able to play Amiga500 games From a harddrive ( and which harddrive I should buy and how to install) and/or to write adf files to a floppy, please?

My Amiga 500 is totally standard, but I would love to pimp it up, any advice on what you guys is mandatory, would be appreciated.

Again, I am as intelligent as the average fruit fly, when it comes to hardware. Luckily I can play games better ;)

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Thu Jul 30, 2020 9:28 am

There are lots of different directions you could go.

You could go old-school and get an external sidecar, like the A590 or HD8+. Those can use RAM to speed things up, and some folks convert the mechanical hard drives to SCSI2SD cards and use micro SD flash instead. I used those in several of my big box amigas (no noise, almost no power draw).

But, sourcing one of those sidecars isn't easy in 2020.

Another very popular option many like is the ACA500+, which is a brand new (2018) piece of hardware that opens up a ton of options. You can read about it here and here. There are also several videos on YouTube that demonstrate what it can do. It's a lot more than just a hard drive option.

There is even a cool and inexpensive clear acrylic case for it, for those in the EU.

And then, there are a ton of internal options if you don't mind popping open your case.

There's the Classic 520, which only came out last year iirc. There's also the Wicher 508i.

Lots of little gadgets out there like those.

Keep in mind they are also accelerators, so if you're just looking for a hard drive solution they may be offering more than you even want and typically push you to OS 2.0 and above. So it kind of depends on what you want to do, and what you actually want when you get there. Whether you just want your 500 to "be like it was" but with a modern solution for storing data, or you want to turn it into a faster machine (which might break some of your really old games) it just depends.

User avatar
Nick

Posted Sat Aug 01, 2020 2:10 pm

Thanks again guys,

Exiting, I am currently in an auction for 500 floppy’s (games:software) for Amiga 500/600/1200. About 70euro’s. No idea if you guys think this is worth it or not (verified working).

For the rest, I am leaning to the aca500+ for the whdload, cause retro gaming is the goal for me.

However, the aca500+ does not come with cf cards and online I have been able to find only cf cards for the amiga600. Are the cf cards for Amiga 500 and Amiga 600 the same ?

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Sun Aug 02, 2020 11:50 am

You can use any CF card with the ACA500(+).

Using CFs below 4GB could make it slightly easier because there are some minor pitfalls with bigger partitions. Other than that it doesn’t matter.

I think the A500 or A600- CFs you are referring to come with pre-installed software. In best case these contain abandonware. In worst case they contain copyrighted software such as the Workbench and/or WHDLoad. While WHDLoad does not cost you anything and is free for download, it is (afaik) not allowed to make money with it by selling it on any mass storage.






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