Since the dawn of time, man has stared up at the night sky and wondered if it was possible to upgrade an Amiga 1000 with 8MB of RAM, a faster CPU, and fast IDE storage -- without compromising the beautiful aesthetic that is the 1000.
Wonder no more.
The 1000 is a great machine, but seriously lacks internal upgrade options. While there are vintage internal CPU and memory upgrades, they are expensive and have no internal "hard drive" option. There are several external hard drives, but no flash memory options.
The ACA500+ is a great option from Individual Computers. Even though it does not technically support the 1000, it does work -- and gives you a nice CPU boost, 8MB fast, and a compact flash "hard drive" for storage. But it dangles off the side like under developed appendage.
The Vampire promises to bring all these things -- but through hardware "emulation". I'm sort of a purist and prefer real hardware.
Along comes the Wicher 500i sporting a 14MHz (minimum) 68000 CPU, 8MB autoconfig fast RAM, and a 600/1200-compatible IDE header.
But...it's only for the 500/500+ and 2000...or so they say! Looking at the card, it's very small and should fit nicely inside the 1000. Except the boys at Hi-Toro decided to put the 68000 CPU partially under the floppy cage. Ugh.
The solution? A custom CPU offset board. So I fired up PCB Artist and laid out a small offset board. Got the board fabricated out of some cheap-o Malaysian factory, bought some sockets and header pins, and soldered me up an offset board.
I have so far plugged everything in and...it fits and...the CPU and RAM work perfectly! To get the IDE working, I have to jumper 2 pins on the Wicher to the OVR and INT2 pins on the ZORRO expansion slot. Of course, you also need Kickstart 2.05 or later for IDE to work. I happen to have a "Rejuvenated" 1000 that has Kickstart 3.1 ROM onboard (plus a 1MB "Fat Agnus" so I can play Alien Breed) -- so I should be good to go.
In the next couple of days I hope to get the IDE working, and will post the results along with pictures. Stay tuned!