I loved my A590 and watching this brought back some great memories, especially the scratchy sound it made (wish you had featured that too!). Thank you sir!
I had one of these bought from Viking computers in Norwich.. An 18 hour Real3D render was ruined because my mum heard the rattling of the drive, assumed something was wrong and pulled the plug. Arrrrgh.
I was lucky enough to have started work when I picked up my Amiga 500 so had cash available when the A590 came out and picked one up. It was shipped without any workbench on it and using one of the disks allowed installation of the workbench. I loved having the drive and productivity definitely was the winner with me. Games in general were still used via floppy disk. After picking up the A570 CD Rom released a couple of years later I also picked up one of those. This was a pain as you could only use one or the other. After picking up my A1200 and adding a HD, my A590 was sold on giving a friend the fun by use of the hard disk! Thanks for the memories Dan!
I remember where I was working in 1986/7 we ordered a "Winchester disk" and you had to "park" it at the end of the day. It had to be handled with kid gloves. It was always getting corrupted.
When I got my first Amiga - an Amiga 1000 - it was unexpanded and had only the one internal floppy. Playing most games was an exercise in torture and frustration as virtually EVERY move required you to insert a different floppy. I begged my mom for the 256K RAM expansion that went in the front port and she did: It was $300...for *_256K of RAM(!)_* but it did make games a tiny bit more tolerable (and allowed certain games to load that wouldn't load before because of lack of RAM). [note: By the way for those who don't know, the Amiga 1000 came with 512K of RAM, but the OS (Kickstart) loaded into the bottom 256K - it was not stored in ROM at this time. So adding the extra 256K allowed you to have a full 512K available to the system. The upside is that upgrading to a newer OS was as simple as buying the newer OS on floppy and using it to boot with. I later added the ROM with a ROM switcher though.] Adding an external floppy made the system actually fully enjoyable to use because I could then leave the OS disk in the internal drive most of the time or let the game have two disks accessible at the same time (if the game supported more than one drive: Some games required you to disconnect the external drive because it needed that extra bit of buffer RAM that the other drive would reserve for its own use). When I finally got an external HD, I think it was 40 megabytes and the access speed and convenience were so awesome, but as you say 40MB is not really that much space for anything. To think that a 128 *GIGABYTE* sd card is around $20 now it just blows my mind.
I bought a GPV HD8+ II with a 120MB Quantum and 2MB ram in april 1992 for my 500. Still have it, with the original box, and it's still working. It was packed down for 20 years but when I took it out it just started up like it's never been away. I paid 7500 SEK for it back then, that's almost 11000 SEK today (a bit over £900). For a long while, when I was running a BBS, I had 4 drives connected to it and the 3 other drives was mounted in a big tower chassi standing next to the 500 with a long SCSI cable going between them. I think the total space I had was about 1.2 GB which was enormous back then. I still have two of those other drives left but I've only gotten one of them to work.
Brings back memories of fitting a 2.5” HDD to my Amiga 600 with expansion card in the trapdoor. Sold it on eBay some years ago. Great vlogs and podcast.... top job man👍🥸
Totally with you there Dan. A hard drive transformed the Amiga in a way that you wouldn't know until you actually had one. I bought a 60 Meg internal IDE drive for my A1200 back in the day, and then later asked Santa for a 40MHz 030 accelerator+ram card. The combo of the accelerator and the HD was even more transformative, suddenly I had a PC and Apple killer sat on my bedroom desk, nothing could touch it... From first boot to Workbench took just 7 seconds... Those were the days!
It's so weird thinking back to the days when storage wasn't cheap. I remember when one of my friends got a HD for their PC that could hold over 700MB, and we marvelled at the possibility to copy AN ENTIRE CD-ROM ONTO A HARD DRIVE. It's so ridiculous from today's point of view. Nowadays I have a network storage where I put all my DVDs on for better viewing convenience, and there's still terrabytes of free stoarge left. This was really unthinkable for 16 year old me back in 1997. Also, it's so funny that I never knew there was a HD extension for the A500 back in the day, I only learned about this during the 2010's when I re-discovered the Amiga. I imagine what it must have been like owning one back then. Loading times are so incredibly fast (even compared to more modern systems) and there's no need swapping disks every so often for games like Monkey Island 2 (11 disks, IIRC) or Simon the Sorcerer (7, or 8 disks?). Once you tasted the convenience of having a HD, it's hard to go back... Of course I also upgraded the HD extension and replaced the incredibly loud SCSI drive with a SCSI2SD-Adaptor, and now I have several partitions with ~2GB, which really is more than enough space for an A500. EDIT: OMG! I too need to do a reboot every time I first power on the Amiga, or else the HD won't get recognized. Even with the SD card in place.
Did you try Adrian Black's trick of oiling the stepper motor on the Western Digital drive? That worked to get my own WD IDE-XT drive functioning properly again. And those drives were actually based on a Tandon design. At the time, Western Digital was primarily making graphics chipsets for PCs, but then they purchased Tandon's data storage division to get into the hard drive business.
Oil a drive you say? So, um... I've just tried this exact trick on a dead, non reading WD IDE-XT drive, 20mb in an Amiga 590 external HDD... unreadable, and to be honest, I thought... well it's broken now so what's the harm, but it's never gonna work... something so simple... and yet... one tiny dab of synthetic oil on the stepper motor shaft... a momentary twiddle... and... SHE LIIIIVEEEESSSS! Absolutely brilliant. Totally unbelievable. But utterly, incomprehensively true. I love 80s tech. Simple = Fixable awesomeness... right, now for a game of Elite....
careful use of a hot air gun may release the old tape from the boxes. I have seen the warehouse people at our company use this trick to remove labels from returned deliveries and then theres no damage to the cardboard box.
I have had one with 20 megs 👻 I sounded Like a Jet while flying, and while Reading or writing is was Like listening a Violin concert 🙏🤸 I was proud like hell, King of Kings, Cinemawares Wings was installed and it came from the desert 👻
In case anyone is wondering that the A590 is making interesting sounds: It's because the original Western Digital XT drive was using MFM encoding for data storage which is modified frequency modulation. It's making funny beeping noises for read and write operations (and on top of that you got the mechanical noise from the stepper motor moving the heads around).
I bought mine in 1991-92 from Diamond Computers on Tottenham Court Road, London for around £320 with 1MB RAM. When I first switched it on, I thought an aircraft was taking off! :) Remembering to Park the Hard-Drive heads had to become routine.
I've got a GVP II (with added 286 PC card). Cost a fortune back in the 90's. Came with a 52MB SCSI. Sat in the loft for 20+ years, powered it up and it works fine. Managed to transfer the lot to a SCSI2SD card. I didn't realise that old SCSI drives are worth cash these days, I've got some old DEC SCSI drives knocking around (some of which are 5.25" bricks). Probably still work. Will have to dig them out.
My dad bought a 20mb he'd for our Amstrad 512 in about 1988-89 and it cost about £300 and necessitated taking out the 2nd floppy drive. They offered a 40mb disk which was almost twice the price but we couldn't afford it. We later found out that it was actually a 40mb disk partitioned to 20mb. So we repartitioned it to 40mb and saved a fortune.
My first A500 hard disk was some loud 10MB hunk of boxy metal that died on me in 2 months. It was an 5.25 HD. The second one was a fast, silent 3.5 inch 33mb Seagate. That one worked well and i sold it together with the A500. I remember having installed Their finest hour (battle of Britain), Wings, i think Rocket Ranger, History line 1914-1918, Wing Comnander? and several other..Also had an chip? Fast? RAM expansion with 2.3MB? extra RAM that costed an arm and a leg. Back then my parents had a ton of patience with me, patience that i dont have today myself. Thanks for the blast from the past.
I can remember getting a GVP 105mb hard disk drive for my Amiga 500 Plus (I think the GVP had some extra ram in it as well but I forget how much now). I can remember it costing in the region of £600+ 😳. Was a great drive, fast, quiet, and matched the profile of the Amiga 500 precisely. Was absolutely gutted when the Amiga 600 came out and I was unable to use the GVP hard drive as the 600 had no SCSI connector.
Yeah it's great being able to pick up these parts today that we always wanted as kids but were just too expensive. I had a 386dx as a kid in 93/94, had lots of fun times on that, but I always wanted a 486 as some games demanded that system and graphics were more fluid in games like Doom. Now i'm building one at a tiny fraction of the cost my parents would have paid back in the day, but I think i'll use my CF to IDE adapter, I really havn't been able to find a reliable hdd from that era.
Agreed, I built myself my dream PC of 20 years ago during lockdown using pre-owned parts from eBay. Dual P-III processors, a GeForce 4 Ti, a SCSI drive for CD and Jaz drives and a CF to IDE adapter, plus a whopping 512 MB of RAM! That spec would cost thousands of dollars 20 years ago and I could never have afforded it back then. Felt great to be using it now to run all my old operating systems, apps and games
The first time I heard about hard disks was when a friend got an Amiga 600 with a 20 MB hard disk. The weird thing is that I had an Amiga 500 and later an Amiga 1200, but never thought about buying any peripherals except extra memory and an extra floppy drive. And didn´t have a clue what to use the PCMCIA-slot for.
My stepfather had one of these attached to his A500 back in the day which he used to store his thesis. By the time he was finished the hard drive was full. I remember wanting to play Beneath A Steel Sky but being put off because it had about 8 discs and they seemed to need swapping for every area you went to. For modern use though, something like a SCSI to SD card adapter would probably be a good upgrade for one of these.
Nice video! I remember those crazy prices, it's ridiculous how storage was expensive. A random question: What is that device you have on top of the Xbox One? Is it an LCD clock?
Can remember carefully putting in the 2mb of memory into the 590 on the kitchen table. Watching the extra ram come up was very cool. If I think hard I can even remember the squeaky hard disk access head noise.
It's not shown in the video, but the A590 also came with a solid metal ground clip that connects to the A500 expansion port and it makes contact with the A590's metal lip below the connector. The user manual shows how to install it. Also DIP switch 3 allows for a short or long delay before the system checks for the hard drive, although I haven't tried that myself.
@@danwood_uk - it will be interesting to know whether it applies the delay only at power up, or whether it does it after every reboot. If the latter, it may get a bit tedious.
@@danwood_uk Yeah my friend first got one for his Amiga 500 with 1.2 rom. The issue being you couldn’t boot directly from the hard drive as a result and had to be disabled via the dip switches on the rear. Hence I remember what the dip switches did. Unfortunately my personal A590 bit the dust years ago. I’m not sure what happened but after years in storage I found it to be corroded inside. Maybe water got into it. 😳
Ah memories , I had one in 92 , all to play LINKS Golf. I saved for ages to buy it and with 2 meg expanded memory. I also was mad about CGI and loved imagine. I sold it a few years after and only last year bought one again :) oh that sound when it’s accessing.
Cool memories! I got my A590 back in 1990 I think, and used it to do my university dissertation😎 My A500 was Kickstart 1.2 so couldn't auto boot until I eventually got 1.3. I remember thinking 20MB would be plenty😂 Wish I still had my set up.
I had an 80mb GVP impact 2 with a few megs and a 286 pc bridgeboard in it. One thing it had that the A590 doesn't appear to have is a `game` switch which hid the drive from games that wouldn't run if a HD was detected (anti piracy I presume). It cost a lot of money, £500+ for the drive, £100+ for each memory module and several hundred for the pc card. Mine was supposed to be a 60mb model but the supplier stuck an 80mb one in there for the same price, which was nice. Its one of the only Amiga related things I still have in a box somewhere along with a rombo digitiser and colour unit, vidi amiga genlock and a few joysticks.
I remember drooling over the 20 MB hard drive when it first came out for the A500. I couldn’t afford it as I was 14 back then. During university, I bought myself a 486DX PC with a hard drive for the first time. I was stunned how much faster and bigger it was than floppy disks. It really felt like a revolution to me
I had an Amiga 500 and I was dreaming about getting this HD for it. Never happened, but I later get an A1200 and yet later, an A4000 that I still have. It has a Phase 5 68060 accelerator, with cyberscsi and cybervision, iirc. It is still working, just have to find an easy way to get it on the internet.
I remember paying near $500 USD for my DataFlyer 20M external hard drive for my A500 back in the day. I also remember it dying about 30 days outside of the warranty (which wasn't very long if I recall). Luckily, when I bought it, I paid my parents and they put it on their credit card to buy it for me and that credit card company had a "we double your warranty" clause. So we got it replaced using that. No problems after that. ;-)
My first hard drive was $600 Canadian in 1990, still have the receipt, on my A1000. I think it was a GVP SCSI controller but I cannot remember.. Also has the '020 Lucas board as well. Those were the days.
I've never tried an Amiga, looks cool, but obviously quite primitive, today. I had sold Vic-20's and C-64's back in the day, but didn't own one or even understand them all that much. It was mostly a photography/audio shop... But I gotta say, the fact that the CGI effects on "Babylon 5" were done on these computers blow my friggin' mind! ;-]
Dan I'm confused! Your compression settings are really great - voice always sounds brilliant on all your vids - I wanted to ask you what compressor/limiters you use and what settings? But also it looks like you've got the wrong bit of the mic pointing at you?! The diaphragm is always on the side on condenser mics like that, unless it's a new type that I haven't heard about with rotatable capsule or something?? Even if it was in omni pattern that doesn't extend vertically does it? Help me understand!!!! Thanks for all the great videos btw!
Thanks, I have been playing with a few different settings lately but pretty happy with this setup now. It does look like a condenser, but it's actually an end-fire dynamic Heil PR30 mic - www.thomann.de/gb/heil_sound_pr30.htm I run it through a DBX 286 channel strip processor then into a PreSonus Studio 24c interface.
The pace of change! I got my A1200 in 1992, got tired of swapping disc by 1995 when I got an internal 2-inch IDE drive for it. 120MB for a similar number of pounds. Totally freed my Amiga to fly.
Had the good old A500 back in early 90s!!! Upgraded and got an external 3.5 disk drive for it. Great games like kick off 2, rings of medusa, it came from the desert and many more!!! Good times!!!
Great video... I had one of these on my A500 for DTP work back in the day (Pagestream). We got so tired of the HD’s noise that we created a sound deadening box that went over the top, otherwise I’d get a headache! Can’t have been that good for it really. I also had a tinted plastic cover that went over the monitor to lesson the on-screen flicker while running in interlaced mode... funny to look back now 😂
Just be careful with malware, once got an RDB virus which was a pain. Ended up wiping the drive and starting from scrath. One reason I switched to CF on my A1200 was that I could easily swap cards e.g. A CF specifically for testing software.
My 15 year old self would've never believed that in 2021 a micro sd card the size of my pinky fingernail will hold my whole Amiga games library + all the 8bit&16bit consoles :)
hey Dan, hope you're doing well :) my first experience of a hard drive was a 20mb in my a1200.. which at the time I thought I'd never fill.. and to be fair I don't think I did, as I was never into those big box games, like Loom. I had a lot of productivity stuff like Wordsworth and Dpaint. great video :)
I used to do a lot of animation on DP4, but kept running out of memory. The solution was external memory which slotted in the same place as the HD. Don't quote me on this, but I think it was for 10 or 12meg, which was huge and allowed me to do massive animations. Sure wish I still had them.
Back in the day I eventually got a A1200, bought the scsi adapter for it, and ran some small notebook drive inside the case on the right side...also had an external Bernoulli drive with removeable disks.
Thanks for your vid, been playing around with my 3 year Amiga a500 r6, has now 1meg chip ram, with my shell less gvp has 8mg of fast ram, 4x4gb hdd’s but only 1 4gb will show up 😞 working on the vga output now 😊 slow ram is the next project 😊
Back in the day my first two hard drive systems Data Chief and Lt Kernal for the C64 and C128 cost close to $1000 USD new and when I acquired those I paid $500 for each and those were 20mb. Later CMD put out a 100mb HD for those 8 bits for far less money under $500. When I was using the A1000 I had an Expansion Systems Data Flyer Hard Drive Controller and an 8mb RAM Card which connected to the HD Controller and by the I acquired that I was buying 100mb Micropolis Drives for I believe $100 and that made a big difference in the A1000 Performance. When I got the A500 I used that Data Flyer Solution on the A500. When I acquired an A2000 HD I installed the Expansion System Boards into the A2000 and ran the hard drives externally. Yea I kept buying drives as the prices of used drives kept falling so the external drives lived in a PC Case. There were a few games which you could install on the HD but not many and so my kids just booted off floppies on either the A1000 or A500 and my A2000HD Ran my BBS. Yea the only reason why I got into using hard drives was to run my BBS starting with the 8 bit computers. Today storage is cheap and I still own all those old drives but I did sell the drive in the Data Chief to a friend who needed of all things an ST506 Drive. Yea that was a long time ago. Even the PET had like a 3mb HD which a friend owned and it was in the same cabinet as the two drive unit or similar to it.
I had an acquaintance in school who had a hard drive on his Amiga 500 in 1992. I also have a Swedish Computer Magazine from like 1987 where the front page say 10mb HDD's now under $1000
Great video, I remember my a590 well, 20mb wasn't big even then, but it was an almost affordable drive. I always lusted over a GVP as it matched the Amiga even better, but they were silly money, I think they could fit an accelerator in them too? I would like to see a video on one of them in the future? Having it though made the machine closer to a competent computer, I could use it for word processing and Sculpt 3d so much easier, they were good days :-) All of this was sold in the end for a a1200 and a £170 20mb ide drive in the end from Power computing - their ads were everywhere as were their shops, now all gone ;-(
Yeah I always drooled over the GVP drives too, and they did have 030 accelerator versions I remember. If I ever get hold of one, will definitely do a video on it.
I was lucky enough to own a GVP HD8+ 2mb/100mb hdd then upgraded to 4GB & 8MB fast ram. aside you needed 2 psu: one for Amiga 500 + one for the GVP. I then connect the jumper and made a bigger psu to make the GVP & Amiga to run with 1 200watt PSU. Still runs till today, Along with my CDTV
I bought vanilla A2000 in 91, because i knew that i need hard drive for my use later on. And by 1992 i got enough money to get 50MB hardcard for it, after that my development things were a lot faster :D
Wow this brings back memories, my first A500 with twin ext. floppy drives, then my A2000 with a 512MB HDD in it (that cost hell of allot of money back then) and later my A1200 with a DIY external 1GB HDD (mounted a ribbon cable socket on the back of the A1200 then connected the HDD with it's own PSU to that). A HDD really changed the Amiga from a hobby machine into a real work machine or games machine (my main use for it).
Price sounds insane,. but 1MB RAM used to cost couple hundred of DEM at least in Serbia. One of CBM deaths is not using HDD tech properly, even A2000 was HDD less, only A3000 and A4000
I loved my Amiga 500. I now regret giving it away. It had the seagate external hard drive and WB 2.0 . My hard drive capacity was 60 meg's back then. It was third party hard drive but a high quality product. Memories sweet memories.
I had one of these with the 2 meg RAM upgrade. It was my first experience of a hard drive and I couldn't believe how much difference it made. Suddenly, Workbench WAS the Amiga, not just a disk that came with it.
20MB in 1991 would have been rough. My dad got his second laptop back in 1990, and it had a 60MB harddrive, and that was considered small at the time. At this time having a laptop drive pretty much cut capacity in a third or there about. I guess that is the drawback of having a fairly cheep single unit computer. Stuff that suppose to be internal become very expensive
Trying to play The Adventures of Willy Beamish on my A500 was taxing. When I switched over to my A3000 with built-in hard drive, things were incredibly fast and smooth! Big improvement! 👍
I use on my A500+ a ACA 500+. I think that it is the modern A590, but a lot better. If you use a A 500 the ACA 500+ is a good send you can put nice big CF Cards in them. You will need a very good PSU to use it.
There was a way back in the day that you could load disk only games to the hard drive by creating folders for each disk and assigning each folder a drive number so the game saw it as different drives, but it only worked with the games that didn't use a custom bootstrap i.e the copy protected games you couldn't see in workbench
Nice video Dan. I’ve recently picked up a HC533 Turbo card for my A500, keeping in the KS1.3 mode. Same vibe achieved, just with more modern hardware. I don’t have the desk space for an A590 or GVP HDD add on. I had totally forgotten about JST and didn’t know it worked with WHDLoad files now, so that’s my Easter weekend investigations sorted. Would be great to have the games setup and working with my A500 setup and not have to fork out for a MegaCHIP type 2MB chip ram upgrade for the A500.
I remember the Amiga harddrive seemed like witchcraft. It made more sense to me to instead have -4- floppy drives. For 95% of games, it meant no more swaps.
I had a 20mb one, I borrowed it from a friend who got an A3000 - I'm sure i had all kinds of stuff on it, but i primarily remember Monkey Island 2, going f rom 10-11 disks to non was glorious.
@@danwood_uk it certainly was amazing. However, i did get motion sickness on the virtual reality! Got my cartoon classics the same Christmas as you. My dad still takes the pi”” out of me now for saying “great graphics “ after firing up the Simpsons game!
I had exactly one of those models and it was only 20MB, I reinstalled Monkey Island 2 plenty of times on it, because there was enough room on the disk to keep it installed at all times.
Just FYI, because RUclips uses a red bar across the bottom of played videos to indicate already-played videos (at least in some interfaces), putting a red border around your thumbnails makes all of your videos appear to have already been viewed (at least at first glance). This might result in fewer views because people may think the red is indicating something they’ve already watched.
Love the video it took me back to the past, yes had the Amiga and started with the ZX81, you say you have a 8TB hard drive behind you and a 16tb NAS as well, please tell us what you have stored on them, every single movie out there? every game ever released? every mp3 that exists? would love to know
@@danwood_uk I am a movie and still photographer, TBs of very fast NVme SSDs of movies and edited editions of 4k movies, takes up a lot of space, I use Davinci Resolve to edit with the M1 Mac but my day to day desktop is a Raspberry Pi with 256gb ssd, perfectly ok with Facebook RUclips, email and PiMiga MF edition : ), and another Raspberry pi I built myself setup as a NAS with 4tb, I am 75 yrs old, what fun, lived through generations of gaming, I love your nostalgia : )
Can you use the external SCSI port in the back to connect this to other SCSI computers, like a Mac? Or is that port only for attaching other SCSI devices and route them through the Amiga edge connector?
The Amiga had two major Achilles heels in the early 90s. The first was that games was still being designed with one button in mind. That restricted games to such a degree that a lot of people jumped ship to consoles. The second was that there was no real upgrade path, as Dan says in this video, you paid insane amounts of money for 50 mb which would be enough for two two large games at the time. All in all it was too expensive to keep going with Amiga, it made a lot more sense to make one big payment for a decent PC that you'd have to upgrade every 3 years or so at the time. With the Amiga you have to spend a lot more money and the upgrades didn't really get you much. And the one button joystick games really bothered me right until the end. Even the NES had two buttons back in 1983.
First hard drive I bought was a Maxtor 2.6GB drive, for my Amiga 1200T. It was enough to house hundreds of applications and games. It was probably close to £200. Last week I bought a 2TB SSD for £140.
I paid $550 Australian for a A590 in 1991. It was miles better than loading Workbench from floppy but there wasn't a lot of games that were hard drive installable. My only installable games were M1 Tank Platoon and F117 Stealth Fighter (I think). $550 for only 20 Meg was very pricey and for the same money one could have bought a much higher capacity hard drive for a PC.
The fact that there is an Amiga magazine out in 2021 is simply amazing.
There is something fun about seeing some old tech that you could not afford back in the day, finally being picked up.
I loved my A590 and watching this brought back some great memories, especially the scratchy sound it made (wish you had featured that too!). Thank you sir!
I had one of these bought from Viking computers in Norwich.. An 18 hour Real3D render was ruined because my mum heard the rattling of the drive, assumed something was wrong and pulled the plug. Arrrrgh.
What a shop
I remember those old Viking stickers on all sorts of hardware in our house, nostalgia trip!
I was lucky enough to have started work when I picked up my Amiga 500 so had cash available when the A590 came out and picked one up. It was shipped without any workbench on it and using one of the disks allowed installation of the workbench. I loved having the drive and productivity definitely was the winner with me. Games in general were still used via floppy disk. After picking up the A570 CD Rom released a couple of years later I also picked up one of those. This was a pain as you could only use one or the other. After picking up my A1200 and adding a HD, my A590 was sold on giving a friend the fun by use of the hard disk! Thanks for the memories Dan!
Been listening to the podcast for a while now. Good to finally put a face to the voice.
I remember where I was working in 1986/7 we ordered a "Winchester disk" and you had to "park" it at the end of the day. It had to be handled with kid gloves. It was always getting corrupted.
I had exactly this model on my a500 back in the days, i mostly used it to store the mods i was composing at the time and have Protracker boot fast :-)
Great to see another one of your youtubes on Commodore. I've missed them.
When I got my first Amiga - an Amiga 1000 - it was unexpanded and had only the one internal floppy. Playing most games was an exercise in torture and frustration as virtually EVERY move required you to insert a different floppy. I begged my mom for the 256K RAM expansion that went in the front port and she did: It was $300...for *_256K of RAM(!)_* but it did make games a tiny bit more tolerable (and allowed certain games to load that wouldn't load before because of lack of RAM). [note: By the way for those who don't know, the Amiga 1000 came with 512K of RAM, but the OS (Kickstart) loaded into the bottom 256K - it was not stored in ROM at this time. So adding the extra 256K allowed you to have a full 512K available to the system. The upside is that upgrading to a newer OS was as simple as buying the newer OS on floppy and using it to boot with. I later added the ROM with a ROM switcher though.]
Adding an external floppy made the system actually fully enjoyable to use because I could then leave the OS disk in the internal drive most of the time or let the game have two disks accessible at the same time (if the game supported more than one drive: Some games required you to disconnect the external drive because it needed that extra bit of buffer RAM that the other drive would reserve for its own use).
When I finally got an external HD, I think it was 40 megabytes and the access speed and convenience were so awesome, but as you say 40MB is not really that much space for anything. To think that a 128 *GIGABYTE* sd card is around $20 now it just blows my mind.
I bought a GPV HD8+ II with a 120MB Quantum and 2MB ram in april 1992 for my 500. Still have it, with the original box, and it's still working. It was packed down for 20 years but when I took it out it just started up like it's never been away. I paid 7500 SEK for it back then, that's almost 11000 SEK today (a bit over £900).
For a long while, when I was running a BBS, I had 4 drives connected to it and the 3 other drives was mounted in a big tower chassi standing next to the 500 with a long SCSI cable going between them. I think the total space I had was about 1.2 GB which was enormous back then. I still have two of those other drives left but I've only gotten one of them to work.
24:26 HDD are NOT obsolete in 2021. Still the best for mass storage like a NAS for home use.
Brings back memories of fitting a 2.5” HDD to my Amiga 600 with expansion card in the trapdoor. Sold it on eBay some years ago. Great vlogs and podcast.... top job man👍🥸
Totally with you there Dan. A hard drive transformed the Amiga in a way that you wouldn't know until you actually had one. I bought a 60 Meg internal IDE drive for my A1200 back in the day, and then later asked Santa for a 40MHz 030 accelerator+ram card. The combo of the accelerator and the HD was even more transformative, suddenly I had a PC and Apple killer sat on my bedroom desk, nothing could touch it... From first boot to Workbench took just 7 seconds... Those were the days!
It's so weird thinking back to the days when storage wasn't cheap. I remember when one of my friends got a HD for their PC that could hold over 700MB, and we marvelled at the possibility to copy AN ENTIRE CD-ROM ONTO A HARD DRIVE. It's so ridiculous from today's point of view. Nowadays I have a network storage where I put all my DVDs on for better viewing convenience, and there's still terrabytes of free stoarge left. This was really unthinkable for 16 year old me back in 1997.
Also, it's so funny that I never knew there was a HD extension for the A500 back in the day, I only learned about this during the 2010's when I re-discovered the Amiga. I imagine what it must have been like owning one back then. Loading times are so incredibly fast (even compared to more modern systems) and there's no need swapping disks every so often for games like Monkey Island 2 (11 disks, IIRC) or Simon the Sorcerer (7, or 8 disks?). Once you tasted the convenience of having a HD, it's hard to go back...
Of course I also upgraded the HD extension and replaced the incredibly loud SCSI drive with a SCSI2SD-Adaptor, and now I have several partitions with ~2GB, which really is more than enough space for an A500.
EDIT: OMG! I too need to do a reboot every time I first power on the Amiga, or else the HD won't get recognized. Even with the SD card in place.
Did you try Adrian Black's trick of oiling the stepper motor on the Western Digital drive? That worked to get my own WD IDE-XT drive functioning properly again. And those drives were actually based on a Tandon design. At the time, Western Digital was primarily making graphics chipsets for PCs, but then they purchased Tandon's data storage division to get into the hard drive business.
Thanks, I'll check that out. It would be nice to get it working again.
Oil a drive you say? So, um... I've just tried this exact trick on a dead, non reading WD IDE-XT drive, 20mb in an Amiga 590 external HDD... unreadable, and to be honest, I thought... well it's broken now so what's the harm, but it's never gonna work... something so simple... and yet... one tiny dab of synthetic oil on the stepper motor shaft... a momentary twiddle... and... SHE LIIIIVEEEESSSS! Absolutely brilliant. Totally unbelievable. But utterly, incomprehensively true. I love 80s tech. Simple = Fixable awesomeness... right, now for a game of Elite....
careful use of a hot air gun may release the old tape from the boxes. I have seen the warehouse people at our company use this trick to remove labels from returned deliveries and then theres no damage to the cardboard box.
I have had one with 20 megs 👻
I sounded Like a Jet while flying, and while Reading or writing is was Like listening a Violin concert 🙏🤸
I was proud like hell, King of Kings,
Cinemawares Wings was installed and it came from the desert 👻
In case anyone is wondering that the A590 is making interesting sounds: It's because the original Western Digital XT drive was using MFM encoding for data storage which is modified frequency modulation. It's making funny beeping noises for read and write operations (and on top of that you got the mechanical noise from the stepper motor moving the heads around).
I bought mine in 1991-92 from Diamond Computers on Tottenham Court Road, London for around £320 with 1MB RAM. When I first switched it on, I thought an aircraft was taking off! :) Remembering to Park the Hard-Drive heads had to become routine.
I've got a GVP II (with added 286 PC card). Cost a fortune back in the 90's. Came with a 52MB SCSI. Sat in the loft for 20+ years, powered it up and it works fine. Managed to transfer the lot to a SCSI2SD card.
I didn't realise that old SCSI drives are worth cash these days, I've got some old DEC SCSI drives knocking around (some of which are 5.25" bricks). Probably still work. Will have to dig them out.
My dad bought a 20mb he'd for our Amstrad 512 in about 1988-89 and it cost about £300 and necessitated taking out the 2nd floppy drive. They offered a 40mb disk which was almost twice the price but we couldn't afford it. We later found out that it was actually a 40mb disk partitioned to 20mb. So we repartitioned it to 40mb and saved a fortune.
My first A500 hard disk was some loud 10MB hunk of boxy metal that died on me in 2 months. It was an 5.25 HD. The second one was a fast, silent 3.5 inch 33mb Seagate. That one worked well and i sold it together with the A500. I remember having installed Their finest hour (battle of Britain), Wings, i think Rocket Ranger, History line 1914-1918, Wing Comnander? and several other..Also had an chip? Fast? RAM expansion with 2.3MB? extra RAM that costed an arm and a leg. Back then my parents had a ton of patience with me, patience that i dont have today myself. Thanks for the blast from the past.
I can remember getting a GVP 105mb hard disk drive for my Amiga 500 Plus (I think the GVP had some extra ram in it as well but I forget how much now). I can remember it costing in the region of £600+ 😳. Was a great drive, fast, quiet, and matched the profile of the Amiga 500 precisely. Was absolutely gutted when the Amiga 600 came out and I was unable to use the GVP hard drive as the 600 had no SCSI connector.
Yeah it's great being able to pick up these parts today that we always wanted as kids but were just too expensive. I had a 386dx as a kid in 93/94, had lots of fun times on that, but I always wanted a 486 as some games demanded that system and graphics were more fluid in games like Doom. Now i'm building one at a tiny fraction of the cost my parents would have paid back in the day, but I think i'll use my CF to IDE adapter, I really havn't been able to find a reliable hdd from that era.
Agreed, I built myself my dream PC of 20 years ago during lockdown using pre-owned parts from eBay. Dual P-III processors, a GeForce 4 Ti, a SCSI drive for CD and Jaz drives and a CF to IDE adapter, plus a whopping 512 MB of RAM! That spec would cost thousands of dollars 20 years ago and I could never have afforded it back then. Felt great to be using it now to run all my old operating systems, apps and games
Dan so glad you mentioned JST.. I just discovered this as I wanted to use whdload games with KS and WB 1.3.. Also nice job mentioning the 7.0 ROMS..
The first time I heard about hard disks was when a friend got an Amiga 600 with a 20 MB hard disk. The weird thing is that I had an Amiga 500 and later an Amiga 1200, but never thought about buying any peripherals except extra memory and an extra floppy drive. And didn´t have a clue what to use the PCMCIA-slot for.
My stepfather had one of these attached to his A500 back in the day which he used to store his thesis. By the time he was finished the hard drive was full. I remember wanting to play Beneath A Steel Sky but being put off because it had about 8 discs and they seemed to need swapping for every area you went to. For modern use though, something like a SCSI to SD card adapter would probably be a good upgrade for one of these.
Nice video! I remember those crazy prices, it's ridiculous how storage was expensive. A random question: What is that device you have on top of the Xbox One? Is it an LCD clock?
Can remember carefully putting in the 2mb of memory into the 590 on the kitchen table. Watching the extra ram come up was very cool. If I think hard I can even remember the squeaky hard disk access head noise.
Just used your link for Skillshare so thanks for the discount :)
It's not shown in the video, but the A590 also came with a solid metal ground clip that connects to the A500 expansion port and it makes contact with the A590's metal lip below the connector. The user manual shows how to install it. Also DIP switch 3 allows for a short or long delay before the system checks for the hard drive, although I haven't tried that myself.
Yeah switch three is for drives that took some time to get up to speed.
Interesting, I'll give the switch a try
@BronsonTheCat Guess I should have read the 61 page manual 😂 I'll give it a try.
@@danwood_uk - it will be interesting to know whether it applies the delay only at power up, or whether it does it after every reboot. If the latter, it may get a bit tedious.
@@danwood_uk Yeah my friend first got one for his Amiga 500 with 1.2 rom. The issue being you couldn’t boot directly from the hard drive as a result and had to be disabled via the dip switches on the rear. Hence I remember what the dip switches did.
Unfortunately my personal A590 bit the dust years ago. I’m not sure what happened but after years in storage I found it to be corroded inside. Maybe water got into it. 😳
Nice video - enjoyed the throwback 🥳
Ah memories , I had one in 92 , all to play LINKS Golf. I saved for ages to buy it and with 2 meg expanded memory. I also was mad about CGI and loved imagine. I sold it a few years after and only last year bought one again :) oh that sound when it’s accessing.
I had one of these (it was my 18th birthday present from my parents). It sounded like a jet engine taking off. I also remember the huge power brick.
But you had SCSI on Amiga 500! :))))
Cool memories!
I got my A590 back in 1990 I think, and used it to do my university dissertation😎
My A500 was Kickstart 1.2 so couldn't auto boot until I eventually got 1.3.
I remember thinking 20MB would be plenty😂
Wish I still had my set up.
I see the GVP I have now got great scores. Very happy it still works to this day with an impressing 40mb
I had an 80mb GVP impact 2 with a few megs and a 286 pc bridgeboard in it. One thing it had that the A590 doesn't appear to have is a `game` switch which hid the drive from games that wouldn't run if a HD was detected (anti piracy I presume). It cost a lot of money, £500+ for the drive, £100+ for each memory module and several hundred for the pc card. Mine was supposed to be a 60mb model but the supplier stuck an 80mb one in there for the same price, which was nice. Its one of the only Amiga related things I still have in a box somewhere along with a rombo digitiser and colour unit, vidi amiga genlock and a few joysticks.
I remember drooling over the 20 MB hard drive when it first came out for the A500. I couldn’t afford it as I was 14 back then. During university, I bought myself a 486DX PC with a hard drive for the first time. I was stunned how much faster and bigger it was than floppy disks. It really felt like a revolution to me
I had an Amiga 500 and I was dreaming about getting this HD for it. Never happened, but I later get an A1200 and yet later, an A4000 that I still have. It has a Phase 5 68060 accelerator, with cyberscsi and cybervision, iirc. It is still working, just have to find an easy way to get it on the internet.
Good shout out for Amiga Addict I have got a sub for it the first issues were that good, Ravi is in it too.
I remember paying near $500 USD for my DataFlyer 20M external hard drive for my A500 back in the day. I also remember it dying about 30 days outside of the warranty (which wasn't very long if I recall). Luckily, when I bought it, I paid my parents and they put it on their credit card to buy it for me and that credit card company had a "we double your warranty" clause. So we got it replaced using that. No problems after that. ;-)
Nice video Dan! Great explanation! Amiga forever! Greetings from Croatia!
My first hard drive was $600 Canadian in 1990, still have the receipt, on my A1000. I think it was a GVP SCSI controller but I cannot remember.. Also has the '020 Lucas board as well. Those were the days.
Dan you are the best RUclipsr ever. Long live the AMIGA! P.S love your podcasts.
Aww thanks Phil! Appreciate the support
I've never tried an Amiga, looks cool, but obviously quite primitive, today. I had sold Vic-20's and C-64's back in the day, but didn't own one or even understand them all that much. It was mostly a photography/audio shop... But I gotta say, the fact that the CGI effects on "Babylon 5" were done on these computers blow my friggin' mind! ;-]
IKEA shelf where the mega cd is sat on.
Very nice :)
I have the GVP A530, it cost over £700 when I bought it back in the day
Dan I'm confused! Your compression settings are really great - voice always sounds brilliant on all your vids - I wanted to ask you what compressor/limiters you use and what settings? But also it looks like you've got the wrong bit of the mic pointing at you?! The diaphragm is always on the side on condenser mics like that, unless it's a new type that I haven't heard about with rotatable capsule or something?? Even if it was in omni pattern that doesn't extend vertically does it? Help me understand!!!! Thanks for all the great videos btw!
Thanks, I have been playing with a few different settings lately but pretty happy with this setup now. It does look like a condenser, but it's actually an end-fire dynamic Heil PR30 mic - www.thomann.de/gb/heil_sound_pr30.htm I run it through a DBX 286 channel strip processor then into a PreSonus Studio 24c interface.
@@danwood_uk Ah that explains it!!! Sounds great :) Proper radio compression sound!
I had a 30MB Supradrive with SCSI connector. It cost 2500 DM which is likely the same in Euro or Dollars today. Got it from my employe as an extra.
The pace of change! I got my A1200 in 1992, got tired of swapping disc by 1995 when I got an internal 2-inch IDE drive for it. 120MB for a similar number of pounds. Totally freed my Amiga to fly.
Had the good old A500 back in early 90s!!! Upgraded and got an external 3.5 disk drive for it. Great games like kick off 2, rings of medusa, it came from the desert and many more!!! Good times!!!
Great video... I had one of these on my A500 for DTP work back in the day (Pagestream). We got so tired of the HD’s noise that we created a sound deadening box that went over the top, otherwise I’d get a headache! Can’t have been that good for it really. I also had a tinted plastic cover that went over the monitor to lesson the on-screen flicker while running in interlaced mode... funny to look back now 😂
that dog is so sweet.
Just be careful with malware, once got an RDB virus which was a pain. Ended up wiping the drive and starting from scrath.
One reason I switched to CF on my A1200 was that I could easily swap cards e.g. A CF specifically for testing software.
My 15 year old self would've never believed that in 2021 a micro sd card the size of my pinky fingernail will hold my whole Amiga games library + all the 8bit&16bit consoles :)
Interesting video, thanks Dan. At 13:39 you say 512k when I think you meant 512mb :-)
Oops, you're right!
No, the maximum it is 2mb then 512k it is correct !!
@@ricardoloureiro4800 512K is less than the capacity of an Amiga floppy disk - they held 880k. You are confusing kb, mb, and gb :-)
@@ricardoloureiro4800 you're thinking of the FastRAM. He was referring to the disk size, and just mixed up K and MB.
hey Dan, hope you're doing well :) my first experience of a hard drive was a 20mb in my a1200.. which at the time I thought I'd never fill.. and to be fair I don't think I did, as I was never into those big box games, like Loom. I had a lot of productivity stuff like Wordsworth and Dpaint. great video :)
I used to do a lot of animation on DP4, but kept running out of memory. The solution was external memory which slotted in the same place as the HD. Don't quote me on this, but I think it was for 10 or 12meg, which was huge and allowed me to do massive animations. Sure wish I still had them.
Back in the day I eventually got a A1200, bought the scsi adapter for it, and ran some small notebook drive inside the case on the right side...also had an external Bernoulli drive with removeable disks.
These days I have an IcyDock in all of my machines, and I use SSDs the way I once used floppies! :D
Great Video Dan. Crazy how prices have come down :)
3:05 Now, those where Enter keys. Wish they had keyboards today that still have that style of Enter key..
Thanks for your vid, been playing around with my 3 year Amiga a500 r6, has now 1meg chip ram, with my shell less gvp has 8mg of fast ram, 4x4gb hdd’s but only 1 4gb will show up 😞 working on the vga output now 😊 slow ram is the next project 😊
Forgot to add I have a scsi2sd with a 16gb card in it, also I don’t power the gvp at all, it’s all done though the Amiga 😏
Back in the day my first two hard drive systems Data Chief and Lt Kernal for the C64 and C128 cost close to $1000 USD new and when I acquired those I paid $500 for each and those were 20mb. Later CMD put out a 100mb HD for those 8 bits for far less money under $500. When I was using the A1000 I had an Expansion Systems Data Flyer Hard Drive Controller and an 8mb RAM Card which connected to the HD Controller and by the I acquired that I was buying 100mb Micropolis Drives for I believe $100 and that made a big difference in the A1000 Performance. When I got the A500 I used that Data Flyer Solution on the A500. When I acquired an A2000 HD I installed the Expansion System Boards into the A2000 and ran the hard drives externally. Yea I kept buying drives as the prices of used drives kept falling so the external drives lived in a PC Case. There were a few games which you could install on the HD but not many and so my kids just booted off floppies on either the A1000 or A500 and my A2000HD Ran my BBS. Yea the only reason why I got into using hard drives was to run my BBS starting with the 8 bit computers. Today storage is cheap and I still own all those old drives but I did sell the drive in the Data Chief to a friend who needed of all things an ST506 Drive. Yea that was a long time ago. Even the PET had like a 3mb HD which a friend owned and it was in the same cabinet as the two drive unit or similar to it.
I had an acquaintance in school who had a hard drive on his Amiga 500 in 1992.
I also have a Swedish Computer Magazine from like 1987 where the front page say 10mb HDD's now under $1000
Great video, I remember my a590 well, 20mb wasn't big even then, but it was an almost affordable drive. I always lusted over a GVP as it matched the Amiga even better, but they were silly money, I think they could fit an accelerator in them too? I would like to see a video on one of them in the future?
Having it though made the machine closer to a competent computer, I could use it for word processing and Sculpt 3d so much easier, they were good days :-)
All of this was sold in the end for a a1200 and a £170 20mb ide drive in the end from Power computing - their ads were everywhere as were their shops, now all gone ;-(
Yeah I always drooled over the GVP drives too, and they did have 030 accelerator versions I remember. If I ever get hold of one, will definitely do a video on it.
I was lucky enough to own a GVP HD8+ 2mb/100mb hdd then upgraded to 4GB & 8MB fast ram. aside you needed 2 psu: one for Amiga 500 + one for the GVP. I then connect the jumper and made a bigger psu to make the GVP & Amiga to run with 1 200watt PSU. Still runs till today, Along with my CDTV
I bought vanilla A2000 in 91, because i knew that i need hard drive for my use later on.
And by 1992 i got enough money to get 50MB hardcard for it, after that my development things were a lot faster :D
Great video Dan =D Love the A590 =D
Love to see a repair job on the a590 🙈
@@PMCRetroGamer LOL! I did two already! I don't mind fixing Dans spare if he wants! Looks to be missing a GAL, and RAM.
Wow this brings back memories, my first A500 with twin ext. floppy drives, then my A2000 with a 512MB HDD in it (that cost hell of allot of money back then) and later my A1200 with a DIY external 1GB HDD (mounted a ribbon cable socket on the back of the A1200 then connected the HDD with it's own PSU to that). A HDD really changed the Amiga from a hobby machine into a real work machine or games machine (my main use for it).
a common problem with drives like that XT drive is the stepper motor and that is easily solved by oiling and exersising the steppermotor.
Price sounds insane,. but 1MB RAM used to cost couple hundred of DEM at least in Serbia.
One of CBM deaths is not using HDD tech properly, even A2000 was HDD less, only A3000 and A4000
I loved my Amiga 500. I now regret giving it away. It had the seagate external hard drive and WB 2.0 . My hard drive capacity was 60 meg's back then. It was third party hard drive but a high quality product. Memories sweet memories.
I had one of these with the 2 meg RAM upgrade.
It was my first experience of a hard drive and I couldn't believe how much difference it made.
Suddenly, Workbench WAS the Amiga, not just a disk that came with it.
20MB in 1991 would have been rough. My dad got his second laptop back in 1990, and it had a 60MB harddrive, and that was considered small at the time. At this time having a laptop drive pretty much cut capacity in a third or there about.
I guess that is the drawback of having a fairly cheep single unit computer. Stuff that suppose to be internal become very expensive
Trying to play The Adventures of Willy Beamish on my A500 was taxing. When I switched over to my A3000 with built-in hard drive, things were incredibly fast and smooth! Big improvement! 👍
I use on my A500+ a ACA 500+. I think that it is the modern A590, but a lot better. If you use a A 500 the ACA 500+ is a good send you can put nice big CF Cards in them. You will need a very good PSU to use it.
There was a way back in the day that you could load disk only games to the hard drive by creating folders for each disk and assigning each folder a drive number so the game saw it as different drives, but it only worked with the games that didn't use a custom bootstrap i.e the copy protected games you couldn't see in workbench
Nice video Dan. I’ve recently picked up a HC533 Turbo card for my A500, keeping in the KS1.3 mode. Same vibe achieved, just with more modern hardware. I don’t have the desk space for an A590 or GVP HDD add on. I had totally forgotten about JST and didn’t know it worked with WHDLoad files now, so that’s my Easter weekend investigations sorted. Would be great to have the games setup and working with my A500 setup and not have to fork out for a MegaCHIP type 2MB chip ram upgrade for the A500.
I remember the Amiga harddrive seemed like witchcraft. It made more sense to me to instead have -4- floppy drives. For 95% of games, it meant no more swaps.
I had a 20mb one, I borrowed it from a friend who got an A3000 - I'm sure i had all kinds of stuff on it, but i primarily remember Monkey Island 2, going f rom 10-11 disks to non was glorious.
I remember back in the day, getting a hard drive for $1 a megabyte. 256mb drive for $256!
Dan, did you go to the Future Entertainment Show at Earls Court back in the day? Amiga heaven! Had the lotus 3 prototype car there one year
Sadly not. I remember reading about it in magazines and it looked amazing.
@@danwood_uk it certainly was amazing. However, i did get motion sickness on the virtual reality! Got my cartoon classics the same Christmas as you. My dad still takes the pi”” out of me now for saying “great graphics “ after firing up the Simpsons game!
I had exactly one of those models and it was only 20MB, I reinstalled Monkey Island 2 plenty of times on it, because there was enough room on the disk to keep it installed at all times.
Just FYI, because RUclips uses a red bar across the bottom of played videos to indicate already-played videos (at least in some interfaces), putting a red border around your thumbnails makes all of your videos appear to have already been viewed (at least at first glance). This might result in fewer views because people may think the red is indicating something they’ve already watched.
Good point! Thanks, will change the colour for the next vid.
Love the video it took me back to the past, yes had the Amiga and started with the ZX81, you say you have a 8TB hard drive behind you and a 16tb NAS as well, please tell us what you have stored on them, every single movie out there? every game ever released? every mp3 that exists? would love to know
Yeah I rip my Bluray and HD-DVD collection, loads of TV shows, music, and backups of my vids from my channel too.
@@danwood_uk I am a movie and still photographer, TBs of very fast NVme SSDs of movies and edited editions of 4k movies, takes up a lot of space, I use Davinci Resolve to edit with the M1 Mac but my day to day desktop is a Raspberry Pi with 256gb ssd, perfectly ok with Facebook RUclips, email and PiMiga MF edition : ), and another Raspberry pi I built myself setup as a NAS with 4tb, I am 75 yrs old, what fun, lived through generations of gaming, I love your nostalgia : )
I have had a computer in the early 90's and it was nothing like the Amiga computers since I had a black screen all the time XD
i still remember when external 1tb hard drive need external adapters,and now it work only with usb 3.0/1 connectivity
Can you use the external SCSI port in the back to connect this to other SCSI computers, like a Mac? Or is that port only for attaching other SCSI devices and route them through the Amiga edge connector?
Nice to hear some music RMC used in his Hauntology mix :)
Nice, I'm guessing the tracks from Retrowave 1/2 not the jazzy stuff?
I find it interesting, how old hardware tends to yellow at the same rate as my teeth do.
The Amiga had two major Achilles heels in the early 90s. The first was that games was still being designed with one button in mind. That restricted games to such a degree that a lot of people jumped ship to consoles. The second was that there was no real upgrade path, as Dan says in this video, you paid insane amounts of money for 50 mb which would be enough for two two large games at the time. All in all it was too expensive to keep going with Amiga, it made a lot more sense to make one big payment for a decent PC that you'd have to upgrade every 3 years or so at the time. With the Amiga you have to spend a lot more money and the upgrades didn't really get you much. And the one button joystick games really bothered me right until the end. Even the NES had two buttons back in 1983.
First hard drive I bought was a Maxtor 2.6GB drive, for my Amiga 1200T. It was enough to house hundreds of applications and games. It was probably close to £200. Last week I bought a 2TB SSD for £140.
I paid $550 Australian for a A590 in 1991. It was miles better than loading Workbench from floppy but there wasn't a lot of games that were hard drive installable. My only installable games were M1 Tank Platoon and F117 Stealth Fighter (I think). $550 for only 20 Meg was very pricey and for the same money one could have bought a much higher capacity hard drive for a PC.
I bet WHD Load is a system that allows you to play previously floppy-only-based games from hard disk even if we're _not_ familiar with that.
Hope you gave the seller a telling off for that packing tape!
yes i remember i got my amiga 1200 with a 20mb hard drive cost an extra £199 in 1992 must of been a 2.5 inch as it was internal
What a beautiful dog! What model is he?
He's a Sprocker (Springer, Cocker spaniel cross)
@@danwood_uk He's lovely :)
Another great video