I had one back in the day. It made my Amiga 500 a true beast (mine was 160 mb if I remember correctly). It has 2 mb additional ram mounted. I also remember playing Colonisation installed on this beast. No more bad sectors on my floppies, so no more lost saves :)
I had one of these. A 20mb HD and an additional 2mb of RAM. It totally transformed the Amiga. Suddenly, Workbench WAS the Amiga, rather than just a disk that came with it.
My stepfather had an Amiga 500 which he used to do his PHD on and I believe he had an A590 on that. It had a 20mb capacity which meant that he filled it almost entirely with his work.
I've got one from UK almost new with 2mb ram. Love it, although I've replaced its 20mb scsi drive cause bad sectors (too many...yep) with a 4gb IBM scsi drive. Tried a scsi2sd, perfectly working, but still missing original hd "noise" I went back to classic scsi hd drive. Cheers, Mark
The PrepHD and FormatHD functions on the A590 setup floppy don't work because the setup programs are looking for the XT drive. If I had the original XT drive installed I guess it would work.
It takes a different kickstart rom if you have a different (upto 4gig) harddrive in it that uses IDE. YOu found a workaround. Well done. Also you can take a (comparatively) modern harddrive out and write whatever you like to it (an image downloaded of the internet or preapred yourself) onto it using DD in linux, or one of those "no need for a computer" Start-tech dongles (with an IDE to SATA adaptor) for copying hard-drives. You can use a CF card to IDE adaptor too if it has hte right "downgrade" jumpers on it. Maybe (I do not know) your a500 would have formatted/installed the a590 if it too had a kicstart ROM, say 1.3 in it or maybe if you were to soft boot 1.3 to it (losing 512k meantime mind you).
I could be wrong but maybe these programs failed because you were booted from the harddrive itself? From memory these should work without an XT drive. they might work if booted into Workbench from a disk and maybe with these programs on the disk? Not sure. Great video and Amiga forever!
Like an IDE drive, you do not low level format a scsi drive. they are preformatted at the factory. you just establish a partition and do a logical format of the partition.
just use hdtoolbox,much better than the old stuff. Just edit the icon prefs in hdtoolbox to use scsi or xt. lastest roms for 590 are 7.0..amigakit has them i think. adding at least 1MB of ram onboard the a590 can speed things up-use 256x4 chips.
PrepHD appears to be a (real) low-level formatter, which means it was there to wipe and re-initialize XT/MFM drives, it won't work on SCSI or IDE edit: I should have read the comments first...
Right, you NEED to look into that external SCSI. Yes, it is true you had plug more hard-drives into that, however, you can also plug a CDROM (or for that matter a DVD) into it (or CDWriter etc) if you have an encloser. Sure, there are "better" solutions interms of some FPGA board whereby you do away with most of your amiga a500, but the authenticty comes with using a SCSI. Do remeber the a570 made the a500 into a CDTV (booted CD games). There was some CD drives you could plug into that SCSI I think that allowed you to boot as if it was a CDTV, so that way you got the functioanlity of the a590 and the a570 (even thouhg the scsi CDROM was not an a570 per se). So since TerribleFire (youube channel) has made a bunch of Open Source expansion boards for the cd32 and a500, I want to know how (or if) one can get a modern adaptor (which would have some board built into it to fool the amiga) that would allow a IDE (PATA) CDROM drive to be plugged into that SCSI and the amiga would "think" it was one of those official old CDROM drives that coud plug into the a590 and yet still boot cdtv games. Homebrew games are a thing now for the megaCD and amiga and I think CD games are tangiable and people like that because they have nice cardboard boxes and inlay cards and extra audio CDs and people can collect them.
I'm trying to put 4gb SCSI old school hard drive keeping wb 1.3 with 1.3 KPS rom.. I get same error using had prep and for,at. Difference is I don't even have it on workbench to manually format. I upgraded to 7.0 roms on the a590.. Any suggestion to get it going?
I had one back in the day. It made my Amiga 500 a true beast (mine was 160 mb if I remember correctly). It has 2 mb additional ram mounted. I also remember playing Colonisation installed on this beast. No more bad sectors on my floppies, so no more lost saves :)
I wanted one of these so badly, back in the day...today, I am happy with the modern replacement my ACA500 Plus...very cool.
I had one of these. A 20mb HD and an additional 2mb of RAM.
It totally transformed the Amiga. Suddenly, Workbench WAS the Amiga, rather than just a disk that came with it.
7:59 Oh that FDD noise brings back some fond memories.
I bought one of these in 1993 all to play Links Golf :) 2mb ram was awesome. But man that fan noise drove me mad. Cost me a bomb.
What a nifty device. I wish I had one back in the day. Nice informative video, too! :)
My stepfather had an Amiga 500 which he used to do his PHD on and I believe he had an A590 on that. It had a 20mb capacity which meant that he filled it almost entirely with his work.
I've got one from UK almost new with 2mb ram. Love it, although I've replaced its 20mb scsi drive cause bad sectors (too many...yep) with a 4gb IBM scsi drive. Tried a scsi2sd, perfectly working, but still missing original hd "noise" I went back to classic scsi hd drive. Cheers, Mark
Nice stuff! I think me and Boat have one of those at the studio!
Nice job! I tried to replicate the steps with FS UAE and an HD RDB FS, however it fails on initialisation :(
These were pricey and a dream back then.
The PrepHD and FormatHD functions on the A590 setup floppy don't work because the setup programs are looking for the XT drive. If I had the original XT drive installed I guess it would work.
It takes a different kickstart rom if you have a different (upto 4gig) harddrive in it that uses IDE. YOu found a workaround. Well done. Also you can take a (comparatively) modern harddrive out and write whatever you like to it (an image downloaded of the internet or preapred yourself) onto it using DD in linux, or one of those "no need for a computer" Start-tech dongles (with an IDE to SATA adaptor) for copying hard-drives. You can use a CF card to IDE adaptor too if it has hte right "downgrade" jumpers on it. Maybe (I do not know) your a500 would have formatted/installed the a590 if it too had a kicstart ROM, say 1.3 in it or maybe if you were to soft boot 1.3 to it (losing 512k meantime mind you).
I could be wrong but maybe these programs failed because you were booted from the harddrive itself? From memory these should work without an XT drive. they might work if booted into Workbench from a disk and maybe with these programs on the disk? Not sure. Great video and Amiga forever!
That's for MFM hard disks.
Like an IDE drive, you do not low level format a scsi drive. they are preformatted at the factory. you just establish a partition and do a logical format of the partition.
just use hdtoolbox,much better than the old stuff. Just edit the icon prefs in hdtoolbox to use scsi or xt. lastest roms for 590 are 7.0..amigakit has them i think. adding at least 1MB of ram onboard the a590 can speed things up-use 256x4 chips.
PrepHD appears to be a (real) low-level formatter, which means it was there to wipe and re-initialize XT/MFM drives, it won't work on SCSI or IDE
edit: I should have read the comments first...
There is no need to install workbench 1.3 before wb2. You can just install workbench2 directly.
Right, you NEED to look into that external SCSI. Yes, it is true you had plug more hard-drives into that, however, you can also plug a CDROM (or for that matter a DVD) into it (or CDWriter etc) if you have an encloser. Sure, there are "better" solutions interms of some FPGA board whereby you do away with most of your amiga a500, but the authenticty comes with using a SCSI. Do remeber the a570 made the a500 into a CDTV (booted CD games). There was some CD drives you could plug into that SCSI I think that allowed you to boot as if it was a CDTV, so that way you got the functioanlity of the a590 and the a570 (even thouhg the scsi CDROM was not an a570 per se). So since TerribleFire (youube channel) has made a bunch of Open Source expansion boards for the cd32 and a500, I want to know how (or if) one can get a modern adaptor (which would have some board built into it to fool the amiga) that would allow a IDE (PATA) CDROM drive to be plugged into that SCSI and the amiga would "think" it was one of those official old CDROM drives that coud plug into the a590 and yet still boot cdtv games. Homebrew games are a thing now for the megaCD and amiga and I think CD games are tangiable and people like that because they have nice cardboard boxes and inlay cards and extra audio CDs and people can collect them.
I'm trying to put 4gb SCSI old school hard drive keeping wb 1.3 with 1.3 KPS rom.. I get same error using had prep and for,at. Difference is I don't even have it on workbench to manually format. I upgraded to 7.0 roms on the a590.. Any suggestion to get it going?
Did you liberate Fred and Wilma?
this harddrive is hard to find in sweden
Really? I thought that one was fairly common! Live and learn!
The prep-HD doesn't work because it's for MFM hard disks.
Wow... I know you worked hard on this video but you made so many mistakes... My recommendation is to do a trial run before making the video next time.