My Bodega Bay expansion unit for the A500 was the talk of last weekend's AmiWest Show. As it sat there, attendees would stare at it; some had never seen such a thing; others said that hadn't seen one in years. Its casing was open, revealing the huge amount of space inside, the powerful power supply, the 2 SCSI drives -- one being on a GVP A2000 board, and other empty Zorro-II slots just waiting to be filled.
I asked opinions of Matthew Leaman of AmigaKit, Duncan M. of TOGA, and others who would listen; how could I fill up those slots? Now that my A1200 tower was virtually finished, it was time to think of upgrading something else, like the Bodega Bay. Another Z-2 memory board? Nah, the GVP A2000 board was not only a SCSI controller with hard drive, but it carried memory on it already, albeit it still needed 4 megs more in addition to the 4 it carried. An accelerator board? Another negative because the Z-2 slots would not recognize a processor. An Ethernet board? Possible. A 24-bit video board? Well, those slots were not video slots... Wait a minute... Matthew told me that a Cybervision or Picasso-II would work, because they did not need a video slot. Very expensive to get one of those, though. Matthew did tell me that it was theoretically possible to add in a Deneb USB card... hmm, USB on an A500!
Already, Duncan is chomping at the bit. He'd like me to put in a CD-R drive in it and bigger hard drives. My main A500 is ECS with 1 meg of chip RAM. That would have to be upgraded to 2 meg. And Matthew does have a newly-received stock of NTSC Mini Megachips.
To dream,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug The Other Group of Amigoids
http://www.calweb.com/~rabel1/ Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network
http://www.sccaners.org
