My dreams of more RAM and a 20Mb hard-drive went out the window when VORTEX, the last company which were making peripherals for the A1000, went bust before I had saved enough money. This glitch, however, gave me enough money to purchase a second-hand A500 with an existing 512k Chip Ram. This machine gave me years of happy tinkering, playing, creating, frustration and hardware hacking such as cutting soldered jumpers to give me 1Mb Chip Ram, (Fat Agnes required, in case there are any crazies out there with an A500 who still want to try this!).
This created the next problem, DISK SWAPPING. Now to those of you out there whose entry-level machine came with a hard-drive, no matter how small, you will have missed the joys of disk-swapping, because, by this time, programs were consisting of 2,3,4, or more discs, and so every program was forever asking for other disks or, when printing, or making other system calls, requesting your system disks. Efficiency in the workplace was almost NIL: This situation prompted me to get a hard-drive. It was 52Mb with 2Mb Ram on board and fit the through expansion bus on my SupraRam, I then bought an A590 CD-Rom which didn`t have a through port and refused to work if the hard-drive was attached and so caused me more trouble than enough! By this time my A500 was nearly 4 feet long and with other peripherals such as a Citizen Swift 9 dot matrix printer, extra floppy disk-drive, RocGen genlock, RocKey chromakeyer, VidiAmiga12 digitiser, sound sampler, Hi-Fi amplifier, speakers and my portable TV, I needed a desktop the same size as the room!
I considered buying a Bodega Bay which some of you may remember as a massively overpriced plasticoated case come monitor stand for the A500, but I managed to talk myself out of that one!
But I was a happy Bunny! Over the next year I added a MegaChip to give me 2Mb Chip Ram and upgraded the Rom chip to 3.1 and my T.V. to a Phillips monitor. I had ignored the A500+ and the A600 because they offered me nothing, I was way ahead! Then the A1200 came out and the Amiga world went wild. I was excited but the packages Commodore were offering weren`t helping to take the machine away from it`s `Games` image, in fact, if anything, it was consolidating this image. The A4000 on the other hand was a much better bet, `030 and `040 processors and loads of Ram, the price, however, was extremely high. At the time I could have afforded an A1200 but the only things I needed from this machine was the AGA screenmodes and it`s speed. This wasn`t enough reason to change!
Being a high adopter (at heart, if not in practice!) and an all round gadget freak I couldn`t allow myself to fall this far behind, but, with the price of an A4000 being far out of my reach, and, having always had the plan to go the route of a big-box Amiga i.e. A2000, A1500, A3000.
Through Readers adverts in the then, many, available magazines I finally bought an A2000 for �250, this was to become the best purchase I had ever made with regard to the Amiga. When I opened this machine up to install the MegaChip and the 3.1 Rom in it I found that it contained a 2091 scsi controller with an 80Mb hard-drive and 2Mb Ram, a 2098 Ram Card sporting 2Mb. It also had an `030 CPU card in it and I removed the 2Mb of ram from my SupraRam and soldered these chips onto the CPU card!(Not for the faint-hearted but remember, at the time, memory chips were still very expensive!). I daisy-chained my 52Mb hard-drive from the A500 and away I went, super-speed and a bucket-full of memory(10Mb 8 & 2 ) and massive hard-drives.;-)
The only item from the A500 which I couldn`t press into service, no matter what I tried and I tried some very strange things, was the A590 CD-Rom but I still had over half the money from my non-purchased A1200 left and promptly bought a brand new double-speed Mitsumi CD-Rom drive. My speed need was sated over and above that of the A1200 so all my energies turned to acquiring a PicassoII graphics card. It didn`t take long because of my desperation, I didn`t mind starving for a month or two, though even after ordering there was an agonising six week delay. When it arrived I realised that I needed an SVGA monitor so I instantly traded in my 15khz Phillips monitor against a brand new SVGA monitor!
Getting rid of that monitor was a mistake which I had to rectify later!
I had to use a television for PAL screens until I managed to replace the 15khz monitor. What I needed was a multi-sync monitor which would sync down to 15khz but I have made this a non-priority because my only sensible upgrade is a 17" or above wide-span, multi-sync monitor, which costs about the same as the National Debt!
Meanwhile, back at my computer with it`s wonderful 256 colour Workbench I find that Shapeshifter and the viewing of Web pages have suddenly come into their own so now I need a High-Density disk drive and a Modem, bigger hard-drive and seperate hard-drives for the PC-Task & ShapeShifter.
The next couple of years brought me a Prograb24RT, Epson Stylus Colour II, Epson GT5000 Colour
Scanner, Yamaha CDR 200t and through absolute necessity a Blizzard 2060 board with 64Mb Ram and
Fast Scsi-II DMA Controller. Apart from the multi-scan monitor, this was about as far as I
was prepared to go with this machine! (You never know, Phase 5 may bring out a Power Up board
for the A2000! hint! hint! ).
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