Side thingy

[quackmore]

Hey, I used to have this side thingy for my A500 years ago and I got rid of it. This one didn't require ANY cables but it had a SCSI HD in it and expanded the RAM by 2 megs. It was quite small, no power cable, etc. Anyone know the name of this or have one for sale cheap?

[woody.cool]

There's several things it could of been.
The most popular (that I can rember) being:
GVP HD8+ (sounds very much like it was this)
GVP A530 (which also had a 68030 + accellerator as well as SCSI and RAM)
Commodore A570 (although not 100% sure if this was SCSI)
I have a couple of GVP HD8+'s but both are in use (one on one of my A500's and one on my A500+)

[quackmore]

If all of these are compact and none require cables of any kind (including power) then the GVP A530 would be what I want providing I can still run all the games. There were some that needed a power cable which made no sense since there was power in the bus anyway. Thanks for the reply, I know somebody with old parts and I'll ask him about it.

[Harrison]

Remember that even the strongest version of the A500 PSU only provided 60W, so most sidecar expansions did need their own power source. And I think the A530 definitely did.

These are very rare these days so good luck locating one.

[Stephen Coates]

The Commodore A590 and the GVP HD+ (and therefore, probably the HD8+), can easily be modified to run from power supplied by the amiga.

The A530 may be modifiable but it's 030 will probably require even more power than the above.

I think all the devices mentioned in this topic did come with external power supplies.

[Harrison]

Couldn't some be modified to draw power from th parallel port?

[woody.cool]

Couldn't some be modified to draw power from th parallel port?
But that would be no different from drawing the power from the PSU!

[Harrison]

I know. However because most of the expansions were not designed to draw power directly from the expansion bus, I remember there were some modifications to instead take it from the parallel port. Obviously there is the danger of overloading the PSU, but at most the system would probably not boot, or would be very unstable and keep resetting.

[quackmore]

Okay, this expansion gave me a SCSI hard drive and 2 megs of RAM. It had NO power cord, my A500 has not been modified in any way. I made the mistake of selling it a couple of years ago. I will search through my paperwork & emails, perhaps I'll find out what it was. If I do, I'll post it for everyone for future reference.

[Harrison]

I don't think it can be made by Commodore themselves, or GVP, as both makes were normally always self powered from an extra PSU.

There is the Protar A500HD which works the other way around and its PSU can power the A500.

I'm about to start adding A500 hardware to the new classicamiga Hardware directory that I'm going to be launching this week, so if I find any that are powered via the A500 I will let you know.