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?