Back in the early ’90s, I had an Amiga 2000 with just one expansion card: a SCSI controller paired with a massive 290 MB hard drive. Getting software and games to run from the hard drive—with only 1 MB of chip RAM—required a lot of tricks. But it was fun, and it taught me a lot about computers.
A few months ago, I stumbled upon a cheap Amiga 500, and I couldn’t resist. I decided to restore it from the ground up and add a GottaGoFast RAM + IDE controller to finally build what would have been my dream machine in 1990: an Amiga running OS 1.3 with fast RAM!
This is the story of my pimped Amiga 500: 1 MB chip RAM, 8 MB fast RAM, and 512 MB of storage. Quite a beast for its time! 🙂
Used Materials
Here is the hardwares pieces I used:
Amiga 500 I bought with a “512K memory expansions”
IDE68K + GottaGo FastRAM 8MB from AmigaStore.eu
A 512M CompaqFlash card (LIMEI, “professional grade”)
A 40 pin 3.5in IDE ribbon cable
A dremel to creare a compaqflash slot
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