In the last Amiga episode, I promised to come back and show you some accessories for the Amiga 1000.
And so here they are. I borrowed all of these from Bo Zimmerman’s collection.
These 3 items here are RAM expanders. Well, sort of. So this one here is just a basic RAM expander
that adds an additional 512K of fast-RAM to the Amiga 1000. In order to use these, you’ll have
to pop off the little door on the side of the Amiga 1000. And this unit just pops in there
like so. It’s relatively thin and doesn’t look too terribly tacky. And that’s really all there is to
it. As soon as you boot up your Amiga again, It will instantly have 1 MB of RAM available.
Now this thicker unit here is a bit more interesting. It’s not
actually a RAM expander. In fact, Bo has a little note on here that it is Kickstart 1.2
and a real-time clock, but missing the battery. It has a couple of switches on the rear.
And it has a pass-through connector so you can add another accessory to the system bus.
So, let’s plug this thing in and see what it does. OK, I am going to power on the computer. And the
main thing it does is this. As you can see, the 1000 boots straight to the workbench disk
screen. Thus it no longer requires the kickstart disk to be loaded first, which makes the computer
much faster to boot, whether you are booting straight to a game, or loading up workbench.
But, it doesn’t actually contain any RAM, which you would think it would considering it’s size.
If we take it apart, you’ll see it is primarily just ROM chips and the realtime clock circuitry,
with a missing battery. So to get the extra RAM, you’d need to add something like this
in addition to the kickstart module. Or, we can try this last module here which is a larger RAM
unit that can add up to 2 MB of Fast RAM, although I think only 1 MB is populated.
And so there we go. With both units installed,
I can boot up to workbench without the kickstart disk and I have 1.5 MB of RAM at my disposal.
OK, so let’s move along. Now I want to show you the Amiga 1020 disk drive. These are somewhat
rare. Looking at the side of the box, you’ll see its a regular 360K drive, and seems targeted
towards IBM PC compatibility. Although they do mention that it uses low cost 5.25” floppy
diskettes. I guess they were lower cost at the time, but you’d only be able to use this for your
personal data files because no commercial software for the Amiga shipped on this type of disk.
So, unboxing it here, you’ll see it actually comes with the Amiga Transformer software
from the factory. This is basically a software emulator for running MS-DOS software on the Amiga.
OK, let’s get the drive itself out. A lot of people mistake this drive for being a 1571.
And there’s no wonder why, if you compare them they are basically identical other than
the badge on the bottom right. I’m pretty sure they reused most of the same molds for the case.
However the rear is slightly different, as you can see. The 1020 has the Amiga
drive interface instead of the old serial system used by Commodore 8-bit machines.
So let’s connect this up to the Amiga 1000. It just connects to the regular floppy drive
port like so. Although one difference with other Amiga drives is that it does require
its own external power. I seem to have left the software disk at Bo’s house,
so I just made a copy from the internet. Once the transformer software loads,
it will ask for an MS-DOS disk, so I’ll use this one. The internal drive is drive A and it
will in fact read regular IBM formatted disks. And of course, the external drive is drive B.
And so here we are, the usual A prompt. Here’s a standard MS-DOS formatted disk.
And if we switch to B drive, we can get a full list of the directory. But there’s absolutely no
hope of running this game. Transformer doesn’t emulate any graphics modes at all. In fact,
it doesn’t even do color text. It emulates an original IBM MDA video card. If you try
to run something with graphics, you just wind up with a flashing cursor at the top of the screen.
And annoyingly, you’d think you could do like control,
alt, and then delete to reset your PC emulation, but nope, doesn’t work.
Although to be fair, later I read through the manual
and realized that they had the delete key mapped over here to the decimal point key,
and it does in fact work for the reset of the emulated PC.
This software claims to be able to run lots of business software like Lotus 1-2-3,
or WordPerfect. And it probably does, but I don’t have either of those to try. But it will
run GWBasic and I was able to both type in some software, and try some BASIC programs from the
internet. As long as it didn’t use any graphics commands, it ran fine, albeit very slowly.
Speaking of slowly, I ran this benchmarking program to find out how fast this is compared
to a traditional IBM PC, and discovered it runs at about 14% the speed of an original IBM PC.
Another way of looking at that, is it is 7 times slower than a 4.77 MHz IBM. With MDA video.
Clearly they never intended this for games, but I wanted to try something. And I tried dozens of
text or character based games and couldn’t really get much of anything to work without crashing.
I finally got this Castle Adventure game to workout I think it’s supposed to run in 40
columns and the emulator still presents it in 80 columns, but at least everything lines up,
even though it is squished to one side. But even then, it is horrendously slow.
So let’s take a look at a 3rd party product that came out several years later called
PC-Task. This one will even emulate VGA, CGA, or EGA graphics. But I know it is going to be slow,
so I’m going to select CGA here. It has detected our two drives. I ran the same benchmark program.
Although it looks nice and has color, the speed is actually slightly slower, at 9%.
On the bright side, PC-Task was able to run nearly everything I threw at it.
The only trouble was, it wasn’t fast enough to be usable. Even a text based game like flash-attach
was far too slow to actually play. So, it seems the compatability is really good.
And no doubt when this software was used on newer Amigas with faster processors,
some of these things would probably be bearable to use. But here, it’s almost comical how slow it is.
It’s worth mentioning that the Amiga appears fast when playing native video games because it has
the various co-processors. But for this task of emulation, it boils down to that 7 Mhz CPU
trying to emulate a totally different CPU and all of the video hardware. It’s just too much for it.
That being the case, let’s look at Commodore’s answer to this problem, the Amiga 1060 sidecar.
Besides the main bus connector, it also connects to the two joystick ports, and I suspect these
are just passed through to the front, because this device would otherwise physically block
the joystick ports. So, let’s get this thing attached and see how it works. Admittedly this
thing isn’t terribly elegant looking, plus it’s slightly yellowed and needs retrobrite.
Here’s how the power works. So, you unplug the power from the Amiga 1000. And then you
take this little power cord that hangs out of the sidecar and plug that into the Amiga’s power port,
like so. And then you plug in the main power from the wall into the sidecar.
The mouse will now plug into this pass-through port on the front.
And the power on procedure is, you turn on the Amiga 1000 first. But it doesn’t do anything
because it doesn’t have power yet. Then you power on the sidecar, and both units come to life.
After loading kickstart, then it needs to load a custom software to use the sidecar.
Interesting thing is, the sidecar itself boots up somewhat independently from the Amiga. In fact,
as it boots up, listen to the chirp it makes. It’s kind of quiet and a bit hard to hear.
Yep - that’s the same boot sound you hear from the PET, and also the Commodore PC series computers.
Anyway, so what we’ll do now is open this folder called PC. And you have the choice
for PC Color or PC Mono. We’ll choose color for the moment. And so what you’ll get is
MS-DOS in a window, so to speak. You can actually resize the window, of course, then you’ll have to
scroll because it won’t resize the interior. And of course, you can make it go full screen.
OK, so you can’t actually use the internal drive on the Amiga 1000 as an MS-DOS drive like you can
on the other emulators I’ve shown. So, this is going to be your A drive, and if you want a B
drive, especially a 720 of any kind, then you’ll have to plug in an external Amiga drive. And
that drive actually plugs in directly to the sidecar mechanism itself, not to the Amiga 1000.
That being said, let’s try reading an MS-DOS Disk. People always accuse me of trying to plug my own
game in every video where I need a disk. But the truth is, I just have hundreds of these on the
shelf right behind me and it’s just the easiest and quickest disk for me to try. And there’s
something I noticed right away when playing the game. It’s sort of hard to explain. The game
itself is running more or less at full speed. But the video display is only updating at a framerate
of maybe 4 or 5 frames per second. So it looks like it is running slow, even though it isn’t.
I also discovered if I right click, there’s a whole menu of options to play around with. Oh and
by the way, it only seems to support CGA graphics. I tried some EGA stuff, but it didn’t work.
So, the next thing I wanted to try was the same MIPS program to find out how fast
this setup is compared to the emulator. And it looks like it reads as 1.0 on every measurement,
meaning it is exactly the same speed as the original IBM PC.
So, I tried playing a few more games. And honestly, it seems to work with just about
anything I throw at it, as long is it is a game from the appropriate era.
In fact, it seems that games that don’t update the whole screen seem to run a bit better,
or at least the video lag is less noticeable. But I should again point out that I doubt
seriously this device was meant for running games. After all, if you had an Amiga 1000,
why would you care anything about running CGA games? No, I’m sure this device was meant
for people to run all of the boring business software that was common on IBMs of the day.
I also noticed another interesting feature. It turns out you can open a Mono window at
the same time as a color window. You can’t really fit them well on screen. But this
gives the same functionality as having a Mono and color card in your IBM, which was one of
the ways people had dual displays back in the day, since they could be used simultaneously.
All right, so now I’m going to take this thing apart and see what makes it tick.
And what you’re going to find here is that this thing is basically just an IBM PC clone,
more or less completely self contained. As you can see it even has 3 ISA expansion slots. One
of those is a modern Compact Flash system to simulate a hard drive, which Bo installed himself.
The longer card looks suspiciously familiar. Let’s take that out and see if my suspicion is accurate.
Yep. This is an AST Sixpack card. For those that don’t know, I used to work at AST back in the 90s.
This card provides extra RAM, a realtime clock, serial ports, parallel port, among other things,
all in a single card. However, this did not come with the computer from the factory. Bo said it was
already in there when he acquired it, though. So the original owner must have installed it.
Anyway, I’m going to continue to take it apart so we can see the motherboard.
As you can see, it has two boards stacked on top. That’s partially how it achieves the skinnier size
it has, and it also needs an elevated board to match up with the Amiga’s expansion bus. Having
removed the upper board, you can see that this is just basically an entire PC clone system,
fully self contained. It just happens to be missing a video card and a keyboard port.
I’m not super impressed with any of the PC emulation products I’ve
shown in this video. But keep in mind these were all pretty early attempts.
What I am impressed with are some of the later products for the Amiga 500 and 2000.
In fact, one product I’ve been looking for for a long time is the A-Max system for emulating
a Macintosh. If anyone has one they could loan me for a future video, please get in contact with me!
Also, while waiting on the next episode, if you’d like more nerdy material, I’d recommend you watch
the Geekbits Podcast where me and my brother and a friend sit around. We talk about philosophy,
science fiction, retro-tech, all kinds of nerdy stuff. You’ll find the link in the description.