I just came back from my vacation in Turkey and found out that my internal A500 IDE hard drive interface that I ordered had finally came. I was eager to try it out in my Amiga 500 project I have been tinkering with during the past six months.

I have a GVP HD8+ external SCSI hard drive controller for my Amiga 500 but I much prefer internal hard drives in Amiga computers, especially the extra large A500 case.

There are rare internal IDE hard drive controllers for A500 and A2000, most famous is the one manufactured by ICD.

That one is quite hard to come by these days so I was happy to find out some finish dude was hacking together his own internal A500 IDE controller which supported auto booting under Kickstart 3.1.

Actually this small IDE controller implements the IDE controller of the A600 into the A500 (if I understood correctly). This revision of the A500 IDE controller is very minimal –I like that- only containing one chip on the bottom of the thin board which is plugged into the 64-pin CPU socket.

There is only one problem with the Amiga 500 IDE hard drive controller, you need to solder two cables from it to the A500 motherboard. IMHO that is not such a big problem only that the directions given on the homepage of this project where slightly weird.

However reading the directions twice, really slowly, I understood exactly where I should solder the cables so I did not need to dig out the A500 schematics just for two solder points.

With the cables soldered and hard drive controller mounted and CPU mounted to the controller it was time to test the new setup. I quickly attached an IDE drive from my Amiga 2000 preinstalled with Workbench 3.1 and it booted just as you would expect from an Amiga with a hard drive.

Unfortunately the hard drive controller would not work with my accelerator which also sits in the CPU socket. My plan originally would be to have an A500 with scandoubler/flicker fixer, turbo card, extra memory and hard drive controller all mounted internally. That plan failed, so I am actually thinking of selling the A500 IDE hard drive controller if anyone is interested in it because it did not work together with the turbo board.

I think it is a really nice hardware piece that is both inexpensive and simple. If you like the Amiga 500 and always wanted to add an internal hard drive to it I cannot think of a neater solution for adding cheap IDE hard drives or Compact Flash cards. Off course a small memory expansion added to the card would be icing on the cake, but as it stands I recommend it for any hardcore A500 vintage Amiga enthusiast.

Check out the IDE64K IDE interface at the official IDE64K homepage

(but do not be afraid of weird english)

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