Engineer Eric Schlaepfer’s newest board is a direct clone of a industrial product — intentionally so, and no person ought to thoughts: it is a copy of the Comspec SA-1000 Amiga SCSI adapter, designed so as to add a for-the-time high-speed laborious drive to Commodore’s traditional Amiga 1000.
“I am happy to launch the Amiga 1000 SCSI Sidecar,” Schlaepfer introduced on his Mastodon account. “This clone of the outdated Comspec SA-1000 makes a terrific storage answer in your A1000, paired up with a SCSI laborious disk[,] connecting to the Amiga’s sidecar bus port and offering a SCSI bus interface.”
In case your traditional Amiga is crying out for SCSI storage, Eric Schlaepfer has simply the add-on for you. (📷: Kaiiv, edited by Pixel8, CC-BY-SA 3.0)
Launched by Commodore in 1985, the Amiga 1000 launched the favored private pc household that will see heavy use in inventive industries and for gaming however would lose market share to IBM compatibles earlier than Commodore’s demise. Constructed round a Motorola 68000 processor with customized coprocessor chips for graphics and sound, the machine’s desktop chassis accepted add-in boards to increase its capabilities — together with Compsec’s SA-1000, which added a Small Laptop System Interface (SCSI) connector, permitting the usage of at-the-time high-speed and high-capacity laborious drives.
Selecting up a Compsec SA-1000 in working situation at this time is one thing of a problem, which is the place Schlaepfer’s work is available in: a permissively-licensed open-hardware clone of the board, fully-functional and suitable with software program designed for the unique enlargement card together with Compsec’s official driver and configuration device. “Please observe that you have to be utilizing Kickstart 1.3,” Schlaepfer advises, “in any other case the machine will simply get caught in a boot loop.”
Design information for the board, a invoice of supplies, and the information for writing to PALs/GALs can be found on GitHub below the permissive variant of the CERN Open {Hardware} License Model 2.
