Amiga 1000 Expansion and PC Sidecar

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[christianzimmermann]

I can't believe it: The second memory expansion card has a sticker on it saying. "Kupke - Entwicklung & Vertrieb" which translates to "Kupke - Development & Distribution" and the phone number starts with the area code of my home town (City of Dortmund, Germany). Maybe I should give it a try, dial the number and see if this company still exists ;-)
It's a little crazy sitting in Dortmund in Germany in 2022 and watching a video from the 8-bit guy from Texas, US with a piece of old hardware from exactly this german city. :-)

[xeroniris]

Its also worth remembering that while the original Amiga did a fairly poor job of emulating a contemporary PC, the PC couldn't usefully emulate an Amiga at all until the late 90s/early 2000s.

[trustyvaultcanteen]

Planet X3 having a port for pretty much any system is a great way to compare their abilities!

[dashcamandy]

It's perfectly fine to plug your own game in equipment demos. You're ALMOST guaranteed to not get a DMCA claim...

[ssm]

Maybe it's worth mentioning that the Sidecar, like the Amiga 2000A, was developed by Commodore Germany in Braunschweig. The Amiga was extremely widespread in Germany, unlike the Atari ST, and the Amiga 500 was basically replacing the C64.

I had an internal memory expansion (4.5MB!) that just stuck between the 68k and the motherboard. Left room for the 250MB SCSI harddisk :) I love the Lorraine, and it was my Kickstart 😉 to become a pro software developer.

[startedtech]

You should be able to use your game disks to plug all you want- it's your channel and games, and you have so many different versions to test on different computers.

[VolJoe]

I love this review of the original 1060 sidecar. Thank you. This thing seemed like pure magic when it came out. Being able to run an IBM PC in a window while boing demo and everything else ran in the background made the Amiga seem preposterously good.

My town didn’t have a store selling the Amiga so i had to drive 80 miles to see it. They had the sidecar setup and everything but it was stuck in a back corner of the store. It was sad because then I realized Commodore couldn’t market their way out of a wet paper sack. The Amiga was generations ahead of anything else in that store.

[Bamahut]

Oh man, when the sidecar was connected I had old memories of the SEGA Megadrive/Genesis expensions with the Sega CD and 32X.

[anakondase]

Never had the original Amiga myself. A friend did though and I remember how amazed I was when I saw him play games like Marble Madness and such on it. I was in high school at the time and a classmate who also had the original Amiga made some of his school projects on it, while the rest of us had to work with the Nord-100 terminals. At the same time we had two PC/XT's in the back of the classroom and they couldn't even get close to what that Amiga could. Eventually got the A500 myself and the rest is history.

[markedwards]

I used a Sidecar with a HDD controller which allowed me to have 2x40MB HDDs in another external enclosure that I built from an old IBM external full height 360k 5.25” floppy case. The software to control the sidecar was called “Janus” and let me partition the external drives for use both in the IBM and also for the Amiga. I had a custom workbench boot disk that transferred the boot sequence across to a partition on the HDD as it started. This not only sped up the boot but meant that I had pretty well all of the machine running from the HDD, making the machine dramatically faster for a lot of tasks.

Some simple scripting let me load various games onto the HDD and this was great for some of the multi-disk games that were out at the time - they booted straight away and never asked for a drive swap.

I wish I still had the setup and didn’t loan it to my ex sister-in-law, never to be seen again.

[teekay_]

I bought an Amiga in '85 and the guy at the computer store promised the sidecar was coming out "soon". I wasn't aware that it ever came out. I did buy the bridgeboard with the 8086 processor, but by that time, the emulated CGA graphics were so outdated that I regretted paying for it.

I also bought a kit for the A1000 that that put the kickstart in ROMs inside the A1000. It made it a lot more elegant.

[i.warrenhastings]

Wow! I watch a ton of retro pc content, but finally someone has mentioned "Castle"! This was the ONLY dos game I really played as a kid. I was born in '89, but inherited my grandpa's old machine for a while, and played this game to death. Finally-- thanks, bro. Lol

[jeromethiel]

I used to work at a computer store in the 80's, we sold the HELL out of the AST 6 pack. Was the most popular upgrade for an IBM PC we had.

[TechTimeTraveller]

I never thought anyone's sidecar expansions would make the PCjr's look elegant. Wow.

[pascalbubi]

Also had a Sidecar (actually connected to my A500 - with the back side facing forward). I added a hard disk to the Sidecar having two partitions: one for PC Dos and one for the Amiga (the Amiga sill had to boot from floppy but I could launch applications and access may data from the hard disk). Also had a video card with monochrome monitor for the Sidecar. Extremely versatile combination.

[CriminalCaterpillar]

Castle Adventure is the game we had on our 286 when I was a kid, and I've never known the name of it and have been looking for it for the last 25 years!! Finally!

[VarionJimmy]

Yes! A video of Amiga 1000!
This brings back memories…
I have two prototype devices for the A1000. A flat bed scanner, and a 2 MB memory expansion. The latter made my A1000 a 2, 5 MB computer. :-)

[suchaluch]

I did love the PC emulation Software back in the day.
Friends learned Turbo Pascal 3.14 at school, and it worked perfectly on my Amiga, so I could help them.

Nice memories, thank you!

[ALurkingGrue]

Man, I used to use an A.Max back in the day at work as the company used Macs for the internal mail system. I had it for some time on an Amiga 4000 Tower. (It had a low serial number)

[LMacNeill]

That AST 6-pack card was probably the most popular single upgrade for the original IBM PC -- it contained literally everything you needed that the PC didn't come with originally, and it all fit in one single slot. When I went to college in September of 1988, a family friend gave me his old IBM PC and it had an AST 6-pack card in it.