In the late 80s early 90s, one 3rt party vendor stood out about the others. GVP.
One solution they provided let you Amiga 500 become an IBM compatible PC.
This video is sponsored by PCBWay (https://www.pcbway.com)
#doscember
#doscember2022
0:00 – Intro
0:33 – A word from our sponsor
1:03 – GVP Impact II
2:54 – GVP A530
5:02 – 286
6:31 – Emulated devices
8:30 – Graphics
13:15 – PC In action
16:13 – Memory in a PC
20:30 – But why, and other questions ?
20:07 – Thanks
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When I bought my Amiga 1000 a few years ago, it had a ATOnce board inside, and I have no idea how to either use it or get it out of there…
Would love a video on SCSI there were so many things for SCSI that Early USB couldn't match.
Yeah, it's actually kind of ironic that the Great Valley Products drive looks more like it fit this one of Commodores computers than Commodore's drive does!
"You can boot up off your hard drive as normal…."
Then what would you boot up FROM?
Oh shoot, sorry that your PC Amiga broke!
"Thinking to yourself…"? Rather than thinking to someone else, right?
"…DOS could work off a floppy disk and you could run applications off a floppy disk, but nobody did; everyone used a hard drive with DOS."
Wait a minute here. Using a hard drive IS running it off a floppy disk. And how would you know what everyone did? Were you around everyone?
"Also… as well"? Oops, ha!
What's the big deal about having your 256 colors with the PC in the Amiga if the OCS Amiga can already show 4096 at the same time without it?
I thoroughly enjoyed that, great! I could hear the gears grinding in the back of my head as the brain was forced to dredge up long-forgotten detail of PC memory management in the 90s. Ahhh, those were the days 😄 Great stuff, keep it up!
For some reason I find these frankenstein Amiga's very amusing. A PC card in a GVP hdd makes my day
Is that A500 unnaturally bright or is that just the video?
When I heard "Doctor DOS," I cringed hard. The proper pronunciation is to say the "DR" letters individually. "DR" is short for "Digital Research," thus pronouncing the letters makes more sense.
I had one
22:35 well for one now you have a 286/386 with a 680xx co processor, or amiga with a 286 or 386 coprocessor
I watch Perifractic, so yes I do.
I had a bridgeboard in my 2000 for a while. I went to the fun of putting the 16-bit extenders on the ISA slots But there still weren't enough ISA slots for everything you'd want on a PC unless you ponied up for one of those expensive multifunction ISA cards. The kind that combined vga, floppy, hd, serial and parallel all on one board. I found a passive ISA backplane that plugged into an ISA slot, and had 3 ISA slots on one side and 2 on the other. So using that, you gave up one slot and got 3. (The 2 slot side was useless, as they overlapped existing slots. It also meant you couldn't put the case on.. Anyway, it was fun to have windows, amigados/wb and 68k Mac/Finder all runing simultaneously.
GVP made the World's First 50Ghz 68030 card for the A2000 in 1989
(which made any Amiga with that card, the worlds FASTEST Macintosh!!)
Fun, I had the GVP A530 turbo, but wasn't aware of this board. Not that I had a real need for it, as I also had plenty PCs at the time.
Anyway, thanks for the nice video.
When I started to work with PC's this was in the dos windows days, 386 and 486 were still around, it was a lot harder getting stuff running properly having to load high certain things, it's a lot easier now anyone can build a PC, and bung windows on it's a piece of cake, even the connectors for the power supply are idiot proof where you can plug them in one way only.
I switched from my A500 to PC maybe a year after working in this place because we got trade price parts and did not have to pay the vat so this saved a lot but I still had to sell my 500, I have a 1200 these days but still love the Amiga.
What a waste of a good Amiga!
I love your videos ^^
Very interesting!
Yeah that's a rare best. I completely forgot about that add-on. Must have cost a small fortune to get all of that. I have a Vortex 486 SLC 25MHz bridgeboard and one of every Commodore bridgeboard. Amazingly all are working. Hellishly expensive back in the day (and even now) and totally useless hehe! Might have been nice if you could have run the PC Benchmark test suite available at Phil's Computer Lab to at least see how that thing compares to a period PC. I won't be able to sleep until you do so we need a part 2! 😉
Anyway, the video name is fitting now for doscember2022 but will be useless in 2023+. So this vid can be found when searching you should rename it to something like "Amiga 500 + GVP A530 Turbo + GVP PC286 Add-on'.
When i was in college, the community kind, i was hired to run the lab since i knew more about dos than anyone. I always thought that it was called 'Lotus 1,2,3,4 DOS' and later 'Lotus 1,2,3,4 WIN', never occurred to me that '4' was more like 'for'…
Great video. I used to have ATonce (I think that’s how it was called) that was installed internally in 500 but although I could boot it in 8086 mode I could not get it to read any disks and back then Amiga 500 HDD add on was too expensive and to be honest I could not get it to run anything on it at all 🙁 too bad I wish I kept that card and many more computers and other things from back then!
Ah yes, back in the early days having a pc was certainly rare, especially one with Windows 3 & Word. When i was still studying back then people used terminal-ish pc with DOS (or cpm, i really cant remember) with a very basic version of Wordpefect with only 1 basic ugly font. 2 study buddies & i dug out his A500+ & my A500 & then wrote a 60 page group project on the amigas & then used some early shareware & an extra external drive to manually copy over the text file using CLI commands. Not that the text files was 100% compatible & but the basic letters got compied at least. Then the local dorm has a single Windows 3 pc with Word (that was kinda mindblowing) & we used that to "bling" up the paper. Of cause later on the amigas also got much better Word processors & some much more compatible amiga/pc file transfering software. Still back then having a "alternative typewriter" was incredible usefull.
I used not one, but two SupraDrive 500XP with 2MB memory connected after each other (52MB and 40MB hard drives). The SupraDrive has a passthrough expansion port.
Sorry, right around 8 minutes you refer to Doctor DOS. Ahem, Digital Research DOS or D-R DOS. OCD flareup over. Enjoying the video meantime. Carry on. BACK to the video.
It would be awesome for you to do a video on SCSI. I would definitely watch that– I was never rich enough to afford SCSI in anything and consequently know next to nothing about it!
My Vortex 386sx for my MegaSTE works waaaay better. Also the graphics are so well emulated, most games run on the PC Card way better than even on the MSTE at 16Mhz with cache. The Vortex is a pretty cool little thing. Also have 8088 and 286 versions for regular ST's. They all work and do a decent enough job even thopugh the ST line doesn't really have great graphics or sound.
Unlike the 386-based desktop PC clones and before the 1995 CGX RTG or 1996 P96 RTG, Amiga 500 with a full 32-bit 030 CPU accelerator wasn't able to run Doom since Amiga OCS/ECS wasn't upgradeable to a 256-color display.
Prior to the 1995 CGX RTG or 1996 P96 RTG, the downside for full 32-bit CPU accelerated Amigas with OCS/ECS is the lack of a fast 256-color display for 1990s PC game ports.
In early 1992, I have Amiga 3000/030 @ 25 Mhz with 32-bit 4 MB Fast RAM and 2 MB Chip RAM. Later in XMAS 1992 year and missing the A4000/030 SKU, my Dad purchased 386DX-33 with an ET4000AX SVGA PC clone.
68030-based Unix workstations usually have fast graphics cards at a similar level as TIGA since Amiga OCS/ECS is not enough. TIGA was useless for AmigaOS apps and games until post-1995 CGX RTG or 1996 P96 RTG.
Hi, this is your missing "PC in action" https://youtu.be/Pk9XQjsHf10😅 sorry for the poor video quality
Wasn't there a PC packaged very like an Atari ST or Commodore Amiga? – it had a very similar "one box" approach and I think even included a modulator so you could plug it into a TV. This was in the early 90s when PCs were becoming more popular as the Amiga/ST era drew to a close.
I don't think it did very well, though.
Thanks for the interesting flashback. I never had an Amiga 500, though. I started with the original 1000 and eventually replaced it with the 2000.⬅
I caught one minor oversight. In passing, you mentioned @16:49 that the original PC memory started at 512 kbytes. IIRC correctly, though, for about the first year of the PC's release, a cassette PC model was available, and that one came standard with just 128 k. I think only 3 ladies in Iowa bought that non-floppy model, so no one remembers it.
what an incredible machine!! this Amiga is it brand new ?? it looks new!! thanks!!!!!!!………….
Back in 1991 I got my first A500 while preparing to move to Saudi Arabia for a job with the RSAF. Days before shipping out I saw a magazine ad for one of the GVP sidecars. Rung them up and ordered one with the biggest HDD and the most memory it would take. Once in KSA I had to wait another 2 months for it to arrive what with shipping time and clearing customs. Quite frankly I'm amazed that it made it at all. Once installed and setup, it was amazing and was so pleased with the performance and not having to use the floppy drive so much.
@RetroBytes Dude, I have to ask, what kind of job do you have, to afford all they toys of yours. I love this channel, and I wish I could have this stuff in my collection. Forgive my vulgarity, but your channel is retro geek nerd porn. I love these vids, and look forward to when you post a new one.
PC means Personal Computer. The Vic 20 was a PC. The Commodore 64 was a PC. The Amiga was a PC. The Mac is a PC. My laptop with Linux on it is a PC. They're all Personal Computers and therefore they are all PCs. There's nothing secret about it.
I love how much info you pack in! Great video!
Oddly enough if Commodore had gone the way of an Amiga PC hybrid and a Commodore 64 mode for their PC. They may have become the defacto standard.
Tiny nitpick re: expanded memory. It was NOT 'himem', or memory located within the 640k to 1M range. It was actually memory located ABOVE the 1M barrier, but was MAPPED into the 'himem' area, one miserable 64k page at a time. It was a complete mess of a system, requiring hw and sw support on the 286, and was dog slow in every way on that platform. The 386 had HW support of expanded memory, so it would have been faster, but still was really annoying to implement. It was basically useless for the majority of cases and wasn't well supported.
Most people ran DOS from a hard drive? I certainly didn't. And neither did most of my friends with PCs. Hard drives came way later for me for the later DOS versions like version 6.
I learned MS-DOS and Windows on an Amiga500 with a Vortex 286 ATOnce card. It gave me the first access to the IT field and consequentially brought great jobs on my path! But boy, did I HATE MS-DOS in the beginning! I also tried a KCS 8088 board, but that was to slow. I would have loved the GVP solution, but they were way more expensive then the A590. The Vortex worked perfectly for me!
Can you add USB to this ?
I always thought Amiga was good for Music and CAD type work better than the IBM series, is that right ?