A500 External IDE Interface Released

A500 External IDE Interface is ready and released.

For those people who prefer not to open their Amiga 500, or who want to use a CD-ROM externally, there is now also an external version of the IDE interface for the Amiga 500 / 500+.

I have been testing this interface for aome time now , and it is rock stable , and with the new IDE drivers it has a real decent speed (> 1MB on a standard Amiga).
There is a new bootdisk in development which allows you to boot from diskette / or with a gotek from an image  under kick 1.3 , and booting under kickstart > 1.3 wil load a resident driver and bootmodule.
This allows you to reset the amiga , while the driver is resident the amiga will boot without floppy from the CF / Harddrive.

Power supply External IDE Interface.

This interface has the option to supply power to the connected device via pin 20 of the IDE interface, the advantage of this is that you no longer need a power cable.
Pin 20 is normally the Keying pin, and is often omitted from devices or close to IDE cables.
This option is therefore only intended for devices that support this, eg IDE-2-CF Adapters.
(before you turn this on, make sure the connected card supports this)
The power supply of an Amiga 500 is NOT suitable for powering hard disks and CD-ROM drives, so you want to connect something else to your IDE interface than an IDE-2 CF adapter, make sure you have an external power supply for this.

The A500 external IDE interface has a self-resetting fuse against overload and short circuit on the pin 20 power supply.

A500 External IDE Interface details:

• The specifications of the A500 External IDE Interface are largely the same as the range of internal versions for the Amiga 500 / 500+ , and the versions for the amiga 2000.
• The A500 External IDE Interface is 11 cm long and 5 cm deep, without an IDE-2-CF adapter the card only protrudes 2-3 cm outside the amiga.
• You don't need to open your Amiga 500 / 500+ for this External IDE Interface.
• This External IDE interface works with all revisions of the Amiga 500 / 500+.
• Can (configurable) pass the power supply through the IDE connection (pin 20). (This is only intended for devices that are specially made for this)
  (That means if you order an interface with IDE-2-CF adapter from me you do not need a power cable.)
  
• This interface has a self-resetting overload and short circuit fuse for the IDE pin 20 power supply.
• The interface is NOT Autobootend, you boot from a special boot disk, which after loading the IDE driver switches to the hard disk / CF card and continues the boot from there.
• There is a new driver version in test that has a 50-100% gain in transfer speed.
• The soon to be released bootdisk allows users with kickstarts > 1.3 to load the device driver resident , so that booting from floppy is only needed at initial start or after a nervous breakdown 🙂
• there is a kickstart 3.1 available now that has been patched which allows you to boot from the disk without needing a bootfloppy ... ever !
• The average time between the reset and a loaded Workbench 1.3 from floppydisk takes 20-25 seconds under kickstart 1.3.
• Master / Slave combinations of CF / hard disk / CD-ROM *
  (CD-ROM / DVD-ROM Support from Kickstart 2.0x)
• 400-600 KB Read Speed ​​(Depends on CPU / Filesystem / IDE Device) ( > 1MB with the new driver)

* there seem to be drivers for CD-ROM support under kickstart 1.3, support from kickstart 2.0x