Amiga : Adding a CD-ROM to your Amiga 2000

Adding a CD-ROM to your Amiga 2000

For those people that are still wondering if it is possible to add a CD-ROM to your A2000,
And how difficut the process of doing so is, i will later on describe the options that you have.

A fair warning though : it will be much more of a challenge to find (or is it fund) 🙂 a decent CD-ROM drive for the older 'standard' SCSI interfaces , than for the newer IDE/ATAPI interfaces.

Why would you want to add a CD-ROM drive to your A2000.

Well simply put, it will allow you to :

easily access a lot of software (PD , aminet and other collections) on CD.
install software from CD.
Listen to music CD's  on your Amiga 2000.

What is needed for adding a CD-ROM drive to your Amiga 2000

A interface that can handle such a drive , it can be a SCSI or IDE/ATAPI interface.
A CD / DVD Drive with IDE/ATAPI or SCSI interface.
A CD / DVD Drive needs at least Kickstart 2.xx.
A CD / DVD driver/Filesystem,  there are a handful of CD/DVD drivers available, both paid and free versions, the only one I've gotten working is one that requires at least kickstart 2.
(There is at least one  version that should work from Kickstart 1.2, unfortunately I was not able to actually get it to work.)

A SCSI interface is nowadays high priced , and CD drives are very Scarse and overpriced too if you can find one at all.
IDE/ATAPI drives are beginning to get scarser too (because of the worldwide acceptation of SATA), but are not as highly overpriced as the SCSI variants yet 🙂
(In a thriftshop you can easily find 2nd hand CD drives for a few euro's / dollars)

If you are new to all this i would strongly advise to buy yourself an IDE kit , simply because all stuff is so much easier to find and at a far more frindly price.

Then there's the option to buy a autobooting IDE interface which will load the drivers automatically and makes it convenient to boot from an old harddisk or a CF card by using a CF-2- IDE adapter.

You could also easily add a IDE CD Drive if you already have a SCSI Interface but no SCSI CD drive available.
Simply put in a No autoboot IDE Interface and just boot from your SCSI setup as usual and load the drivers for the IDE interface while booting up.
Like that you can add a CD-ROM drive to an Amiga 2000 in almost every configuration imaginable.
In the Amiga downloads section you can find a boot floppy  image with drivers for the CD-ROM drive.

The test environment 🙂Compact Flash card as Master Drive and CD-ROM as Slave drive.

Amiga Format CD #09 is recognized. Disk changes are also recognized.

Contents of the Amiga Format CD #09 : Double click and the contents will be displayed.

CD-DA (Audio CDs) are also recognized and played without any problems.