Engineer Eric Schlaepfer’s newest board is a direct clone of a industrial product — intentionally so, and no one 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 exhausting 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 “This clone of the outdated Comspec SA-1000 makes a fantastic storage resolution on your A1000, paired up with a SCSI exhausting disk[,] connecting to the Amiga’s sidecar bus port and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 artistic 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 Pc System Interface (SCSI) connector, permitting the usage of at-the-time high-speed and high-capacity exhausting drives.
Choosing 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 appropriate with software program designed for the unique growth card together with Compsec’s official driver and configuration instrument. “Please notice that it’s essential to be utilizing Kickstart 1.3,” Schlaepfer advises, “in any other case the machine will simply get caught in a boot loop.”
Design recordsdata for the board, a invoice of supplies, and the recordsdata for writing to PALs/GALs can be found on GitHub below the permissive variant of the CERN Open {Hardware} License Model 2.