ScuzzBlog: Diaries May 2018
Entry 9th May 2018: Post: 4
A570 - A bit early or a bit late
The A570 was a particularly oddly timed bit of kit given that it
was released by Commodore at the very time the A500 was being
discontinued. It was originally labelled as the A690 which seemed
to suggest an Amiga 600 compatibility, though that was not the
case.
The Amiga could have benefited greatly from having the CD-ROM
though even the 1200 expansion based on the CD32 never made it
into production.
The A570 is another one of the items of Amiga hardware that I
rarely, if ever used. Basically, cus it gave me a mass of data
that I had no way of utilising. Whenever I have used the Amiga
I have always insisted on having a hard drive as minimum. Without
one I find using the computer a struggle. So with the expansion
port trapped behind the 570 there was no way to plug in any
external drive. I guess an internal one may work but those are
like gold dust in the original machine so the A570 was confined
to the storage boxes never to be used.
Quite simple to use given that it uses an Amiga standard power
supply. Once connected you can choose to boot to CD or floppy
simply by allowing the Amiga to auto detect and boot what ever
is available. Booting to floppy lets you start using the CD but
sadly what are you going to do with half a gig of data with a
DD floppy for storage. Also the CD takes up valuable memory and
that sometimes means you have to disable the drive to use the
Amiga. Simply fully turning the volume off disables the drive.
And so to the A570 of which I have four. I guess with the 690
I technically have five. I decided to stack them as the CDTV
feature yesterday, given that the 570 was intended to give you
CDTV functionality on the A500. Just seems a little forward
looking backward or is it the other way round. Commodore create
a CDTV that doesn't actually perform like a proper 500. And then
creates a drive that allows the 500 to perform as the CDTV but
then decides to cease production of the A500 and release a
new computer that has no CD functionality.
For me, if they had focussed on getting the CD into every machine
post the release of the CDTV then that would have been way more
beneficial. It's not like they hadn't developed the technology.
Enough said.. time to party. 570 style.
Next Stop the CD32... or not
Sadly still getting it r's bout face..
Well until the SX32 came along ...
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