Just wanted to share a few pictures of my Revision 8a.1 that I have upgraded from non-Plus to Plus spec's and upgraded with a few nice additions. I initially intended to upgrade it to a beast with accelerator and stuff, but I have gotten my self an Amiga1200 instead for the times when I want to run with a faster Amiga. Basically. I got rid of the accelerator on this 500 and got my self a non tested sidecar HDD/Ram solution instead of an internal TerribleFire accelerator.

It is what it is. But yes. I upgraded this 8a.1 from normal configuration to Plus configuration. And added following upgrades to the machine:

- RGB-to-HDMI upscaler/scandoubler.
- 1mb Trapdoor Ram, that are configured as ChipRam. (2mb Chip in total now)
- Internal Gotek drive.
- Boot selector, in order to be able to boot from external floppy as it was the internal drive.
- Kickstart switcher, to have both Kickstart 1.3 and also Kickstart 3.1
- A sidecar upgrade, with CF card as HDD and then 8mb FastRam in total.

I bought the sidecar expansion a couple of months ago. Some 4/6 months or something. It was untested, and without the original PSU, manual and software. The first thing I did was cleaning it up, as it had big black cakes of dust all over. Then I power-modded the expantion in order to accept internal power from the Zorro-slot to power the HDD. Just a matter of two wires from the slot to power in (5v and 12v). Upgraded Ram from 2 to 8 and got it fully to work this way. The bad news is that I can only use CF cards. Or is it a good thing? I dont miss the noisy 100mb Seagate HDD at all, and CF cards are silent. Good thing, bad thing? I don't really know. 😁 The best part of this setup is the HDD. The Amiga is running with stock CPU, and still the HDD speed is freaking 9mb/s. 😳 The internal HDD adaptor the I have in a box somewere, gives around 700kb/s on a stock 68000 CPU.

I like this setup. It is basic and not much super-bling or anything like that. And it is oldschool centered to what I experienced as a teenager around 1991/92'ish, when attending the local Computer Club. Basically fully retro to me personally. If I want something more in terms of Amiga, then I can always hook up my 1200 instead.