Engineer Eric Schlaepfer’s latest board is a direct clone of a commercial product — deliberately so, and nobody should mind: it’s a reproduction of the Comspec SA-1000 Amiga SCSI adapter, designed to add a for-the-time high-speed hard drive to Commodore’s classic Amiga 1000.
“I’m pleased to release the Amiga 1000 SCSI Sidecar,” Schlaepfer announced on his Mastodon account. “This clone of the old Comspec SA-1000 makes a great storage solution for your A1000, paired up with a SCSI hard disk[,] connecting to the Amiga’s sidecar bus port and providing a SCSI bus interface.”
If your classic Amiga is crying out for SCSI storage, Eric Schlaepfer has just the add-on for you. (📷: Kaiiv, edited by Pixel8, CC-BY-SA 3.0)
Launched by Commodore in 1985, the Amiga 1000 launched the popular personal computer family that would see heavy use in creative industries and for gaming but would lose market share to IBM compatibles before Commodore’s demise. Built around a Motorola 68000 processor with custom coprocessor chips for graphics and sound, the machine’s desktop chassis accepted add-in boards to expand its capabilities — including Compsec’s SA-1000, which added a Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) connector, allowing the use of at-the-time high-speed and high-capacity hard drives.
Picking up a Compsec SA-1000 in working condition today is something of a challenge, which is where Schlaepfer’s work comes in: a permissively-licensed open-hardware clone of the board, fully-functional and compatible with software designed for the original expansion card including Compsec’s official driver and configuration tool. “Please note that you need to be using Kickstart 1.3,” Schlaepfer advises, “otherwise the machine will just get stuck in a boot loop.”
Design files for the board, a bill of materials, and the files for writing to PALs/GALs are available on GitHub under the permissive variant of the CERN Open Hardware License Version 2.
