Amiga A570

The A570 was a single-speed external CD-ROM drive for the Amiga 500 computer launched by Commodore in 1992. It was designed to be compatible with Amiga CDTV software as well as being able to read ordinary ISO 9660 CD-ROM discs.

The original designation was A690, and pre-production devices under this name were delivered to developers. The A690/A570 used a proprietary Mitsumi CD-ROM interface. It contained a header for an internal 2Mb fast memory expansion, but this proprietary memory module was never put into production and only a few rare developer examples of this exist today.

The A570 provided the Amiga500 with a CD-ROM, but obviously was not useful to improve the A500 with modern features mainly dealing with enhanced graphics, even if there was a common desire for Amiga users to upgrade the A500 to something similar to the A1200, which was launched just a few months after the A570. The A570 was incompatible with the A1200.

Commodore never realized anything to enhance the A500 machines with more graphics but also it never realized any processor accelerator cards, leaving third party hardware manufacturers free to realize these cards and/or peripherals for A500.

The A1200 also featured standard IDE interface and also one PCMCIA PC Card Type II port, then it had various possibilities to mount standard IDE-ATAPI CD-ROM readers and writers, internal or external, so Commodore never released an A1200-compatible CD-ROM device.

It is also notable that by the time of the A570's launch, the A500 computer had already been discontinued. The A600 (ostensibly the A500's direct replacement) was, like the later A1200, incompatible with this drive external device. Thus, Commodore were in the position of having launched a CD-ROM drive for a discontinued machine, but this move by Commodore marketing department could be justified by the fact that it existed million of A500 worldwide which required an advanced storage system capable to handle hundred of megabytes of data.

In addition to this, the device (like the A590 hard disk that was sold by Commodore for the A500) had no through connector, so it was not possible to connect both an A590 and an A570 to the computer at the same time. The A590 Hard Drive, despite having an XT IDE hard disk, internally carried also an external SCSI interface that allowed third-party Hard Disks and CD-ROM drives to be fitted. While these drives did not carry CDTV emulation, the lack of success of this format did not restrict this option.

Features

* Single speed CD-ROM reader
* 2 megabytes RAM internal interface connector
* two audio in and two audio out connectors (Left and right speakers)The audio in connects from the A500 to the A570 and the Audio out goes to the speakers (or Monitor).
* Audio control nob on the front panel to adjust the volume of the headphones if connected, it did not change the volume out of the rear ports as they are designed to go to an amplified speaker setup which will have there own controls
*Microphone jack on the front panel
*Rear connector bay port to add SCSI interface card

CDs could not be inserted directly into A570 and needed to be put in a caddy box before being inserted into the reader slot.

A570 had no need for drivers. It was automatically recognized as standard Amiga card by Amiga Zorro Bus AutoConfig feature. Programs for playing CD Audio were available on public domain software disk collections, and then on Aminet Repository.

The A570 featured also its external power supply, that is the same model of A500 PSU.

External links

* [http://www.cdtv.org.uk/1255.html "The A570 CD-Rom for the Amiga 500"] article at CDTV.org.uk site.
* [http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/prototypes/a690.html "Amiga 690"] article at Amiga History site.