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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Fri Oct 26, 2018 10:34 am

I attended the 2018 Portland Retro Gaming Expo (PRGE) last weekend for the third year in a row. It is a massive show that fills the Portland Convention Center and features all things retro-gaming. It is basically divided into three main areas: an arcade and game competition area, a vendor area and multiple auditoriums for panels and presentations.

The key for those interested in vintage hardware and software (mostly console-based) is to arrive early Saturday morning before the doors open to get in line. The line then grows and snakes through the convention center to an insane length. Once the doors open most people then run to the vendor area to try and get there first, which of course is impossible. There are simply too many people and the building is too gigantic. There’s a lot of ground to cover. But it is fun trying to find that personal "holy grail" before someone else does.

In any case I have always run into this area (about the size of a football field) with a singular laser beam focus: to find anything Commodore related at all. Since most vendors are there to sell old Nintendo carts, as well as Sony, Sega, Atari and (yes) Intellivision, I can run through fairly quickly in a first pass to figure out where to focus. It’s usually only two or three tables at most and the pickings are slim. That's just the reality of it.

Long after I’d given up (and found a mint, boxed (barely used) bread bin C64 and 9 original Commodore 64 game cartridges), I casually walked over to a large table that had piles of random hardware thrown on top of it. It looked like an electronics recycling center with just mounds of useless junk.

But then, thrown sadly to the side amidst a nest of random cables and anonymous gamepads, I found this:
An original SupraDrive hard drive, with a DB25 SCSI connector!
IMG_8211.jpg
Welp, the power light at least came on (and I could hear the HDD spin up, too).

It looked pretty sad and rough with markings on the case and non-original screws put into the side of it. But regardless, I asked, “So how much for this?” The vendor looked at it, then waved his arm over a small pile, “That and the rest of the Amiga stuff for $50.” Other Amiga stuff? That’s when I realized there was a SupraDrive SqQuest drive as well! Having two SyQuest drives already I was not in the market for yet another. “How about $20 for just this old drive here?” I asked. He looked at it and shrugged his shoulders. “Sure.”

After telling my friend Matt about my score, he raised a judgmental eyebrow (a valid reaction) and asked what I planned to do with it assuming it even worked. The chance of it working, I admitted, seemed very low indeed. When I moved the drive around I could here something inside was loose. The SCSI port was missing a mounting screw, and it looked a mess.

But it’s a SupraDrive! I was stoked.

I had bought another mint-looking SupraDrive earlier this year, and when I turned it on it sounded like a machine gun.

Well check it out , guys. Does this sound like a machine gun? I don’t think so!
Sure, it’s loud by today’s standards (and compared to my other mechanical drives in use) but that’s only because this case isn’t insulated in any way shape or form. I’m tempted to do to it what I did to my optical mouse in 2017.

The next step was to plug it into something and see what happened. I decided to use the DB25 port on the back of my A2000's Zip Drive. I turned off the Zip drive's termination and plugged the SupraDrive's cable into the Zip, not knowing what to expect.

On first boot, my 2000 got confused and locked up trying to boot Workbench. I know this sounds crazy, but this made me feel very optimistic. I never saw the busy light on the SupraDrive flicker - only the solid green power light. No matter I decided to bypass my machine’s startup and booted off a WB floppy.

This time the machine booted into Workbench, and showed me 2 new drives!
IMG_8212.jpg
I couldn’t believe it!

After clicking on them I could see the old software still sitting patiently waiting to be used. I couldn’t actually launch most of the programs inside, but I think that is due to how they were originally installed and not finding the correct assigns in my environment. One partition was for work, the other for games.
IMG_8215.jpg
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Finally I fired up HDInstTools to see what I was dealing with. I assumed it was a 20MB drive, as this thing screams Amiga 1000 (which really makes it ancient). The 500 uses a very specific SCSI cable for a Supra side expansion. It found the drive (of course) and reported back two 50mb partitions. A 100mb drive!?

Do you guys know how much these things cost back in the late 1980s? Back in 1987/88, an 80MB SupraDrive cost around $1,000. That’s well over $2,000 in today’s dollars. For 100MB. Simply incredible. And I got it for $20 (and frankly, it’s probably worth about $100 if I ever put it on Ebay, which I’m not planning to).

I also opened up the case and quickly saw that the HDD busy light had simply become disconnected.
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Since I have a dead spare with a mint case, I’m going to swap the tops.
IMG_8218.jpg
This is the clean, minty looking SupraDrive I got that is dead. It will become an organ donor for this working drive when I swap the top shells.

My plan is to fix the light, swap the outer shell case and then format the drive. I think I’m going to make this a hard drive for my A1000 setup, which currently uses a Zip Drive as its main hard drive. The Zip can then be a secondary drive, since this machine has another DB25 on the back of it, and I can use the Zip to terminate the SCSI.

It's also worth noting that this drive has power and LED HDD busy lights not just on the front, like all SupraDrives do, but also on the back, which is super weird but also very cool as it should light up the wall in interesting ways when in use.

And I can finally assign one of my SupraDrive hard drive icons to a real deal SupraDrive. Hah!

User avatar
Bulletdust

Posted Fri Oct 26, 2018 3:36 pm

You always manage to find the cool stuff Intric8! Here in Australia all the cool stuff is either already owned by enthusiasts or stuffed so deep in someone's garage that it'll never see the light of day again.

...Or the cool stuff is already landfill. :(

Awesome drive, built like a tank!





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