Submitted by Our customers have regularly been asking for replacement Workbench floppy disk sets since their older disks have either become corrupted or worn out due to age. About a year ago, we approached our friends at Cloanto to enquire about a possible solution. As a result, we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of new Workbench 3.1 Floppy Disk Set.
This isn’t just a really old operating system generating enough demand to be sold, but it’s also on floppy. So awesome.
I still use Workbench 3.1 almost every day. I will have to order a set of these to support it I think.
You can also purchase it on a ready to use CF card which you can use with an adapter in any Amiga with IDE
Forget CF cards, they don’t make very good hard drives. Stick with a old mechanical drive, much more reliable. Plus with the latest scsi.device patches and the PFS3 AIO filesystem, you can use as big a drive as you have, even SATA one’s with a IDE to SATA adapter.
Darn that old Amiga is resilient.
Really wonder if i should get that old A500 out of storage and see how much i can add to it today.
There is many add-ons and expansions for the A500 now. The latest is the ACA 500 accelerator from Individual Computers, this gives you a accelerator, RAM expansion and CF hard drive in one, it also makes it possible to use some A1200 accelerators with it. Personally though, I would look for a GVP A530 sidecar expansion, that would give you a 68030 CPU, RAM expansion, SCSI hard drive and a external SCSI connector. They do come up for sale on Amibay from time to time. The ACA 500 is the cheaper option though and available now.
Wow, I didn’t know the ACA 500 was finally available. I just wish it came with more than 2MB of ram. I already have an accelerator that supports 8MB.
Yeah, that’s the downside, only 2mb, not even enough for most WHDLoad software unless you turn off preload. The plus side is the A1200 accelerator option if you already have one. The new Individual Computers accelerators are supported, but some unsupported ones work fine too like the Blizzard 1230 IV, just plug and go.
Another downside, after looking a bit more, is that it apparently has problems with (some?) NTSC Amigas.
Yes, timing issues I believe. Most just work, but there is reports of some NTSC machines failing to boot with it.
Ages ago I bought an Amiga 500 from eBay that didn’t come with disks and I never got around to fixing that problem. Hmmm…
Time to dig it out and bring it back to life then?
I’m strongly considering it, though I have no extra hardware for it and I’m not sure what I’d use it for. I’m pretty sure my multitude of Raspberry Pi computers each have more processing power than the Amiga 500. :p
Yes your right, I have a couple of PI’s too. They’re not as much fun though.
You would be very limited with an unexpanded A500 though, only floppy based games and software, unless you got the “bug” and expanded it with a hard drive and such.
The Amiga 500 most likely came with a 1.3 ROM, the 3.1 Workbench disks would be unlikely to boot it
You might have more luck if you own an A500+ which would have come with a 2.x ROM 🙂
Thanks for the heads up. I honestly don’t remember exactly what it is except that it was Amiga 500 of some sort. I’ll have to double check before I buy. Again, thanks for the warning.
It may already have a 3.1 ROM fitted, many people upgraded them years ago, it will tell you on the kickstart screen after switch on what ROM version it is.
If it is still a earlier version ROM in it, you can purchase a 3.1 kickstart ROM from Amigakit, the same place as the disks, it is not hard at all to swap.
That’s cool that people still use AmigaOS. I never had a chance to.
Good design die hard 😉