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The Amiga 500, also known as the A500, was the first popular version of the Amiga home computer, "redefining the home computer market and making so-called luxury features such as multitasking and colour a standard long before Microsoft or Apple sold these to the masses."
Hard-drive equipped versions were labeled "A2500HD" Amiga 1500: 1990–1991 68000 1 MB 1.3 3.9 / 3.2 UK only, variant of A2000 with two floppy drives and no HDD. This version originated with CBM UK Marketing who found it necessary to distinguish the floppy-only version from the A2000 with the general public. Amiga CDTV: 1991–1992 68000 1 MB 1.3
As the majority floppy-disks shipped by software-companies or as magazine-coverdisks still used this DOS type (which would boot on pre-2.x machines like the Amiga 500), this enabled users with existing OFS-formatted drives, that all older OFS-based disks could still be read afterwards, once they had installed FFS to the RDB of their start-disk.
The Amiga's floppy disk drive allowed 880 kilobytes on a single disk, comparable to the RAM of most Amigas (512 kilobytes to 1 megabyte). To increase capacity, Amiga used data compression. The disk drive had a slow transfer rate, such that using processor-based decompression could actually reduce loading times versus loading uncompressed data.
Mac 800 KB (requires a Mac drive) AMAX Mac emulator (a special floppy of only 200 KB to exchange data between Amiga and Macintosh could be formatted by the Amiga, and it could be read and written by floppy drives of both systems) Commodore 1541 (requires 5¼-inch drive slowed to 280 rpm) Commodore 1581 formatted 3 + 1 ⁄ 2-floppy for C64 and C128
It makes hard drive, 4x floppy disk and write support possible. [10] The FPGA core is the same for the new ARM and PIC firmware but only the ARM has enough resources to support four drives. The PIC only supports two. The upgrade also allows an increase of the CPU speed from 7.09 to 49.63 MHz with a 4 KB zero wait state CPU cache.
The Bridgeboard card and the Janus library made the use of PC expansion cards and harddisk/floppydisk drives possible. Later third party cards also appeared for the Amiga 500 and Amiga 600 expansion slot such as the KCS Powerboard, and Vortex released full-length cards for the Amiga 2000+ based on the 80386 and 80486 CPUs called the Golden Gate.
On the Amiga, the Old File System was the filesystem for AmigaOS before the Amiga Fast File System. Even though it used 512-byte blocks, it reserved the first small portion of each block for metadata, leaving an actual data block capacity of 488 bytes per block. It wasn't very suitable for anything except floppy disks, and it was soon replaced.