Commodore Amiga 2500/RPi – Retro & Gaming

The big-box Amiga’s have a special place in my retro memory. My first and only Amiga I’ve owned during the production era is the Amiga 2000A. This machine changed my usage of a computer. While my first love was the Commodore 64 on which I programmed and played game the Amiga 2000 took it to a higher level with video editing. The 2500 and 3000 had a place in my computer history. Sadly for Commodore it was looking around, not buying an Amiga and decide to move to an IBM Clone PC with an AMD 80386-DX 40 Mhz. The Amiga at that time didn’t offer network solutions and the bridge boards were old tech. The harddrive solutions offered by Commodore were expensive and not following industry standards. Not marginal more expensive but think like factor 2-3x more expensive for inferior harddrive capacities. I saw network growing faster and faster and decided not to buy the A2500 with an 68020. The Amiga 3000 was announced somewhat later and I saw only the 68030 but the PC was gaining professionally more and more market share. Oh boy what was the Amiga 3000 a pretty machine, I mean… is a pretty machine. Despite this I knew video editing was not a future for me. The future was networking for me so I took the road of IBM PC computing.

So why a 2500 in the collection? First it’s a big box Amiga. Second it’s having a 68020 which my other Amiga not have.

This is how I got the Amiga 2500:

The Amiga 2500 had no Picasso on board but it had an A2060 network card, MicroBotics 8-UP, Commodore A2090 SCSI Controller and the Commodore A2620 Accelerator Board. The two last mentioned cards I decided to be installed.

My cleaned Amiga 2500 with diskdrive panel

The A2090 was initially in the Amiga 2500 but later were replaced with the more stable A2091 and even GVP SCSI controllers. This particular A2090 has MacroSystem ROM installed with bugfixes installed and being able to handle bigger sized harddrives.