A570/A690

The A570 CD-Rom for the Amiga 500.

The A570 was launched in 1992, It added a single speed CD-Rom to the Amiga 500 and 500+ computers. The card also has a single Prom which holds the same information as in the CDTVs Proms which is loaded on power up, The program gives the A500 standard CDTV screens including a CD player and screen saver.
The A570 connects to the side expansion port on the A500 and is powered by its own power supply, The Power supply is a standard Amiga 500 version. The CD-Rom will only turn on if the A500 is and the A500 will only turn on if the CD-Rom is turned on.
On the back of it are 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).

On the front panel is the Audio control nob (Under the CD-Rom to the left), This adjusts the volume to the headphones if connected, They do 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. On the left of the volume control is the headphone socket, This is designed for the large connector, Partly because thats what was used on hifi`s of the times, Partly because you can get an adapter to make it smaller but an adapter to make it bigger is hard to find.
Under the CD-Rom to the right is a vent (The lines running from center to the right), Recest in one of those lines is the power light (Which is green) and a drive read light (Which is Orange), these lights where kindly named Ted and Wilma after the film & TV show "The Flintsones"
Note: If the A500 is turned off when the CD-Rom is powered up the power light will remain off.
The A570 does not give you 100 % CDTV compatability, This is for a number of reasons but at the end of the day its just because it is an add on, For example the CDTV has a memory card slot which the A570 does not have so if a program accesses it the program would fail.
The A570 when new sold for Ł299 (Dec 1993) but then dropped as the CD32 replaced the CDTV and hit a low of Ł99 for a new unit with 3 CDTV titles. The price hasnt droped much lower as A570 still sell for up to Ł50 for a good example.
The A570 is very simple to install, No software needs to be installed and the manual isnt needed (Well I didnt need it), There are programs on public domain sites for free that let you play audio CD`s from Workbench on both CDTV`s and the A570.

The A570 also has a rear expansion port, it was added for the same reason as on the CDTV, to expand the CD-Rom interface into a full SCSI compliant card, This is ideal for adding a harddrive to the CDTV as the A570 does not have a pass-through.
A few cards were designed for this slot and can be seen in the "upgrading" section of this site.

The A570 also has an internal connector for adding extra memory, up to 2 Meg of fast ram can be added to the A570 which can be used by most Amiga programs and free's up valuble Chip ram for high resolution or colour screens and the smoother playing of CDXL clips.
Again for more information on the memory cards available for the A570 visit the upgrading section of this site.

The A690 prototype.

First a bit of background information, Commodore numbered all of its Amiga upgrades in a layed out patter, first the Amiga it was designed for (IE Amiga 500 = A5**, Amiga 2000 = A20**) and then a number reflecting what the card was (IE: SCSI card = **90, memory card = **5* (last * = memory (58 = 8meg) , etc), this made cards like the A2090 (Amiga 2000 SCSI card), A590 (Amiga 500 SCSI card), A4090 (Amiga 4000 SCSI card), etc.
But there was a mistake, the CD-Rom upgrade for the Amiga 500 was given the number A690 (Amiga 600 SCSI card) which is wrong, So how did it get that number? who knows.

When development started on the A570 the Amiga 600 was not known to be in development (At least not by the people designing the A690) so the A570 was giving the name A690, After the Amiga 600 was announced this name had to be changed but by this time a few A690's were made and even offered to C.A.T.S. members as well as exibited at Commodore shows.

The A690 was still in late development when the name change occured so not much is different with the PCB or casing, the main difference is the addition of a battery which is belived to power the reprogrammable ROM which holds the A690's software (CD-Rom driver, auto config code, CDTV like screens), it could either be needed for when the chip is being reprogrammed or for when the A690 is turned off. (To store the information) Also on the above prototype the memory card slot (CN2) does not have the 40 pin DIL connector fitted but apart from that appears to be identical to the A570.

Two of these drives have appeard on an online auction site recently (Feb 2003) but both do not appear to work. (Data lost from ROM?)