You know what they used to say– once you go Commodore, you’ll never leave by any door. Well, they might not have said that, but given the prevalence of projects still using Commodore-branded systems decades after the company’s demise, perhaps someone should have. A case in point is [Jit06] with this writeup on his Ultimate Amiga 1200 — or “Amiga 1232 Storm CD”– which crams just about every upgrade you might think of into the 1990s wedge computer.

Of course it has the PiStorm 32, with a CM4 providing supercomputer performance, at least by A1200 standards. That’s rather old hat, though, and it’s everything else crammed into the old Commodore that takes the score. For one thing, there’s a slot-loading, slim-form DVD drive from an old laptop that’s been incorporated so smoothly it almost looks factory. Ditto for the compact flash card slot, which is also on the IDE bus. The two share a custom IDE cable– yes, kids, we did used to roll our on 44-pin cables back in the day, but you’d better believe no one did it unless they really had to. With the space constraints inside the A1200 case, [Jit06] falls into that category.

The optical and CF cards trigger the drive LED on the Amiga case by default, but [Jit] wanted to see access on the PiStorm’s SD card as well, so he wired a couple of red LEDs to the default lightguide to get a colour-contrasting flash. That SD card is also broken out with an extender for easy access without opening the case– and once again, it looks almost as good as stock. So does the modded-on VGA port, which is stealing space that once belonged to the Amiga’s RF modulator and fed by a ScanPlus AGA board.

The only thing that really stands out as modded is the volume knob on the floppy-drive side of the case; that controls a mixer that sits between the CD audio and Paula, the Amiga’s custom sound chip. This lets him use the A1200 as a CD-32 system, and is very handy to have as CD-32 games used CD audio tracks that apparently were not well mixed with the digital audio in the games.

With all the cutting and soldering, this is not a reversible mod, something people are becoming much more concerned with as these machines slowly increase in rarity. Still, as a quality-of-life improvement, this sort of upgrade might be worth it if can keep the old A1200 relevant for another three decades. For anyone else who never got over the Amiga bug, he’s also published a linux-native SD-card creator called emu68 bootstrap on github to help with making images for the PiStorm.

Thanks to [Jit] for the tip! With the easy OS-swapping he’s enabled with the SD-breakout, there’s no reason not to try the rediscovered Amiga Unix. If you want the same without cutting into a vintage case, the PiStorm can be a sidecar.