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Do you remember a few years ago when Commodore brought out the
A570 CD-ROM drive for the A500?  Yes, it was a great device, but there
was however one flaw to the drive.  It only worked on A500's with 
1Mb oh chip RAM and Kick 1.3 and up.  What about users with
Workbench 1.1/1.2?  

Well we have done a bit of work.  The A570 will not work under 1.2 <--
because it needs to autoboot patch in 1.3.  Well we have tried to
use the 570 on our 500 with 1.2 and 512K CHIP 1.5Mb FAST.  When we first
plugged it in we found that the screen would flash black and grey
over and over.  We decided to have a go at getting it to work.  So we ripped
open the 570 and after a few hours of testing and comparing the 
1.2 and 1.3 versions of the A500 circuit board, we noticed that rev 3 upwards
had a blue capacitor near the right side of the board and the Rev 2
and 1 didn't have this, even though there was space for one and tracks
underneath.  We have come to the conclusion that this capacitor does not
do anything, so soldered one into the 1.2 Amiga's board, and tried again.
Hey!  The Amiga booted up, with the standard 1.2 Boot screen, a hand holding
a disk with the numbers 1.2 under it.  So we inserted a CD called
Almathera CDPD, which we borrowed from Daniel Wood , the editor of Page.
Nothing happened, so we inserted the Workbench disk and the Amiga booted
and Workbench came on AND THE CD WAS ACCESSABLE.  Commodore decided that
they didn't want A500 owners with Workbench 1.2 or lower to use the drive
so that they would then go out and spend money upgrading to use it
when they could have used it in the first place!  Phew!  Commodore 
decided to use the one thing that is not in the old board and they
did all of that to disallow some users access.  The bad thing
is that most CDTV titles need to Autoboot, and they nearly always need
1MB of chip, but if you are just using CDs like hard drives, that
is CDs like CDPD, that just are utilitiy collections then it is
fine.

George and Graham Peterson