Vortex ATonce Plus

nilseuropa · Apr 3rd 2022

I picked up an ATonce Plus yesterday ( along with some trapdoor RAM )

https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=347

Thankfully the disk images are still available at http://amiga.resource.cx/expde/atonceplus .

Today I've popped it into my trusty A500+

Since I don't have a hard drive, I just started the emulation environment as it is.

ATonce BIOS reports 640k base memory, access to Mouse, Serial, Parallel port and VGA video.

Volkov commander ( sorry, my studio is too bright )

Space commanders

It is awfully slow, a lot slower than my PPC512. I don't think it would make much difference if the utilities were installed on a hard drive.

Nonetheless it's a nice working piece of obscurity.

According to the manual, it should support external disk drives, but it just doesn't

ThoralfAsmussen · Apr 3rd 2022

Eventually there is a configuration file, somewehre - to switch on the second drive option ?

**Toshi** · Apr 3rd 2022

I am relatively sure you can use ext floppy drives. I have the smaller brother (Atonce classic) which can use for example 5.25 Floppy drives as XT360kb format.

You have selected VGA emulation which is very slow.

When you switch to "MDA" you can significantly improve speed.

During school I uses the Amiga 500 with the Atonce classic to run Qbasic and "Turbo Pascal 5.0".

Which was ok in Mono mode with 2 disk drives.

Edit: http://amiga.resource.cx/adcoll/adcoll.pl?id=atonceplus&pg=3 here you can find an old advert where the use of external floppy drives is highlighted.

nilseuropa · Apr 3rd 2022

Quote from ThoralfAsmussen

Eventually there is a configuration file, somewehre - to switch on the second drive option ?

Might be. Couldn't find it though.

**Toshi** · Apr 3rd 2022

nilseuropa There is no config file you need to edit manually. There is a configuration program somewhere on the disks where you can edit the memory use for the system (the Amiga is still running in multitasking in the background when the emulation was started, the mapping of the drives (e.g. df1:=a:) and the video emulation.

You should try to go the the CLI and locate the file "INSTALL" on the Atonce Amiga boot diskette which is an executable file.