A570

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The A570 was a single-speed external CD-ROM drive for the Amiga 500 computer launched by Commodore in 1993. It was designed to be compatible with Amiga CDTV software as well as being able to read ordinary ISO 9660 CD-ROM discs.

The original designation was A690, and pre-production devices under this name were delivered to developers. The A690/A570 used a proprietary Mitsumi CD-ROM interface. It contained a header for an internal 2Mb fast memory expansion, but this proprietary memory module was never put into production and only a few rare developer examples of this exist today.

Unfortunately the A570 was not successful due to the desire for people to upgrade to the A1200, which was launched just a few months after the A570. The A570 was incompatible with the A1200, and Commodore never released an A1200-compatible CD-ROM device.

It is also notable that by the time of the A570's launch, the A500 computer had already been discontinued. The A600 (ostensibly the A500's direct replacement) was, like the later A1200, incompatible with the drive. Thus, Commodore were in the position of having launched a CD-ROM drive for a discontinued machine, whilst a similar device was unavailable for their current low-end Amiga.

In addition to this, the device (like the A590 hard disk that was sold by Commodore for the A500) had no through connector, so it was not possible to connect both an A590 and an A570 to the computer at the same time. The A590 Hard Drive, despite having an XT IDE hard disk internally carried an external SCSI interface that allowed third-party CD-ROM drives to be fitted. While these drives did not carry CDTV emulation, the lack of success of this format did not restrict this option.

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