I don't really know what you should do about your hard drive controller. I am not an expert on A1200 hard drive solutions. I just know that my friends with other controllers (mostly SCSI) can load stuff WAY faster than me because in Team Chaos we sometimes do timing tests and we race our machines against each other for fun. We even race against WinUAE on 3000Mhz multicore pc. hahaha. Its hilarious.
Anyway maybe some hardware guy can tell you if you should use FastATA controller or SCSI controller. I assume SCSI controller is waaay faster because it uses DMA. But its going to be hard for you to find a big SCSI drive, I think. I donno. You need advice from ppl who know more than me.
A lot of ppl know about hard drive controllers such as som99, Thomas, Rogerio and many others.
Right now my Amiga is not operable. I am about to embark on a major overhaul of my Amiga, both my real one and my virtual one. Once that is done (probably will take me a few weeks since I have no idea what I am doing, I am a software guy not a hardware guy) then I can resume producing Total Chaos AGA, Worlds Best Strategy Game(tm) yah000!!!!
You can send me an email to the address in the Aminet readme.
I coded Total Chaos to do very good full screen animations in 640x512 on an 040. Its even faster framerate on 060 but 040 is pretty good and I am very happy that u r feeding your Amiga some 040 love
040 has dual 4K L1 caches, which is real nice, but 4K only can hold 3 tiles inside at once and many times the game gfx will have more than 3 layers. This is why 060, with dual 8K caches r0x AGA hard. 8k holds 7 tiles so I can mix 7 layers real fast!
Which 040 card are you getting? How much RAM?