ACA500 test / review

[Photon]

My small part of the development and the weeks of testing the ACA500 is done, so I decided to write an article that should answer most questions about this A500 expansion for those planning to buy it soon.

I think it's relatively complete, but If I get questions about something I haven't covered I will try to collect them in a follow-up post. I suddenly have some spare time on my hands but just so you know you may have to wait a little to see it answered. You can subscribe to Scoopex news by using the RSS button if you want an alert when I/we post.

Photon/Scoopex

[Photon]

Yes, I brought up the lack of a case early on. Of course, ANY manufacturer will have to see some numbers in units shipped before venturing into this, it's very expensive to mould a case for as long as the numbers are small.

Most of you probably already know of the coming competing products I guess, kipper2k's IDE+RAM and Zeus68k. They all aim to do the same thing for A500 (how cool are these last months!?? with individual differences.

These two are internal, so of course need no case. Perhaps a mirrored Zorro adapter could (barely) fit inside the side expansion flap to make the ACA500 the same?

Then of course internal ones require you to open the case to transfer files... So at least it's dead easy and quick to get your CF cards setup and transfer files with the ACA500 as it is.

The Zeus68k needs an extra CF (or SD) adapter but via a flatcable it could reach the expansion flap on the underside, which makes easier to access at least.

Kipper2k's IDE+RAM IIRC has an extra extender board for CF that you can get, if you want to cut out a hole in the case where CF sticks out.

So there are some options. Which is :afro:

(Edit: Question: Heh. What's up with the auto-added links to misguided places in this and the original post? ...I still seem to be logged in...?)

[Photon]

Thanks for the report.
However I do have some problems with that webpage http://scoopex1988.org/the-scoop-examining-the-aca500.html on my win7 laptop here. Opera and Chrome shows the page a bit different.
Opera shows the last line "magnificent language of them all: Swedish "
But only shows the upper half of the characters.
Chrome doesnt display that at all, and the last visible line is "your ACA500 with only a floppy disk. Boot the disk and it's restored! (Very neat, in my opinion) "

And one other thing I noticed:  "CF speed: A slow Lexar card gave me 1450MB/s in Sysinfo, while the cream of the crop, Sandisk Extreme III and IV can reach just over or around 2000KB/s."
I guess that should be 1450KB/s there?

Eheh, yes I noticed that before and corrected it.

Scroll the article by putting your mouse pointer over the text and using the scroll wheel, or pulling the scroll bar. Let me know if that didn't work.

Updated the article with some clips of performance and usage (mostly  ClassicWB and WHDload). Sorry for the poor quality, my phone camera  autofocus didn't like the reflections in the CRT glass, I guess.

[Photon]

Uploaded a clip that shows the Preload feature working in Workbench on the ACA500 and gives some detail about this feature.