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Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga Hardware News => Topic started by: Roj on May 24, 2010, 06:22:11 PM
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New GVP Products now available
Software Hut has teamed up with GVP to deliver new 060 boards for the
A4000 and A2000 computers. These accelerators are new with scsi and
take standard 72 pin ram modules.
Software Hut now also has new 4mb and 16mb custom GVP proprietary
simms in stock.
Also available is the 030 Typhoon Boards for all A1200 models both
with scsi interface and without which take a normal 72 pin simm.
Finally a new batch of Spectrum Graphichic boards has arrived. These
are zorro 2 and zorro 3 compatible graphic boards.
For details please visit Software Hut (http://www.softhut.com) and click on the GVP logo
If the interest is still high we hope to continue to partner with GVP
to provide new products for the classic Amiga Computers in the future.
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Wow, that is pretty cool, well done SoftHut & GVP!
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I bought one of the Amiga 1200 Typhoon boards a while back and I am one satisfied customer! Thank you very much Softhut!
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It is nice to see SoftHut showing some life.
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Really and truly shipping? Or is this another round of fishing for pre-orders?
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Really and truly shipping? Or is this another round of fishing for pre-orders?
I can vouch for the Spectrums. There's one sitting in my A3000 as we speak.
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Wasn't there something about these boards using overclocking? I think somebody had a 68030@16 which they sold on a 40MHz board or something crazy like that.
Are these boards definitely using the right components running within spec?
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I think not. The only one that does it was Apollo.
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Hey guys. Got a question about the Spectrum if you know.
Matt says that he's limited to EGS because he's only got ks2.1 in his 3000. I have ks3.1 and wb3.9 in my 3000, so that would mean I can use P96 drivers, right? Plus is there any performance improvement with P96 over EGS?
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Yes you can. No numbers to show but P96 is much newer and faster.
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Wasn't there something about these boards using overclocking? I think somebody had a 68030@16 which they sold on a 40MHz board or something crazy like that.
Yup.
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=48875
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I know at some time there was talk of putting a fast G3 or G4 into one of these accelerator boards - instead of just the PPC 603 or what. Did anything ever come of those efforts? With all the faster PPC (1Ghz + ) chips around now, would it be possible to make such a thing? It would really bring an A1200 along.
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I know at some time there was talk of putting a fast G3 or G4 into one of these accelerator boards - instead of just the PPC 603 or what. Did anything ever come of those efforts? With all the faster PPC (1Ghz + ) chips around now, would it be possible to make such a thing? It would really bring an A1200 along.
Sure it would be possible. Elbox's "Shark PPC" would have added this to the Mediator using a re-badged Sonnet Cresendo 7200 PCI with G3 or G4. But you can no longer purchase those (I tried, from their webstore, but when you try to "check out" your shopping card, you get an error). I even called Sonnet and talked to a sales guy about availability, since the website said they were available, but then at checkout they aren't.
He never ended up getting back to me.
It's possible to put a faster PPC chip on the Blizzard PPC or Cyberstorm PPC (some have done it, and I have such a 366Mhz cyberstorm PPC board). But it's difficult to get them working reliably - you have to get very good RAM. It's hard to find reliable fast SIMMS nowadays. Most of the sticks I have tried (over 20 32MB 72-pin simms) lock up after awhile. The memory interface on the cyberstorm PPC is lame. It's fixed at 60/70 ns and can't really take the higher speeds very well without VERY GOOD ram and proper/extra cooling.
A new amiga-specific development would have to be done to create a new PPC accelerator for the A1200/A4000. To date no one has been willing to take on this project. Probably because the market for such an upgrade is small (probably less than 500 units) and the cost of developing such a board would be very high. It would be very doubtful the investment would be re-couped.
Even some people had contacted DCE a few years ago about re-starting Cyberstorm PPC/Blizzard PPC production, but some of the parts are no longer available and it's not ROHS compliant, so it would need to be re-designed. Not to mention DCE washed their hands of all Amiga stuff (there was a rumour they threw all their Amiga stuff in the garbage....).
Even if you had such a board you would need programmers to write support for it.
I'm the first person who would want such a board but unless we are able to come up with probably a couple hundred thousand dollars it's not going to happen :(
There are a couple of companies that could possibly develop this, though.
AmigaKit could sponsor development. E3B or Individual computers could potentially design it. But it would require significant investment.
AmigaKit has come through with the ZorRAM board, which has been nice. I hope their sales are OK so perhaps we can have future developments sponsored by them in the future.
E3B has released their excellent Deneb hardware. Not sure what else they have planned. By the way, they also designed the ZorRAM board in conjunction with Individual Computers for AmigaKit.
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How come no one is whining that this is a new GVP and not the original?
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How come no one is whining that this is a new GVP and not the original?
Why would I whine? My new GVP Spectrum is totally fine, working perfectly.
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I think it is seriously cool the two companies are brave enough to produce some new hardware for Classic Amiga :)
Hopefully plenty will be sold - I would certainly buy one for my A600, if one were produced.