My A500+ Project

[darksun9210]

i've not had problems with ebay. but then i've never sold anything... i've even lost an auction or two and had the seller come to me and say that the top bidder couldn't complete on the purchase and ended up getting it anyway.
however, i have had my paypal account "hacked" and it is now locked out, along with my associated bank details and credit cards. which sucks. paypal have, (barring catching the fraud, for which i commend them whole heartedly), generally sucked bigtime for any help in getting my account back and working.

anyway, i have an A500 with 3.1rom, 40Mhz GVP A530, 8Mb 32bit fast, plus half a meg chipram, and half a meg 'slow' fastram, a 4Gb compact flash acting as a hard drive, a clock port adapter, a subway USB card, and a USB2LAN adapter.

for the best web browsing on an A500, you really need to cover the following bases.
 - as much CPU as you can for image rendering
 - as much chipram as you can for images, you got an A500+ so the 2Meg max isn't as out of reach as for anyone with an older machine ;-)
 - as much fastram as you can for everything else. TCP/IP stack, workbench, web browser, browser page loading, cache etc.
 - hard disk. i suppose you could work from floppies. i used to when i used to hook upto BBS's and the like, but web browsers are a bit bigger, and need space for caching pages and all those aminet downloads ;-).
 - a 3.1rom in there with make life much easier, as your machine will support datatypes and the like for image loading. if you think this detracts from the plus'ness of your A500, just think of it as an OS upgrade, or what OS2x should have been :-)
 - some form of internet connection.

i think someone said that they wern't sure how the amiga would use a USB LAN adapter. well, the USB stack takes care of that and provides a usbpegasus.device (in my case) for a SANA networking driver.
be warned though. i havn't found the subway/USB LAN adapter isn't really a good combo. but maybe its just the pegasus chipset of my adapter, but the subway card seems to poll the CPU's interrupt lines massively when the IP stack is active and using the USB2LAN device, and drains what extra CPU power the accelerater provides leading to a painfully slow "just cos i can" web surfing expirience, and about a 4-5KB/s transfer rate from the LAN.
so i'd really be better off on dialup, or a serial link to a PC sharing it's network connection.

i hoped it would be fixed in the version 4 release of the poseidon USB stack, and to be fair, it is better. but i still wouldn't think it usable. nowhere near as usable as an 030 based A1200 with a cnet card...

'nother thing i've found. i wouldn't really bother with anything higher than OS3.1 on an A500. 3.5 and 3.9 look pretty, but will chew hard on what little resources you have. 3.1 is still perfectly usable on a 7Mhz 68000

the viper530 would be the best solution for accelerating your amiga. you wouldn't need an external hard disk, as it has IDE ports to take both 2.5" laptop drives, and 3.5" desktop drives. the more expensive versions had onboard scsi too. plus it has its memory addessed outside of the Zorro2 range, so it could take upto 128Mb on a single 72pin simm. not to mention it is pretty much the fastest, (bar the PPS 33Mhz 040, with no hard disk controller, and only able to take 8Mb ram).

if you had some other internal accelerator that didn't have a hard disk controller, then yes, you would need an external solution like a GVP, or A590 for your hard disk.

i hope this helps, but this is just my expirience from kinda following the same path as you :-)

[darksun9210]

i bought a GVP HD8+ and SupraTurbo28 (super clocked 68000@28Mhz!) initially, but they are now sitting gathering dust as i found a GVP A530 on ebay about two months after buying them! :lol:

i wish you the best on your hunt for a viper or Derringer! :-)

[darksun9210]

2Gb sounds fine. you'll be able to fit workbench and all the apps you could ever need in about 200-300Mb, and will still have over 1.5Gb left for games and stuff.
Hard disk amigas used to come equiped with 20, 40, or 80Mb drives. maybe even 52 or 105Mb drives if i remember the GVP series correctly. so 2000Mb is a huge amount!   :-)
and the price for both? sounds good. i think i paid 45GBP for mine with 4Mb internal fastram, and a 52Mb drive
but you are getting a chipram boost aswell for an extra 15GBP, which is good  

[darksun9210]

one thing to bear in mind with the GVP, is my PSU made a high pitched "singing" noise and then died after a few weeks. i guess at being nearly 18 years old i can't complain. so you may need to find someone that is good at electronics and can find the fault in the PSU and replace the part, (audio repair shops are a good source of soldering skill). or there are a two sets of jumper pads (one for 5Volts, and one for 12Volts) you can solder together yourself, or have someone solder for you that makes the GVP draw power from the Amiga itself.
The A500's PSU should be more than able to power everything quite happily if you have PSU problems... i had to do this for my A530.

[darksun9210]

the SCSI>IDE adapter and compact flash route is brilliant. after running a howling 1Gb scsi drive to a silent compact flash, makes life so much more pleasant. not to mention the less stress on the A500s power supply...

and WHDLoad... what a genius bit of software. :-D

[darksun9210]

there are the PPS 040 accelerators out there, but i have never ever seen one come up on ebay :-D
trouble is that IIRC they are/were only expandable to 8Mb of ram...

the other option you have is to build some kind of slingshot device that bolts onto the sidecar expansion slot to give you an A2000 style CPU slot. then you can plug in A2000 style accelerators.

bit of a mission is you will probably have scsi cables and drives all over the place, not to mention some sort of uprated power hookup to drive an 040 or 060.

if you really really want to go that route, then i'd look out for an A500 zorro bus board. as these provide not only the CPU slot, but zorro2 slots aswell, for things like graphics, ethernet, and sound cards. then you'll need to put it all into some full height PC tower case.
have a look through the images as there is one guy who has done this already. and got an 060 powered A500.

otherwise, if you want to stick with the A500ness of your current setup, i'd get the derringer card. it'll outgun pretty much anything except top end 030 cards and above, being and order of magnitude faster than the stock 68000,
and be compatable with pretty much everything, and provide you with the most amount of ram, barring an A2000 type accelerator...

 :-)

[darksun9210]

My hard drive will have a PSU all for itself so that means I will have two PSU's, one for A500+ and one for the hard drive. What I am most worried is if the CPU (on the A500+ or the accelerator card) could get burned because of the amount of processing requested by the operating system.

erm. nope, you should be ok. you can stick a heatsink to it if you really want...

Regarding Fast RAM; how much Fast RAM is enough? That is how much Fast RAM will actually make a difference for the processor?

64 kilobytes of fast ram will make a difference to the processor, as it has direct access and doesn't have to fight the custom chips to get to it. hence 'fast' ram. but this amount will be pretty useless to actually run stuff in.
4-8Mb makes a very usuable machine,
16-32Mb and you don't need to worry about running out of memory from running TCP/IP stacks, web browsers, paint packages, music players etc all at once...
64-128+Mb for big lightwave renders and openGL games,

Today's processor have an address space and having more RAM then the address space can support is pretty much useless right? Didn't the A500+ processor work the same way?

yup. the 68000, being a 16bit chip has a maximum of 16Mb of address space. on the A500+, this is (roughly speaking) split into, 2Mb is assigned to chipram, around 1Mb for the operating system rom, 8Mb for zorro2 ram space, around another meg for autoconfig space, and the remaining 4Mb for motherboard resources.
the 68030 being a fully 32bit chip has 4Gb of address space. hence being able to put 256Mb ram on a Blizzard 1230.
the Derringer board, cpu, and memory is fully 32bit, but has to comply with the above memory layout for the A500+. so its onboard memory is outside of the 16Mb upper limit for 16bit range. i think it autoconfigs properly to tell the amiga about this new memory area, but i could be wrong, and you may need to run a utility to tell the amiga this neew memory is there, before the memory is available.

anyway, the two advantages are, that this doesn't clash with the memory already in your GVP, as the GVP ram sits in the 16bit zorro2 ram addres range, AND that you are not limited to the 16bit address range for the Derringer's onboard 32bit ram, so you could (memory controllers permitting) have as much ram as you liked up to the upper 4Gb limit of the 32bit address range.

[darksun9210]

ahaaaaa... that makes sence, just like the range of the EC020 on an A1200...

good stuff, everyday's a school day :-)

[darksun9210]

nope, the viper, being a 68k based accelerator, will only allow you to run OS3.9. so will the derringiner, and the GVP A530...

for OS 4.0 you need an A1200 or A4000 with a PPC cpu accelerator, and for OS 4.1, at the moment it seems you need a PPC based AmigaOne...

[darksun9210]

Mate, get that Derringer board, seriously :-)
they can be upgraded to be equivilent speed as the Viper530 if you really need to, and 32MB of ram will see you through most things you will do with this machine.
you already had a GVP hard disk, so thats good, you'll pretty much have the equivilent kinda machine to the viper right there.

if you don't go for it, at that price, i will! :lol: and i've got a supra turbo28, and a GVP A530!  :crazy:

3.1 is plenty fast enuff on a standard chipram only 7Mhz 68000, and on an accelerated amiga, it rocks.
3.5 and 3.9 require a 68020 and 4Mb ram at the base point, as they load more things into memory and try to be more "advanced" with the way they do things.

i used to run 3.9 on my A530 powered A500, but went back to 3.1, and it feels like another speed increase! :-)

with WHDLoad, i wouldn't worry about incompatabilites between 3.1 and 1.2/1.3, you can have the 1.3 rom as a file on your hard disk that WHDLoad will use for the game if it needs to. for a good WHDLoad machine you ideally want:-
020/030 cpu
1-2MB chipram
2-8MB fastram
harddisk
2.x or higher rom.
that will have pretty much every game you want running from hard disk...
and it should suit basic web browseing too :-)

[darksun9210]

yeah, what he said ;-)

sim085, sounds like you've got a fairly decent amiga setup there now. 2MB chip, 4MB fast, hard disk, yadda yadda yadda, i think it'll be a fun machine to play around with. maybe even get some WHDLoad goodness out of it :-)

enjoy! :-D

[darksun9210]

the GVP was designed to use an external powersupply and all it probably drives is the hard disk itself. probably isolated from the A500's supply so that it doesn't cause floating earths, fluctuating voltages all all the other scare stories people have been saying on here. :lol:

basic rule of thumb.
turn on all extrnal devices first, then the amiga.
to turn off, switch off the amiga, then all external devices.

the switch on top of the GVP unit you have, is a disable  switch. some really old floppy games don't like the presence of extra fast memory, or a hard disk. so flick the switch, reboot, and the hard disk and memory isn't visable to the amiga anymore. switch it back, reboot, and you should be back to hard disk nivarna.

to be honest, it'll probably be one of the least used switches you'll ever own ;-)

[darksun9210]

yup, the clockport adapter plugs into the CPU socket on the mainboard.
the accelerator would plug into the CPU socket on the clockport adapter, and the old 68000 chip would plug into the 68k socket on the accelerator if you need it for backwards compatability.

however, you may find that stack of hardware means your keyboard doesn't fit right anymore ;-)

plugging a subway into the clockport adapter will give you USB on your A500 for keyboards, mice, usb memory sticks, CD drives, hard disks, etc. etc. and even USB>Ethernet adapters.

although, i don't know of any drivers for USB>Wifi adapters for the amiga, and there is something up with the hard/software of the subway and USB drivers for USB>LAN adapters (using the pegasus2 chipset - in my experience) that causes massive amounts of CPU interepts.
this results in slow screen redraws, jerky mouse movement, and transfer rates no better than a direct serial to serial connection. or even parallel to parallel using the old 68000 gives you 20KB/s...

it might be something up with my hardware config, but to be honest, since i can't figure it out, i've given up with my a500... :-(

[darksun9210]

sorry for the off topic, but just ordered a Dlink dub-e100.

many thanks for the heads up Lockon_15! :-)

[darksun9210]

kick arse. thats got to be a rev 8 to have 2meg chip ram on board?