Most powerful PPC that can be put in an A1200?

[ChaosLord]

No new PPC card has been made for Amiga since a century ago.  The ones that were made are few in number and many of them broke down.

They were quite tremendously expensive.

In any event they never really integrated into a classic Amiga very well.
They only run certain special software.

But its your money.  If you wanna buy one then go ahead

[ChaosLord]

If you want a PPC Amiga and want to spend a lot of money you could get an X1000 ppc Amiga.

If you want a PPC Amiga and want to spend little money then you can get 2 or 3 MorphOS machines for the price of a PPC accelerator.

If you want the A1200 experience as many of us do then you should get the ultimate classic Amiga accelerator: 68060

There are 2 varieties of 68060 accelerator: Blizzard and Apollo.

They both came out as 50Mhz and 32MB to start with.

Apollos are limited to an absolute maximum of 64MB of RAM.  But they can be easily modded to be 80Mhz or even 90 or 100Mhz

Blizzards can easily take 128MB of RAM and if u add on the SCSI expander you can get another 128MB.  But I never met anyone with an 80Mhz Blizzard that I can remember.  They are all 50Mhz.

50Mhz on an 060 is awesome and not to be taken lightly.  But since you seem to be into hardcore modding and spending money, I am just letting u know the options.

An 060 card runs the way an Amiga expects a card to run so it integrates beautifully.

[ChaosLord]

I'm in the process of trying to win an A1200 and I'm collecting as much info on what can actually be done as improvements.

What I recommend for improvements are:
A mouse adapter to use a brand new PS/2 laser mouse.

A keyboard adapter to use a brand new PS/2 keyboard if you get an A1200T or if you are going to put your A1200 into a tower.

Deck that baby out with a 2TB hard drive.  Or get a smaller SSD or something.  2TB is the absolute limit you can use in a single drive with AmigaOS.  Your limit may be less depending on which hard drive controller is in your A1200.  If you don't like whatever limit you have then you can buy a new HD controller, if you wanted.

A FlickerFixer.  This is awesome for me.  I donno if you would care or not.

Mediator PCI board:  All the kewl Amigans have this :razz:  This adds PCI slots to your A1200.  The board costs something like 300$ but once you have it then you get to plug in cheap PCI cards.  In mine I have a FREE Ethernet card + voodoo 1280x1024 gfx card + I am about to buy a PCI 256MB gfx card.  I use the Ethernet to network my A1200 over to its slave core i5 box.

CD Drive: Not much point but u can add one.

Four Player Adapter: This adds 2 additional joystick ports.  Cheap and works great.  Only useful if you are having Amiga parties.


I personally use my Mediator PCI slots, keyboard adapter, Lasermouse adapter, FlickerFixer and 68060 constantly and could not live without them.
My A1200 is in an Elbox Power Tower.

I also have a PS/2 KVM switch so I can share 1 19" CRT monitor + 1 mouse + 1 keyboard between my windoze box and my Amiga A1200T.  It just saves space and clutter.

[ChaosLord]

Those of you contemplating PPC+060 card for perfect heaven should be aware that the way they implemented the 060 part of the card sux and it has very slow access to memory.  I can't remember ottomh if it was only slow at chipram or both chipram and fastram but there was something really NOT optimzed about their bus interface.

Everyone's plain 040 and plain 060 beat them in timing tests because the PPC+060card memory bandwidth was only half what it should have been.

Just giving u full disclosure.

I only write 040/060 gamez so I never timed the PPC memory bandwidth.   I just assume it was fast.

[ChaosLord]

If you ran a properly configured 3.1 with all the flashupdates, memory speed tweaks, rom imaging, etc, and you had decent patches for software to use the PPC, it was a nice system in 1999.  If I still had mine I wouldn't use it to run 3.5 and onward.

Bah humbug!

I cruised the internet burning up the IRC chats and the www on my 50Mhz 060 Amiga until sometime in 2003.  My Amiga was only about half the speed of my Brother's 650Mhz Athlon Unreal Tournament Gaming Rig at rendering webpages and about 1/4 speed at rendering large .jpg images.  It was hilarious.

[ChaosLord]

... RTG is nice to have of course but you can still get a pretty decent WB display happening with just an Indivision AGA and for games and most of the legacy applications AGA (68k) is all you need.

True.

I have RTG in my A1200/060.  I don't have PPC but I have Mediator PCI slots + a 32-bit gfx card.  99% of the time my RTG is disabled and I just run my AGA with my flickerfixer (I have the super awesome 24-bit flickerfixer from the 1990s way before Indivision).

RTG is indespensable for Web browsing, DTP, etc.  But for oldskool gaming it causes incompatibilities.

[ChaosLord]

Quick question:
Is there any benefit to an Apollo over a Blizzard?

There are some small benefits to having either one.

Maximum RAM goes to Blizzard and is big benefit.

Maximum chipram access speed goes to Apollo.

Blizzard has some special utils for it written by Piru the Megacoder.
But that probably won't matter to u.

Maximum Mhz goes to Apollo.  They can do 100Mhz or 105Mhz.

Either one can load your kickstart ROM into highspeed 32-bit FASTram.

I think, not sure, that u can soft disable the Blizzard 060 but still use the RAM for your 020.  Hafta ask someone who has one or has read the docs.  I haven't read about it for over 10 years.

I think, not sure, that when u soft disable Apollo 060 the cpu and RAM disappear from the system.

The thing is I have had my 060 card and I never once disabled it or wanted to.  I luvz my 060 card. :knuddel:

I've been offered an Apollo 1240 with one SIMM slot. Would it be hard to upgrade it to a 060 CPU and a second RAM slot?

Do u mean hard for u?
Or hard for Cosmos?

I donno what level of Hardware Wizard u r.

Personally I would just pay Cosmos to do it since he has done it a zillion times and knows what's what.

How much do Blizzard 1260s usually go for these days?

I donno but $500.00 last I checked.  But that was a long long time ago.
They are worth every penny.

I'd very much like to upgrade my Amiga 1200 to an 80 MHz 68060 (AFAIK, something that works with both brands, Apollo and Blizzard) but am a bit concerned that an Apollo might not be as good as a Blizzard due to having much less RAM.

You don't actually get to choose what accelarator you get when it comes to 060.  u grab it and run before someone else buys it.

They have not made new ones since 1990s.  So u only can get one when someone dies or goes insane and sells theirs.  Or when u manufacture one out of an old 040 card with the help of Cosmos Industrial Enterprises International Inc.


If u chant "Cosmos" 3 times in a row, then cross ur arms and blink your eyes (like I Dream of Jeannie) then click your heels 3 times and offer him a virgin houri then Cosmos the Mighty will magically appear and tell u how much he charges to upgrade an Apollo040 to an Apollo060 and add the 2nd SIMM slot with memory that actually works.  (both SIMMS must match).

Then u can have an 80Mhz or more 060 card with 64MB and be kewl :cool:
like the rest of us

If the Apollo 040 is cheap then I will buy it and hire cosmos to upgrade the hell out of it and give it to a friend of mine who can make use of it.

[ChaosLord]

Apollo's are cheaper which is the main benefit....

+1

you can also clock them higher (usually, not always true).

+1


 

Another thing to consider is that (I believe) Blizzards are 'buffered' across the Zorro bus when (in theory) means that they do not access CHIPRAM as fast as Apollo cards.   This may have been changed/improved with the latest official 060 libraries but I'm not sure.

All I know is Team Chaos used to conduct a lot of timing tests on a lot of different hardware and the Apollo 040 always had the fastest chipram access.  It was always with 3% of the theoretical maximum.  The Apollo 040 was even faster than the Apollo 060 at writing to chipmem which doesn't even make sense.  But that's how it is.

Basically every accelerator made always has different weird inefficienies when accessing memory.

The main downside with the Apollos is the lack of memory, only 32mb can be used if you still want to use your desktop case.   While 32mb is fine for most things, things like web browsing are obviously going to need more.

Yeah it does suck that its absolute maximum is 64MB.  But oh well... most ppl are happy with 64MB.  You can always sell it later if/when u can get something better.

Some people say Apollos are less reliable or less compatible than Blizzards

Bah humbug!

[ChaosLord]

BTW: I just found about another 060 board. A so called Falcon.
Specs seem pretty much on par with the Blizzard, except for the SCSI.

Sounds like an Atari.

[ChaosLord]

That's what I thought.

But they appear to be real (produced in Germany and the US by MacroSystem)

http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=137

Wow, crazy!  Is someone offering to sell u one?  U should get it and write a review because I never heard of it.

[ChaosLord]

With a standard BB2 3.9 system the fast-ram speed it is roughly 30% quicker than the Apollo, it surprising matches the chip-ram speed of the Apollo in most cases but for a couple of the test the Apollo beats the Blizz by about 20% (you need to download the modules to get the exact ratings).

Maybe by boosting the Mhz you have altered things such that Blizzard partly catches up to Apollo Chipram speeds?

In fact, by boosting the Apollo from 50Mhz to 80Mhz it might have even slowed down its chipram access times.  One can never know unless one tests.  The way accelerator cards access memory is a field of darque blaque majix.

Or maybe you are averaging out all the chipram timing tests which is not something I care about.

The speed of reading from chipram using bytes, words or longwords is interesting from a scientific perspective but not really useful to the consumer in determing which card is best.

The speed of writing to chipram using 8-bit writes or 16-bit writes is interesting from a scientific perspective but not really useful to the consumer in determing which card is best.

The only chipram test that matters is how fast chipram can be written to 32-bits at a time.  If a game is writing 16-bits at a time then it is unoptimized slow as molasses anyway and doesn't bear consideration.

When an Apollo has "20% faster chipram access" this says to me, as a game coder, that Apollo cards have a 20% faster framerate, which is fantastically important to gamers and animators.  Anyone who uses the Amiga for video purposes, such as SCALA or CLARISSA or Total Chaos AGA or etc. etc.

As a gamecoder, all my games are bottlenecked by the speed at which my code can write to chipram 32-bits at a time. (because chipram is 32-bit memory).  All I care about is the speed of move.l Rn,ChipRam

Having faster fastmem is kewl and I love it, but that is not where my bottlenecks are at.

So when I did my timing tests on Apollo vs. Blizzards over the years I was mostly testing stock 50Mhz models (because that is what most ppl have).  And I was only paying attention to 32-bit chipram writes and all my tests were performed in 640x512x256 colors mode because that is what my games use.

Would you be willing to post your Busspeed test results from both cards in 640x512x256 colors mode?  (fastram and chipram, the whole thing)

Thanx!

Now if you want a surprise, get yourself an Apollo 1240 40Mhz and check out the amazing chipram access speeds!  I never had such a card but various playtesters sent in timing test results many years ago and it was really amazing how the 1240 could magically always access chipram at the maximum theoretical value.  Even faster than theoretically possible sometimes