A500 - How much can I expand it!

[mr_a500]

Oh, don't "towerize" the poor old thing. You'll just turn it into a "towerized" A2000, defeating the whole purpose of the A500. My upgraded A500 looks like a stock A500 from the outside. And check out Lemmink's A500 - probably the best A500 upgrade I have ever seen: http://home.joice.net/j100513/scans/temp/A500

The Bodega bay was also nice, it sat on top of the A500 making it look like a desktop computer

I have an old AmigaWorld magazine with a Bodega Bay advertisement. I always thought it was the ugliest, most disgusting A500 add-on in Amiga history.

[mr_a500]

Quake on an A500?

I've done a lot of things with my A500 - ran MacOS 8.1, faxed PDFs I made, scanned 24bit images from DVD movies, played DOOM, and I'm even using it to type this post - but Quake is impossible.

[mr_a500]

I would be interested in details of your modifications. I have several A500s that I would like to develop into unique machines.

Well then they won't be unique ;-).

I didn't do anything too clever (nothing amazing like Lemmink). I got a Viper 520 - which gives me a 33Mhz 68020, 8Mb 32bit Fast RAM, 3.0 A1200 ROMs and 2,5" IDE, then I added a 40Gb 5400RPM 2.5" HD and 68882 FPU. I got a Mini Megi 2Mb Chip and ECS Denise. I already had an A501.

I use WB3.1. If you haven't seen my screenshots, here's one:
http://www.amiga.org/gallery/photo.php?lid=2533

You should definitely get DCTV. It's awesome. You can view and scan 24bit composite images (requires 1084 or TV). You can't use it to make WB 24-bit. I use it to display jpegs or scan still images.

[mr_a500]

I believe is technically *possible* to make quake run on an ECS Amiga, but you'd probably need 2mb of chip ram and it would be limited in color and give new meaning to slow.

Not only that, but you'd need a motherlode of Fast RAM. Running Doom II, some levels require 4Mb heapsize (continuous block) to load (about 6Mb total). I bet Quake would require 32Mb at least.

Anyway, forget Quake. The two games I'd want are Warcraft II and Hexen. (..another impossible dream)

[mr_a500]

My Viper 520 is 33Mhz 020 as I said, with 8Mb RAM maximum (not expandable). The ultra-rare Viper 530/E-Matrix 530 (same thing) is 50Mhz 030, 64Mb expandable to 128Mb RAM maximum (Lemmink has one!). I think less than 10 of those were sold.

There was no 040 Viper - not even planned.

[mr_a500]

Was it you that likes to test Dir utils? I use Ordering on slower Amigas because it's very fast...

Well, it's not a hobby of mine or anything. I was just looking for the best one. I started a poll on EAB (Dopus currently winning - who knew? ;-)):

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=22887

I tried Ordering and it wasn't bad, but I still thought ABCdir was better.

I'm glad you liked my screenshots. Those are now old and I've got a much better configuration (..I'm always saying that :-D).

[mr_a500]

Tenacious wrote:
I'm looking with renewed interest at color schemes that reduce or eliminate flicker.

Reduce flicker in WB3.1 or WB1.3? For WB1.3, I have lots of reduced flicker colour schemes (system-configuration). I used to spend a lot of time reducing flicker. Blues and greens work best.

For WB3.1, the key is to not use black as your shadow colour because in scrollbars it is next to the highlight colour (usually white). A horizontal black line above or below a horizontal white line is "flicker city". I use VisualPrefs to set my shadow colour medium grey (8,8,9).