I ordered a PPC card for my A1200

[fishy_fiz]

I think your only option for c64 emulation using ppc is frodo. It should be ok, but wont be perfect. A 25mhz 68040/160mhz 603e card isnt a great purchase in my opinion (I say this because I had one). Id have preferred an '060 card. The best thing about the bppc was the connector that I connected my grex to (ergo the ability to add a video card and sound card).

With aga though it adds pretty much nothing and apart from a few bits and pieces you'd be better off with a standard '040 card even (the '040 side on the card youve mentioned is the weakest '040 card available).

I hope you enjoy your purchase, but I warn you, be prepared to be disappointed. For me it felt like a huge waste of money and effort

[fishy_fiz]

Ouch, the 175mhz version is even worse. Slower fsb + ram speed.
In some situations its even slower than a 50mhz '030.

If youre happy though then good luck to you. Just remember you'll end up spending almost as much to upgrade the cpu and add a bvision as you would to buy a sam (probably more). There's also no guarantee the card will work at 300mhz. Some do, but not all, and its an expensive proposition to find out.

Honestly the only worthwhile bppc's are those that contain an '060. Dont forget that you'll still be using the 680x0 cpu 95% or so of the time.

[fishy_fiz]

From my experiences, yes, and Id be surprised if many people who have owned an '040 based bppc disagree. For me it was all a massive disapointment and this is with a voodoo3 card and soundcard, which is much nicer than aga. The only things that I enjoyed that ppc bought to the table were a couple of emulators (snes, megadrive, mame), ppc video players (still not great, but 320x240 low quality .avi videos (or thereabouts) played reasonably), some ppc datatypes, and ppc ahi. Oh there was also a couple of ppc scene demos that are quite nice (although no better than what was available for 68k).

As for the 175mhz card, downclocking to 166mhz helps a little (assuming the 68k cpu will do 33mhz), or failing that overclocking to 180mhz will also help (33/30mhz bus respectively). Quite a big jump vs the default 25mhz bus that the card comes clocked at. Bus speed and ram speed are more important at these sorts of speeds than cpu clock rates.

[fishy_fiz]

I guess maybe I was a bit harsh, and I dont really want to deter you from something you wanted to buy. There is some fun to be had with them, but it's a lot more limited than most people seem to expect. In my honest opinion a person really needs an '060, and to avoid the 50/25mhz bus and an rtg card before a bppc system starts to be worth the effort, by which time its become quite expensive. There's also other things to consider such as the need to 2 seperate diplays for custom chipset/rtg (or a workaround) once you hit that point too.

To each his own, but Im personally more of the opinion that if you want to do things in a more typical/mainstream way a person is better off with aros/amithlon/os4/mos anyway. If you want to enjoy a classic amiga just keep it simple (cpu+ram upgrade/harddrive upgrade, pcmcia networking and so on) and then work within the machines restrictions.
That's half the fun for me Having said that though, if I won the lotto I would buy a ppc classic amiga based system again, but I'd still use it as a nice retro system rather than trying to use it as a replacement for an ng system.

[fishy_fiz]

Well that's exactly why I made the last post, because my earlier posts were a bit negative. AmigaClassicRule appears to want to do more mainstream things, and despite being a little negative in the way I presented it, there's actually some info that may be of interest to him amongst what I wrote.

@AmigaClassicRule

If you're willing to spend a little extra money on it rather than going the whole hog, adding an '060 and running the ppc cpu at 3x60mhz rather thank 3.5x50mhz will make up for a lot of the shortcomings I mentioned of the 25mhz '040/175mhz 603e cards. There's plenty of other options/possibilities. As for the '060 the reason its important on the bppc cards isnt so much the exptra speed of the '060 vs and '040, but rather that the clock frequencies influence the memory bus.

Anyway, hope you enjoy your card, and I do appologize for my excessively negative feedback (based on my own disappointment).