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Offline countzero

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Re: My A500+ Project
« on: August 08, 2008, 08:46:11 AM »
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sim085 wrote:

I found on amiga-hardware.com that Commodore produced the A501 and the A501+ RAM expansion boards. It seems that the A501+ is specific for the A500+. However if I find and A501 would this still work with my A500+? Also are there any better RAM expansion boards and would this be still required once I buy the accelerator card (since some accelerator cards also have RAM on them)?


Yes. The trapdoor slot of A500+ is to increase Chip RAM, which is always useful regardless of how much RAM you have on your acelerator. Think of it like graphics card RAM. It maxes out at 2 mb, so get a 1 meg card. The A501 and A501+ are 512K only, so I would avoid them. 1 meg cards for A500+ pop up at ebay from time to time.

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Also regarding Kickstart ROM; Should I buy a Kickstart switch board so that I keep both the Kickstart 2.0 and 3.1 or I no longer need the Kickstart 2.0 if I have the Kickstart 3.1!?


Kickstart 2 is totally useless once you have 3.1 rom. Maybe you may want to keep a 1.3 rom for old games, but you won't need it much if you have whdload.
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Offline countzero

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Re: My A500+ Project
« Reply #1 on: August 14, 2008, 02:59:40 PM »
ChipRam maxes out at 2. True for all amigas (even A4000) no way around.

Not sure what lockon meant, but he probably meant ChipRam + FastRam on the zorro2 adress space (side car) which make 10 mb in total.

There is also another adress space for the A500 (not A500+) called ranger mem. This is the place where trap door slot maps to. It is 1.8 mb AFAIR. The A500+ trap door slot maps to ChipRam address space so this space is not usable AFAIK.
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Re: My A500+ Project
« Reply #2 on: August 14, 2008, 04:00:51 PM »
Slow ram and Chip ram are not the same things. Depending on the context slow ram can be used to mean as chip ram, but it's better to call chip ram, chip ram. Anyway, the answer to your question is, simply it won't be recognised, and you won't be able to use it. There may be eggzentric trap door expansions which use gary adapters to map to ranger mem space, but I doubt they will work on your A500+.

The maximum mem you can get on your A500+ is 2 mb chip ram via trap door slot and 8mb on the side car. That is without an accelerator which plugs onto 68k socket. Acclerator cards are out of these boundaries and can hold upto 128 mb of Fast ram.

Now of course when an accelerator comes into picture, you see the FastRam/SlowMem terminology turning meaningless, cause the mem on the sidecar which we called fast ram will be slow when compared to fast ram on the accelerator board. So I prefer to call them slow mem, and chip ram as chip ram. The difference between them is of course the chipset can't access the slow mem, but it can access chip ram.

To get a better picture of things, check the Amiga System Memory map. This map covers the whole 68000 addressing range (16 bit). The 68030+ accelerators have 32 bit addressing range, so they are not limited to this map.
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Re: My A500+ Project
« Reply #3 on: August 14, 2008, 05:40:24 PM »
yes, basicly all I/O is done through motherboard. They're not designed to run stand alone.

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Re: My A500+ Project
« Reply #4 on: August 19, 2008, 10:29:31 AM »
No. It doesn't exist. A500/A600/A2000/CDTV are 68000 based designs with 16 bit data path. A1200/A4000/CD32 are 68020/68040 based designs with 32 bit data path. Also the 68k bus protocols are different AFAIK. Such an adapter will probably have equal or greater complexity than doing a A500 accelerator from scratch.

Now that I think about it, A3000 is a strange case scenario with a processor with 32 bit data path and 16 bit chipset (ECS). Probably there's some custom logic in there to interface the two.
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Re: My A500+ Project
« Reply #5 on: August 20, 2008, 12:20:17 PM »
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JJ wrote:
@ CountZero

Im pretty sure the 020 at least, is 32bit proc with24bit data path



and ?  :-?
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Re: My A500+ Project
« Reply #6 on: August 20, 2008, 02:29:14 PM »
technically this is possible. AFAIK all the signals are there. My previous answer was about a A1200 accelerator bridge, which is a totally different beast. However, I can't see you fitting a A2000 accelerator inside your 500+. Maybe you could do a side car like thingie though. There was a project from an italian guy who did a custom A500 zorro + accelerator plate from a A3000 daughterboard, but I don't have access to my links now  :roll:
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