A600 maximum (stock) performance and PAL/NTSC

[brownb2]

It's been a few years since I've owned an Amiga and I've picked up an old A600 at the bargain price of £26 to do some retro gaming and decided to upgrade it with some old parts I had - hard disk +1MB RAM upgrade.

Now I know this machine is slow by modern Amiga standards but I remember NTSC mode sped the stock clock speed up and I'm looking for best workbench performance/quality from the machine.

To this end I'll be:

- Installing SetPatch
- Installing Mem Plus
- Running in at least 640x512
- Not using ClassicWB GAAE (it looks a bit unprofessional!)

Can anyone recommend any other software and if possible tell me why NTSC was faster (thus a "stock" overclock) since there is a program that switches on NTSC but gives full PAL height resolution?

Cheers,

Benjamin

[brownb2]

If it really gives full PAL resolution then it's most certainly not switching to NTSC-mode

Actually the utility was on an old AUI coverdisk (it doesn't appear to be on Aminet, or at least easily found).

The readme mentioned that they wanted to use an NTSC screen mode but still have full PAL height. I suspect it was an overscan setting but I'll try and dig the disk out again tonight.

Anyhow, the second part of the question is recommended software - I remember a Smart(Cache?) utility for (pre)caching disk cylinders that was better than add buffers... although I probably won't have enough RAM for that although mapping it to the hard drive somehow would be useful...

[brownb2]

The software I mentioned -

AUI Superdisk 79:

NoNTSC - Grab back the lines lost from your non-PAL software.

[brownb2]

Maximum overscan from NTSC is 480 lines, so you could make it 640x480 if you like standard size resolutions.

Since all my games and software runs in PAL though, I find it best to just keep my A600 in 4-colour 640x256 PAL High Res. It's nice and fast, and thanks to the iconset and fonts I use it all fits on screen well enough.

Okay here's the low down.. I achieved 1.66MB (1666656 bytes) free RAM (from 2MB Chip only) with a fully usable 8 colour MagicWB desktop with most of the frills:

To do this I've:

• Installed SetPatch
• Installed CopyMemQuicker
• Installed KillClick2
• Installed ReqTools
• Installed MagicWB
• Installed TBClock
• Installed NickPrefs to allow Marble MagicWB background image in WB 2.
• Installed Ordering
• Installed lha, lzx, unzip and configured it with Ordering
• Installed WHDLoad
• Installed the latest Amiga installer bin
• Got my desktop at 8 colour NTSC High Res Laced with an overscan of 700x464.
• Have just DH0, Ordering and CF0: dosdriver left icons out on the desktop.
• Have no Workbench window (standard these days - backdrop ticked only).
• Moved the Ram Disk to DH0: (saves about 60K)
• Removed un-needed assigns (e.g. printers, and drivers/handlers)
• Moved CF0: to Storage and left out the icon on the desktop (rather than having it load on ever boot when I'd need the RAM for WHDLoad). This saves about 150K.
• Removed all buffers from drives (-20 DF0: i.e. 5+15, -5 CC0:, -20 CF0: )
• Large whdload games have preload disabled.

I couldn't get Add36K working and as an additional note the clipboard functionality can also probably be disabled.

If anybody else can help me better this I'd like to see 1.7 MB free ;)

[brownb2]

M8, hate to tell ya - NTSC has exactly 525 scan lines, so there's absolutely no way to overscan beyond that...

Whoops thanks - I'll change my last post. I'd given the PAL overscan settings.

[brownb2]

I must have missed something, what's magical about 1.7 MB free?  You seem to be sacrificing much to get there.  Is adding a fast ram expansion out of the question?

I picked the A600 up a couple of weeks ago for £25 (~$35-40 USD) and only did it as spur of the moment thing since I had an old A600 1MB memory upgrade and 2'5->3'5 cables to add a new internal hard disk/CF.

I want just to get it up and running and use for retro gaming/usage instead of wearing/leaving out my original A1200, hence I didn't really intend to invest.

You asked for software suggestions.  You might consider an improved hard disk file system, like PFS3 (Hopefully, available in PD soon, it's much faster and more secure than FFS).  There are faster serial port drivers, math libraries, and datatypes on Aminet.

I was aware of the likes of baud bandit etc. back in the day but really I won't be needing networking or port drivers.  I'm aware of some shareware math libraries but never really saw the need to get them. I won't be using this machine as viewer so the datatypes aren't really applicable - viewing a JPEG might be a bit painful too I used FFS as it was bootable and didn't want to set up multiple partitions on a 512 card that is regularly imaged...
[EDIT]Just found out that PFS3 might be bootable too by storing the driver in the RDB[/EDIT]

Are you trying to see how far you can push the system, are you primarily a gamer?  What do want this system to do?

Have a single boot mode (no cut down startup) that will run as many games as possible but still have a decent/impressive (for A600) Workbench for day to day tasks (backup, extraction, file manipulation, mod playing, algomusic, etc etc).

Hope this helps explain