Apollo 040 or Blizzard 1230-IV... what is the best for my A1200?

[Karlos]

I had an early apollo 1240 card for many years before it got totally knackered. On the whole I'd say it was one of the best purchases I ever made. The compatibility issues raised here do exist, but most things written in post ECS era worked OK with it.

For those that do not, there is always WHDLoad :-D

[Karlos]

I should point out that I replaced the original fan and heatsink which as Brian points out, are louder than standing next to the intake of a jumbo jet engine :-D

Power wise, my old 1200D used 2 power input cables from a 200W AT PSU I hacked. First there was the normal one, then a second cable that (via a molex connector fitted in the back of my case) supplied 0/5/12VDC rails to power the internal drives and a second cooling fan.

[Karlos]

It was very much quieter.

The fan/heatsink I got was one of the old 486/Pentium-I low profile jobs. It is exactly the same area as the 040, but it can't fit exactly under the keyboard, so I had to move it about 5mm. That said, it gave much better cooling and was far,  far quieter than the original fan, which was this tiny, noisy little thing sat atop a small bonded heatsink.

[Karlos]

Plenty of games I had that were a bit ropey on the apollo directly worked fine with WHDLoad, but I guess your mileage will always vary.

The WHDLoad idea is that there is a central library/framework and then there are seperate installers/patchers for each game/application that try to correct known incompatibilities. You can generally configure each installed game so that if needed, caches etc can be deactivated when the game is launched.

-edit-

Anyway, if you have some old game that refuses to run, you could always fire up that A500 :-D

[Karlos]

To expand on that,

If you can get a Blizzard 1240, 1260 then sure, go for it. On the other hand, I wouldn't reccomend an 030 card unless CPU performance is not an issue.

The SCSI controller is a consideration too. If you want to use SCSI drives, the apollo card is poorly implemented, using PIO. Blizzard cards use a proper SCSI script processor capable of DMA, so transfers to/from disk use a lot less CPU time.

This reminds me, I must find a SCSI HD for my 1200T at some point ;-)

[Karlos]

I dare say the 040 won't be a bad choice for you then. Of course, the IDE expansions you have still use PIO which is naturally quite CPU intensive.

-edit-

If you do get the Apollo, be sure to check a tool on aminet called 'RemApollo' which can give you quite some performance boost, especially if your apollo card, like mine, was an earlier model.

There are also replacement math libraries for the 040 which can give any applications that use these math libraries a healthy boost.

[Karlos]

@Tahoe

There is a chance I might be around there in the not too distant actually (depends on a few other factors not im my control however) :-)

What would be your preferred payment method for shipping, anyway?