WTB: Amiga 1200 Accelerator

[RepoOne]

I'm looking for an accelerator for my A1200. I currently have a 4MB Hawk memory expansion in there, but it's just not enough to handle some of the software I would like to use.

I'd like to spend somewhere around $100-$120, and I don't care how old or used the accelerator is, so long as it works.

Also, this might be asking for a bit much, but a 68030 would be nice to have. It would be cool if my Amiga could compete with my 386 rig!

RAM amount doesn't really matter much to me, so long as it has more than what I have now (4MB). 16MB+ would be best, though.

Thanks!

[RepoOne]

Do NOT buy an ACA accelerator as you may need mods to your amiga motherboard. You should buy the blizzard 030 a guy is selling on this board!

What kind of mods, and why?

I'm running a Rev 1A motherboard, if that means anything.

[RepoOne]

Alright, thanks for all the advice.

I'll probably just take $200 from my next paycheck and buy a 68030/33MHz ACA accelerator, or one that is similarly priced on eBay. 128MB is certainly tempting, though. Oh, and a GBS-8200 as a scandoubler.

Also, I don't have any specific software in mind. I just want to be able to browse the web/telnet/IRC/E-Mail/etc and multitask more comfortably, and pimp out my workbench.

Then you'll probably see me on here a lot more often.

[RepoOne]

In the interest of full disclosure I should warn you that you can absolutely forget about "comfortably browsing the web" with any 030 CPU.  The 030 is really really slow at processing data and decoding jpgs.  Webpages take foreeeeeeever to display.  Its no fun at all.

Remember the L1 cache on an 030 is soooooooo tiny that for many purposes it does not have any.

You really need an 060 to comfortably browse the web.

The other things on your list use a lot less CPU power and you might be happy with them on an 030 but but but.... you need to keep in mind that Amiga software for doing those things is megafantastically fancy.  Much fancier than lame Windows XP software.  The GUIs are superduper professional and you can customize every last little thing better than any Windows 7 program I have ever seen in my life.  But all that fanciness eats CPU cycles.  68030 cpus take 2 to 4 cycles to execute common instructions while 68060 cpus take 0.5 to 1 cycles to execute those same instructions.

Those hyperprofessional fancy MUI GUIs may feel laggy on your 030.  Just a fair warning.

And things like unzipping or unlhaing files will be quite slow on 030.  A 33 Mhz 040 is fully 3x as fast at uncompressing files as a 33Mhz 030.  An 060 is faster still.   Remember 030 does not have jack for cache.  And the cache that the 030 has is the really primitive 1980s cache.  68040 has 1990 technology cache called "copyback cache".  It provides a giant speedboost for code written in C (which is most Amiga software).

Good luck and I hope you enjoy your Amiga experience, especially IRC with AmIRC and/or WookieChat.

I do a lot of those things just fine on the stock processor, with a 4MB FastRAM expansion. I just can't do more than one or two at once because 4MB of RAM isn't anywhere near enough for multitasking the way I would like to.

An upgrade to a 33MHz 68030 + 128MB RAM would be pretty substantial, would it not?

Also, for the hyper-fancy stuff, I just use emulation, because I don't have $500 to spend on an '060.