Natami style SuperAGA card for A4000/A1200?

[slaapliedje]

Maybe this has already been talked about, maybe not.  Just too damned tired after having a rather strange day at work to bother looking.

But I've been thinking about this for a while now.  My biggest complaint right now about my A4000D is the AGA chipset.  It seems to just fly when in 64 or less color mode, but in 256 color mode, work bench crawls, has weird redraws, etc.

I am simply dying for the Natami to come out, but the question always comes up "well when / if it ever comes out, what will be the damage to my wallet?"  I'm also wondering if it'd be easier to create a new, faster, better AGA upgrade somehow to allow for faster 256 (or more) work bench?

I'm sure there have been discussions on this in the past.  There is the "why don't you just get a Mediator and Radeon or Voodoo card" or "find some Picasso Card on eBay."  Well mainly due to compatibility and well.. the screen dragging and independent resolutions is why, damnit!  I know the real reason it's slow is due to the really old AGA chipset, because Workbench seems to just fly under my Radeon (yes I do have a Mediator board with a Radeon, though I have weird random lockups with it).

Besides a faster video chip, an accelerator that didn't make me feel like I was mugged would be nice as well.  I'm still running a stock 040.  The thing is, Workbench has certain things that actually feel snappier than my 8core AMD (in either Windows 7 or Linux).  Not sure what it is, but it's just awesome.  

Anyhow, one can dream, right?

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

One thing the FPGAArcade has going for it is far faster memory, so even if the AGA implementation has no enhancements, the 256 colour modes should perform a lot faster simply because there will be far less contention on the memory bus.

Wonder if you can put faster chip RAM in an A4000 to help the performance in AGA?

Now that's an idea!  Though I don't know how you'd really do that, I think the fastest SIMMs they made were 60ns, right?  Are the default ones 72ns?

If you have an Indivision AGA MK2 you may see a driver in the future  that does not slow down so much running in higher resolutions or depth.  The driver would accomplish this by turning off screen DMA while writing  to the video buffer. Normally this would cause the screen to blank out  but the Indivision would frieze the image until DMA is reenabled. You  could see a quicker ShapeShifter or WorkBench driver.

There's an idea, except that I have the original Indivision AGA.  Actually I kind of like that I got that anyhow, since I have the VGA of it, the DVI of the Radeon and HDMI from my main PC all connected to my 24" LCD.    But if it's just a driver update, the question is will it work with the Indivision that I have?

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

Every ole who have 040 or better should installa and configure FBlit.
It makes big difference.

I believe I have FBlit installed.

Actually I have set up the ClassicWB for OS3.9 installed, and I think it comes with that.

It's still a huge difference between the AGA chipset and the Radeon card.

If only I could figure out what is causing the Radeon resolutions to lock up.

slaapliedje