68060 Accelerators

[Franko]

My GVP030 Amiga is fine for games and such, but my Blizzard060 & Blizzard 060/PPC miggies are the bees knees when it come to using an Amiga on OS 3.x...

If you want the best all round performance and the ability to create and play MP3s, edit large AIFF audio files, faster GFX packages D.T.P. etc... then it's well worth the money to buy a second hand Blizzard060 with or without PPC.

If games are your main thing then an 030 would do just fine and the more ram you get for it the better, the only problem I see with the new AmiKit one is the lack of an FPU which even on an 030 comes in quite handy for a lot of things...

[Franko]

I wasn't aware that 060 would have much influence on graphics operations on AGA. Does the HighGFX mode use the CPU significantly?

I have 060 system below and a Blizzard 030 1200 system that both use native AGA. In day to day use of OS3.9 there is little difference. The 060 comes into it's own when running CPU thrashing code though. In my estimation twice as fast as an 040. And 040 is about four times as fast as 030.

With an 060 and FBlit installed the whole Workbench experience is a joy to use, everything is much faster & smoother...

[Franko]

I admit I'm not using FBlit. That's something to do over the silly season then )

CMQ060
BlazeWCP
FBlit
FText
MCP

& a Blizkick patched rom will give an Amiga to be proud of, you be hard pushed to find a better set up than this...

I'll need to post some benchmarks to show the difference this makes...

[Franko]

never heard of fblit or the others, what are they?

Not sure if you kidding here, but just in case your not...

CMQ060 = Patches some of the rom routines with faster 060 code that is mainly used by Workbench, intuition, graphics & dos librarys...
BlazeWCP = Patches certain blitter routines with faster code...
FBlit = Patch many of the OS GFX & blitter functions with much faster highly optimised routines and move a lot of gfx data to fast ram, thus freeing up  chip ram...
FText = Patches any OS Text output (eg:cli/shell) and make a significant difference to text ouput...
MCP = Is a user configurable with GUI prog that patches lots of stuff on you amiga to make things faster and better...

All are available on Aminet and easy enough to install and set up in your startup-sequence once installed they can be forgotten about and the saving in chip ram alone are worth it as well of course the fact that the over speed increase to your Amiga is pretty amazing...

I couldn't go back to an Amiga that runs without having these installed as they really get the best out of an 060 based Amiga...

[Franko]

Don't be fooled by 3.9, it's not as fast as a good 3.1 install, hence Classic WB 3.1 Full.
 
Having a Blizzard 1260-50, 2060-50 I don't see a big preformance increase when running 3.9.
Except when I use the CS PPC 060-50/200 with a 10K SCSI HD, then it's really a bit tad faster than 3.1
 
But I just got the Blizzard 2060, so I have to test with the SCSI controller, but it is still 50 pins and not 68 pins UW.

@ Buzzfuzz

I couldn't agree more about 3.9 with you, too bloated and not much of an increase in speed when using that. Oddly enough though 3.5 is much better and that's what I want back to...

I'll post some SysSpeed benchmarks later on showing the increase in speed that can be achieved using the utils I mentioned earlier for folk to judge for themselves...

[Franko]

TBH a 68060 is just icing on the cake these days.  Most Amiga owners I knew back in the day had '030's or slower A1200's.  And on that hardware-and anything else without a graphics card-the bottleneck is the native chipset graphics speed.

If you want to run Amiga productivity software quickly, then that software usually needs an RTG card to do it justice eg rendering, image processing, DTP.  Believe me, I know, I spent a small fortune upgrading my A1200 with an Apollo 68060, only to realise that AGA was still as slow as ever in 256 colors dblscan, which is what ImageFX, Photogenics, Cinema 4D and Pagestream need as  a minimum to be used comfortably

In short, the sensible thing would be to get an 030 ( 50 mhz if you can).  And if you need to run any of the above-mentioned apps, then do it in Winuae: its cheaper, faster, morecompatible and easier to set up than a big box amiga with an 68060 and a RTG card.

Ofcourse a true Amigan will ignore this sensible advice and buy an A4000, get that 68060, plus the picasso 4/cv64 with scan doubler/indivision.  I did.

Disagree with you totally here on my Blizz060/PPC under both OS3.1 & OS 3.5 PageStream, ImageFX, FinalWriter, and lots more besides run perfectly well WITHOUT AN RTG BOARD...

From a few threads that's running here tonight it looks like a lot of folk using 060 boards don't have them set up to take full advantage and squeeze every bit of speed out of their set ups...

Of course it could be because your using an Apollo and not a Blizzard as the Blizzard boards are way better than the Apollo ones...

[Franko]

What is a Blizkick patched rom? How do I go about doing/getting this?

Well to start with you'll need a Blizzard060 board and download Blizkick from Aminet. A BlizKick rom is just the Kickstart ROM remapped from ROM into your Blizzards fastrom this introduces a vast overall increase in almost every aspect of the Amigas performance straight away...

A Blizkick patched ROM is a copy of the ROM image again, which BlickKick remaps to your fast ram but this time you have patched it with any amount of the so called modules that come with BlizKick which provide various patches and bugfixes and again more speed increases for your 060 Amiga...

That along with things like FBlit etc... and using blizkick to remap stuff like the latest versions of FastfileSytem and lots of other goodies give you an Amiga that works like a dream...

Now that I think about it, this could be one of the main reasons why I come across as such a rabid defender of OS3.x and my old A1200s, I just took it for granted that everyone had also set their 060 miggies up to run this way and couldn't understand why some folk think such a machine is not up to everyday use...

Seems like a quite a number of you guys out there have been using your 060 Amigas all this time and not getting the best out of them, think I'm gonna have to start a tutorial on getting the best out of a Blizzard 060... :lol:

[Franko]

But on RTG board they really *shine*.  Seriuosly that software list loves a high-res high color screens.

I do agree that an RTG board would make things even better but how many folk actually own one

oh I did every speed hack I knew about:ftext, fblit, map kickstart into RAM, fastexec etc, 256 color AGA 640x480 ran like a dog

Well I did say somewhere else I'd post some SysSpeed benchmarks for various setups and let folk judge for themselves, as I've never had a slow problem like you describe, I'll do it tomorrow though it's 4:35am here just now and It's time for me 3 hourly sleep...

I've read that before and I would agree in terms of build quality P5 boards were better, the biggest issue is the stupid idea not to solder the timing crystal on the Apollo, so it would work its way loose when powered up, and damage the 68060.  But in terms of performance AIBB benchmarks I did, the Apollo outperformed the P5 boards in a lot of tests, ram speed being one big difference.

I've only ever owned an Apollo040 board but I've downloaded some Apollo060 SysSpeed test result from the net and comparing both the Blizzard and the Apollo there were no significant differences.

Find it rather odd that you manged to get AIBB running on an 060 board as AIBB is not compatible with an 060 board, just launched it right now to check and am sitting here staring at the old bright orange software failure message ERROR 8000 000B... :confused:

Do you have a special version of AIBB

[Franko]

You could probably count them in the tens these days.

I thought Karlos was the only one left with an RTG board, and I cant get the bugger to sell me it... :lol:

There weren't any in mine either. The major troubles were due to timing issues with some Apollos and things like the mediator PCI expansion board on some models of A1200. Also the scsi was a bit hinky for those half dozen people ever who bought that expansion for the Apollo.

But on it's own, the Apollo was a fine card.

Have to agree with that the Apollo cards were good quality, I never got round to buying the SCSI kits though for either the Apollo or my Blizzards, bought the FastATA MKII and was quite happy with that...

Lulz. Owned.

Also, aga in 8bit will always be slow, knock it down to 64 and it'll purr along nicely, even with an 040.

I tend to stick with 128 colours on my Blizzards and it does the job nicely for my uses...

[Franko]

1. syspeed AFAIR isn't as good as AIBB.  Can't remember why.

2. To run AIBB on a 68060, you use the 68000 cpu, and a 68882 fpu option, just click the cycle gadget.  AIBB then works.  It probably underestimates how quick the 68060 is to relative to 68040 and lower cpu (still outperforms them), but for the purpose of comparing 68060 boards from differing manufacturers its useful.

1: they both have their differences but both perform the said task in slighlty  different manor...

2: You can't run AIBB on an 060 and you don't even get to the option screen it crashes as soon as the checking system text appears, look it's just did it again, you must be using a hacked version

[Franko]

i seem to recall that AIBB was a better way to benchmark.  Not sure why.


Just the 6.5 version that comes with classic workbench.

Check the aminet links of other people doing AIBB benchmarks with an '060.

Damn... Im knackered it's 6:07 and haven't slept since Tuesday but this AIBB thing has been bugging me...

Quick disassemble of AIBB V6.5 (the one I'm using) reveals it can only handle up to 040 boards, so apart from the fact it crashes on an 060 it would be pretty pointless using benchmarks form AIBB to compare 060 boards.

Right I'm off to bed now cos me eye are hanging oot ma heid and my last brain cell has only the strength to guide me to my bed...

So it goodnight from me.. and its goodnight from him...

[Franko]

To run AIBB on 68060 systems, use the following ToolTypes, then it should work.

CPU=68000
FPU=68060
MMU=68060
CPUSPEED=60.0
FPUSPEED=60.0

Replace the CPU- and FPU-Speed settings with the speed of your CPU.

Just gonna give that a try thanks, let you know in a couple of minutes...

[Franko]

Just gave it a go... non luck I'm afraid...

same result as before = Software Failure 8000 000B

Anyway not much point as it doesn't contain any code to specifically test an 060 for benchmark results... reckon I'll just stick to SysSpeed...

[Franko]

@ stefcep2

I do use the latest 060 library (Ver46.15)

However on my setup the 040 new/dummy or real libraries are not used or needed so I deleted them years ago. Just the 68060.library is required with my Blizzard060/PPC setup...



Anyway as I say SysInfo is a better tool when it comes to benchmarking an 060

[Franko]

cgxsystem and cybergraphics.library with no RTG card?

I know, I've had to put them in just now cos a version of Frodo (the C64 emulator) I'm modifying just now requires them...