A500 accellerators?

[Herbman]

Even if you get an accelerator, you'll still need a Mini Megi for 2Mb chip to do anything useful and they're rare too (... but I have one!).

Mini Megi 2Mb? This I didn't realise? Why do you need one, and is it like a 1.5 Meg upgrade for the trapdoorslot underneath?

But I have seen GVP 030 accellerators for the A500 quite often on eBay (like this one). But sometimes the prices are a little crazy.

Yeah! Im bidding on it soon

[doctorq]

The chip ram expansion isn't needed, but it's highly recommended. All graphics the computer displays depends on the chip ram, so the more the better. With only half a meg of chip ram you run out pretty fast if you want to use colourfull icons (NewIcons, GlowIcons), etc.

[alexh]

You dont need a MiniMegi (MegaChip) if you have an A500+.

It is an agnus replacement with 1Mbyte of RAM that plugs into the Agnus socket.

[Herbman]

doctorq wrote:
The chip ram expansion isn't needed, but it's highly recommended. All graphics the computer displays depends on the chip ram.

Ok. So the FastRam in the accellerator doesn't fill this purpose?

[doctorq]

Nope. Only way to avoid chip ram being used for graphics is with a graphics card, but that's gonna be a bit overkill and not very handy.

I would recommend getting the accelerator and harddrive controller first, and then you can find out if you really need more chip ram or not.

[cv643d]

I bought a couple of second hand amigas. One of the A500's had a Hurricane 030 25mhz with 4mb fast ram inside of it. I consider myself very lucky.

[Karlos]

I knew someone back in the good old days that had a lot of a500 hardware and topped it off with one of these bad boys. Easily the fastest still-in-the-original case A500 I ever saw. Cost an absolute fortune too...

[Crisisdog]

Accelerators for the A500 are totally useless unless you get one with its own onboard RAM.  I had a board with a 50MHz 68030 and it didn't even increase the speed 20% per AIBB benchmarks.  I now have a 16MHz 68000 with 4MBs of same speed onboard memory, and am hitting an 80% increase in speed.  Pretty sad.

 :crazy:

[patrik]

@Chrisisdog:

Yeah, the 030 has way to small caches to be able to give much performance when running code from slow memory.


/Patrik