AGA + A500

[sim085]

Ok,

Maybe this will be added to my list of stupid questions ... however is it possible to have AGA chipset on an A500?

Regards,
Sim085

[Matt_H]

Nope. There was a prototype board to do so, but it never made it to market.

There's a picture of it in the image gallery.

[sim085]

Thanks, thought so Was there a great leap forward in quality between the ECS and AGA chipset? I never owned a A1200 and therefore do not know the quality difference.

[Matt_H]

From a user perspective, all you'll see is that your screenmodes can now have up to 256 colors.

[darksun9210]

and if an indivision ever gets designed and built for OCS/ECS machines (500/600/2000/3000), the chipram bandwidth will limit the screemode resolution, so you won't get the 1024x768 or 1280x1024 like on AGA machines... well, maybe on the 3000 but not for the A500...
but then i wouldn't really worry about it, as an indivision will only be for plugging an OCS/ECS amiga into a modern display anyway :-)

and demos... lots of AGA demos... but then lots of OCS/ECS demos too. hmmm. there is a remote desktop client that is AGA/GFX card only. otherwise. can't think of much else. a couple of AGA only games, but you're not missing too much.

the only real advantages of a 1200 over 500, come from expandability.
a built in hard disk controller, and "relative" ease of finding accelerator cards, and using PCMCIA devices like network cards, and compactflash readers. plus the 1200 is garenteed to be a minimum of OS3.0 so pretty much all modern amiga software is garenteed to work.

[Zac67]

What's the point? Better get a 1200 in whole...

btw: The A3000's chip RAM is just 16 bit as well - only the CPU can access it 32 bit - so it's got exactly the same bandwidth.

[murple]

If you compare demos on ECS and AGA... yes, there is a huge difference. There aren't a whole lot of AGA only games but they do look real nice compared to the ECS ones. WorkBench can be set up fancier with AGA. The main graphics improvement shows in demos and graphics apps though.

AGA machines have other nice things though, like Zorro III.

Once you use an AGA machine you won't want to be limited to ECS... but ECS can do many cool things.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Matt_H wrote:
From a user perspective, all you'll see is that your screenmodes can now have up to 256 colors.

And AGA games have a bit more backgrounds and animation and the such.
Though most of the best looking games on bare miggys are OCS (like Lionheart and ElfMania)

[Piru]

@murple

If you compare demos on ECS and AGA... yes, there is a huge difference

There are some rather funky OCS demos made, too. For example Multicolor by Unique

The OCS/ECS demos look worse mostly because they're very very old. And the latest demos typically target a high end 060 system, too, while OCS/ECS demos mostly run on a stock A500 or so.

AGA machines have other nice things though, like Zorro III.

Nope. A1200 does not have Zorro III.