New accelerator on the way

[Richard42]

Vesalia shipped my new ACA 1231/42MHz A1200 accelerator today!  I'm super jazzed about getting this, because my current accelerator is a bit flaky.

[Iggy]

Vesalia shipped my new ACA 1231/42MHz A1200 accelerator today!  I'm super jazzed about getting this, because my current accelerator is a bit flaky.

Cool. That one looks neat.
'060's may be the ultimate, but I'd be willing to bet that your board is more compatible (I always like the '020 and '030).

[runequester]

Most all stuff works fine on an 030.

The ACA cards also benefit from very fast RAM, far as I could gather. I can even play Alien Breed 3D2 on my 030/56, though it chugs a little bit.

[amiman99]

Cool,
When you get it, run Sysinfo and lets compare the results. It says that it's faster then Blizzard 030 50MHZ, which I have (with 64MB RAM).

[NovaCoder]

I'm waiting for the 060 (FPGA based) card, I hope that he'll make it one day!

[zipper]

Cool,
When you get it, run Sysinfo and lets compare the results. It says that it's faster then Blizzard 030 50MHZ, which I have (with 64MB RAM).

Faster, yes (re Jens) - but just by about 0.1 MIPS.

[Richard42]

I have attached 3 screenshots.  The first is of my A1200 with no accelerator board installed.  The second is with my old accelerator, which I think was an MTec.  I bought this cheaply off someone on ebay.  It was pretty flaky (lots of crashes) when I got it, and found that it was OC'd by the factory (40Mhz clock speed but 33MHz 030 CPU).  I "right-clocked" it back down to 33MHz, where it's much more stable but still crashes sometimes.  The last screenshot is with the ACA1231/42.  Almost 10 MIPS (9.79).

Do I need to do anything to enable the MMU with WHDLoad or any other programs?

[MelbourneBen]

richard42, are you running WB 3.0 or 3.1? I'm running 3.0 and wondered if I had to run the tuning software to configure the ram? Or is this just for loading kick start into fast ram?

I'm hoping to order one of these cards when the next batch becomes available.

[Jope]

The MMU is enabled if something needs it, you don't need to turn it on separately.

WHDLoad doesn't really benefit from the MMU unless you're developing slaves.

[Richard42]

I'm running WB 3.1.  I haven't installed the tuning software yet, so I don't know for sure what it does.  I can see 3 different memory areas in SysInfo: a 2MB chip ram, a 1MB slow RAM 24bit DMA, and 62MB fast ram.

I have attached a pic of the board itself.  There are two 44-pin QFP chips near the amiga edge connector which have had the top surface ground away, so no marking is visible.  I think it was done on the board, because the small TSOPs underneath the QFPs had some dust on them.  I wonder why they would remove the markings on these chips.

[amigadave]

I'm waiting for the 060 (FPGA based) card, I hope that he'll make it one day!

I am sure MikeJ will follow through with his daughter board design and get it produced, at least in enough quantities for you and I to get one for our FPGA Arcade Replay boards.

I think both his Replay boards and the prototype daughter board that has been shown already are fantastic projects and worthy of becoming successful retail products.  They show off MikeJ's design talent and he has thought them out well, with great expansion possibilities for the future.  The FPGA Arcade Replay board and it's daughter board, plus the Natami (when it finally sees the light of day and becomes available for purchase by anyone) will raise the the capabilities of AmigaOS3.x to new heights and hopefully inspire more new Amiga software to be written in the months and years ahead of us.

[ExtremeWays]

Vesalia shipped my new ACA 1231/42MHz A1200 accelerator today!  I'm super jazzed about getting this, because my current accelerator is a bit flaky.

G'day Richard, have you had any stability problems with your ACA1231?  Vesalia have notified me that they've not been able to ship the ACA1231 due to some serious issues with the first batch.

[billt]

Vesalia shipped my new ACA 1231/42MHz A1200 accelerator today!  I'm super jazzed about getting this, because my current accelerator is a bit flaky.

Haha. My first thought seeing this title was that it would be a new product announcement. Boooo!

[Richard42]

G'day Richard, have you had any stability problems with your ACA1231?  Vesalia have notified me that they've not been able to ship the ACA1231 due to some serious issues with the first batch.

I haven't used it a whole lot yet (maybe 3-4 hours total), but I have not seen any crash.

[KimmoK]

Haha. My first thought seeing this title was that it would be a new product announcement. Boooo!

I think ACA 1231/42MHz is really a new accelerator.
It's being sold for the first time, one month "old" or so.

Actually it's accelerator card from the future:
"Today I’ve got some news concerning a hardware upgrade for the Amiga 1200. It turns out that a new accelerator card will be available for purchase shortly. Vesalia, which is a popular Amiga shop in Germany, estimates that it will arrive on the 1st of March 2012."
http://oldschoolgameblog.wordpress.com/2012/02/21/aca-123142-amiga-1200-accelerator-card-w-68030-cpu-incl-mmu/