Accelerator Card ACA-1220

[sturulez]

I'm looking at purchasing one of these accelerator cards? Can anyone give me any idea what they are like, if so are they are worth it?

 I've seen it on Amigakit.com but they never seem to have them in stock for some reason.


Thanks.

[MelbourneBen]

They havent been released yet. There is a forum on EAB (English Amiga board) which discusses the spec etc.

[sturulez]

Does anyone know when it's going to be released?

[vox]

I'm looking at purchasing one of these accelerator cards? Can anyone give me any idea what they are like, if so are they are worth it?

 I've seen it on Amigakit.com but they never seem to have them in stock for some reason.


Thanks.

If its 020 CPU, better buy 030, surely you will need it.

[sturulez]

Okay thanks. Can you reccomend an accelerator card for my A1200?

Also where to get hold of them? I've seen a few on eBay but they seem to go for ridiculous amount of money which Im not willing to pay for.

Would I have much benifits from purchasing one as I mainly play games on my current setup.

[som99]

Okay thanks. Can you reccomend an accelerator card for my A1200?

Also where to get hold of them? I've seen a few on eBay but they seem to go for ridiculous amount of money which Im not willing to pay for.

Would I have much benifits from purchasing one as I mainly play games on my current setup.

http://www.vesalia.de/e_aca1231-42.htm In stock and new.

[desiv]

If its 020 CPU, better buy 030, surely you will need it.

Not necessarily.
An 020 is about as fast as an 030 at the same clock speed.  (Not like the difference between the 030 and 040 at the same clock).

Yes, you won't get an FPU or MMU, but my 030EC doesn't have either of those.  There's not much (raytracers, some demos) that use an FPU and less (Shapeshifter for Mac video enhancements and some dev stuff?) that uses an MMU.

At the speed of the 1220 (with it's pretty fast fast RAM), you'll be at the lower end of enjoying the FPS games.
However, you'll have plenty of speed for almost every other Amiga game (unfortunately, not a lot of them take advantage of extra CPU) and have PLENTY of RAM for WHDLoad.

My main question/concern about the 1220 is whether or not it's RAM is mapped to be PCMCIA friendly.
That much RAM, you'd have no problem with most WEB apps (I'm not saying ibrowse on the Amiga is great, but it works), but not if you can't use your PCMCIA card at the same time as the RAM.
I haven't seen an answer about that one yet tho..

Other than that, I'd say it's a great low end card.

That being said, a faster Amiga is almost always better.. ;-)  But unless you want great framerates on FPS games (in which case you need a FAST 030 or higher), the 1220 should be a great card.

desiv

[Crumb]

Not necessarily.
An 020 is about as fast as an 030 at the same clock speed.  (Not like the difference between the 030 and 040 at the same clock).

You are probably right. 030 has 256bytes of memory for both data and instruction caches (68020 only has instruction cache IIRC)*and supports burst modes (useful for c2p). Motorola used 020,040,060 for major revisions and 68010,030 were minor ones.

[Damion]

Would I have much benifits from purchasing one as I mainly play games on my current setup.

For playing games and keeping costs and hassle low, I don't think you can do better than the 1220. If you want something with more grunt, go for the 1231-41. (Jens sure made a nice board there, beats my 50MHz GVP in some AIBB tests)

[amigakit]

The ACA1220 will be perfect for most retro gaming/WHDLOAD games.  It has not yet been released so that it why our website is featuring it for preorder only at the moment.

When it is released we will also be stocking the new ACA 1232 which will be an '030 accelerator.

[danbeaver]

As somewhat stated above, a 68030 is the same as a 68020 except for the slight 256 byte data cache and the option for an on-chip MMU. As not so clear is the answer that the 1220 has memory that does NOT bother the PCMCIA port. For just plain gaming, the 68020 + on board RAM (ACA 1220) is fine.  Jens has the release of the BigRam slated for this month, so I'm assuming the rest of his kit will be in the same time frame.

When computing power is really noticeable is in the 040/060 range especially with the PPC; add in OS 4.1 and you are living large.

[ElPolloDiabl]

The onboard 68020 is only a cheaper 24-bit model @ 14mhz. 020 upgrades are usually a full 32-bit model. The 68030 is almost identical except for the MMU on chip. Both require an external FPU.
The 040 and 060 have a lot more cache and also the FPU onchip.

[danbeaver]

Both require an FPU

The FPU is not "Required" nor is an MMU; the amount of memory addressable 24-lines vs 32-lines only means something if you need to exceed 16 Megabytes. It does not make the on board 68020 any "cheaper," as both will run at the same clock cycles (crystal dependent) and give the same computational power. Since the Amiga could only give 8MB of on board ram, there was no need to use a 32-bit CPU. So it made the "Motherboard" cheaper to manufacture in exactly the same way that the 8088 made the first IBM PC easier and less expensive, and of recall the Intel 80386SX did the same thing

[desiv]

Well, just heard from Jens (the designer) on EAB and he has mapped the RAM into the 32bit address space (Yes, it's not a full 32bit CPU, but this is Jens.. he's really good).

End result is, no conflict with the PCMCIA slot.
(Unless you try to use SRAM, but who would use slow 2M or 4M SRAM when they already have 128M... ;-)

So, for the money, that's a great card...

Now, if you want faster, that's OK..

But, I can tell you, the 1220 is coming in about $25 more than what I paid for my 8M RAM card for my 1200.  And this is a new card.

I love the ACAs, but I probably would have gone for the 1220 had it been released when I was shopping.

desiv