WTB: Amiga 1200 Accelerator

[amigakit]

The difference between Blizzard cards and ACA cards is the memory bus design- asynchronous vs synchronous.  

The ACA cards have more efficient memory access using modern SDRAM instead of old DRAM as used on the Blizzard.  This exposes the factory bugs inside some A1200 motherboards.

[magnetic]

Your source for that statement?

His source is himself lol

Its not a factual statement in several ways as ive run Apollo boards without any "fixes" needed.

The ACA boards are a cool design and are a nice price. However, alot of the collectors dont want to take their 20 yr old computer apart and send it in the mail to get "fixed" Its much easier to get a known compatible board like the blizzard. This is why these cards are so sought after as well.

[AllocVec]

I am offering a Blizzard 1230 with 68030/50 MHz and SCSI-Host-adapter at the moment, have a look here: http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=65469

[amigakit]

Its not a factual statement in several ways as ive run Apollo boards without any "fixes" needed.

Why would I post an infactual statement?

The ACA design is not based on the Apollo design.  The technology in both designs is very different.  A quick glance and comparison of the components on both boards will confirm this.

[kd7ota]

My ACA 1232 works GREAT! No mods done to my board. Can't remember off hand what revision the board was but posted it on another thread.  Only thing I did to the A1200 board was solder in all new capacitors. Not 1 lockup since.

[paul1981]

What kind of mods, and why?

I'm running a Rev 1A motherboard, if that means anything.

That's the best board revision. It won't need ANY timing fixes.
By an ACA1232@33MHz with 128MB ram from Amigakit. You won't regret it.

Unless you need an FPU? ACA1232 can't use an FPU. I'm mentioning this because you seem to have specific software in mind I think? FPU's are pretty useless though as far as I'm concerned.

[RepoOne]

Alright, thanks for all the advice.

I'll probably just take $200 from my next paycheck and buy a 68030/33MHz ACA accelerator, or one that is similarly priced on eBay. 128MB is certainly tempting, though. Oh, and a GBS-8200 as a scandoubler.

Also, I don't have any specific software in mind. I just want to be able to browse the web/telnet/IRC/E-Mail/etc and multitask more comfortably, and pimp out my workbench.

Then you'll probably see me on here a lot more often.

[magnetic]

Amikit
I wasnt refering to you it was the other guy that said the design was based on Apollo and also that Apollo boards require timing fixes. Both wrong. afaik of course

[ChaosLord]

Also, I don't have any specific software in mind. I just want to be able to browse the web/telnet/IRC/E-Mail/etc and multitask more comfortably, and pimp out my workbench.

In the interest of full disclosure I should warn you that you can absolutely forget about "comfortably browsing the web" with any 030 CPU.  The 030 is really really slow at processing data and decoding jpgs.  Webpages take foreeeeeeever to display.  Its no fun at all.

Remember the L1 cache on an 030 is soooooooo tiny that for many purposes it does not have any.

You really need an 060 to comfortably browse the web.

The other things on your list use a lot less CPU power and you might be happy with them on an 030 but but but.... you need to keep in mind that Amiga software for doing those things is megafantastically fancy.  Much fancier than lame Windows XP software.  The GUIs are superduper professional and you can customize every last little thing better than any Windows 7 program I have ever seen in my life.  But all that fanciness eats CPU cycles.  68030 cpus take 2 to 4 cycles to execute common instructions while 68060 cpus take 0.5 to 1 cycles to execute those same instructions.

Those hyperprofessional fancy MUI GUIs may feel laggy on your 030.  Just a fair warning.

And things like unzipping or unlhaing files will be quite slow on 030.  A 33 Mhz 040 is fully 3x as fast at uncompressing files as a 33Mhz 030.  An 060 is faster still.   Remember 030 does not have jack for cache.  And the cache that the 030 has is the really primitive 1980s cache.  68040 has 1990 technology cache called "copyback cache".  It provides a giant speedboost for code written in C (which is most Amiga software).

Good luck and I hope you enjoy your Amiga experience, especially IRC with AmIRC and/or WookieChat.

[ChaosLord]

Why would I post an infactual statement?

I will say this as nicely as I can since I really like you.

You have made unfactual statements before.  Maybe you were tricked into it.

Your website told me "no paypal fees".

Yet every single time I bought anything from you, I paid with my VISA debit card and PayPal charged me a $1.00 fee.

This makes you look very very bad because a $1.00 fee to PayPal is not "no paypal fees" no matter how you slice it or dice it.

[delshay]

I have posted this link in the past in another thread so here it is again. Fastest EDO dram.

 http://hwbot.org/competition/team_cup_2012_sc3/stage/623_edo_dram

[RepoOne]

In the interest of full disclosure I should warn you that you can absolutely forget about "comfortably browsing the web" with any 030 CPU.  The 030 is really really slow at processing data and decoding jpgs.  Webpages take foreeeeeeever to display.  Its no fun at all.

Remember the L1 cache on an 030 is soooooooo tiny that for many purposes it does not have any.

You really need an 060 to comfortably browse the web.

The other things on your list use a lot less CPU power and you might be happy with them on an 030 but but but.... you need to keep in mind that Amiga software for doing those things is megafantastically fancy.  Much fancier than lame Windows XP software.  The GUIs are superduper professional and you can customize every last little thing better than any Windows 7 program I have ever seen in my life.  But all that fanciness eats CPU cycles.  68030 cpus take 2 to 4 cycles to execute common instructions while 68060 cpus take 0.5 to 1 cycles to execute those same instructions.

Those hyperprofessional fancy MUI GUIs may feel laggy on your 030.  Just a fair warning.

And things like unzipping or unlhaing files will be quite slow on 030.  A 33 Mhz 040 is fully 3x as fast at uncompressing files as a 33Mhz 030.  An 060 is faster still.   Remember 030 does not have jack for cache.  And the cache that the 030 has is the really primitive 1980s cache.  68040 has 1990 technology cache called "copyback cache".  It provides a giant speedboost for code written in C (which is most Amiga software).

Good luck and I hope you enjoy your Amiga experience, especially IRC with AmIRC and/or WookieChat.

I do a lot of those things just fine on the stock processor, with a 4MB FastRAM expansion. I just can't do more than one or two at once because 4MB of RAM isn't anywhere near enough for multitasking the way I would like to.

An upgrade to a 33MHz 68030 + 128MB RAM would be pretty substantial, would it not?

Also, for the hyper-fancy stuff, I just use emulation, because I don't have $500 to spend on an '060.

[ElPolloDiabl]

An 040 or 060 can be overkill, unless there are a couple of programs that you know will take advantage of it.
It will give you plenty of CPU power, but it won't speed up the chipset.
One thing I liked having my 040 for was shapeshifter.

For web browsing nowadays you need a 1Ghz processor minimum. But don't forget the Amiga is just a hobby, so you only be going online for Aminet I would think.

[ChaosLord]

Back in 2001 and 2002 I used to race my A1200T with a 50 Mhz 060 against my brother's 650Mhz Athlon gaming rig with whatever was the top of the line gfx card back then.

My 50Mhz A1200 could browse the web just as fast as his 650MHz Athlon, except for .jpeg decoding.  His computer was always 3x or 4x the speed of my A1200 at that.

As long as you block flash and don't use Javascript, a 50 to 100 Mhz 060 is plenty good enuff for web browsing as long as you have 64MB or more RAM.

[ChaosLord]

I do a lot of those things just fine on the stock processor, with a 4MB FastRAM expansion. I just can't do more than one or two at once because 4MB of RAM isn't anywhere near enough for multitasking the way I would like to.

An upgrade to a 33MHz 68030 + 128MB RAM would be pretty substantial, would it not?

If that is the way you feel, then in your case you should go for it.  Amigas need lots of memory because they multitask very very well.  You can run as many programs as you want without slowing down your whole computer like Linux and Windoze XP do.

Honestly, I wish there were more ppl like you.  I write games that require 32MB+ and ppl are always complaining to me "argh!  I only have (16|8|4)MB of ram!"

If everyone would have 128MB of ram then I could happily write games that require 64MB and leave the other 64MB for multitasking.

[Madshib]

I'd like a "classic" accelerator as well. I just received my stock A1200 in the mail about a week ago and would already like to see a large speed improvement.

I am in agreement with not sending it out to be sure that it will work with an ACA accelerator. I actually saw the postman literally throw the A1200 up to my porch and was not only horrified, but proceeded to give a piece of my mind which, of course, was very welcome. Now that I have my 1200, he's not going anywhere any time soon

Thanks
Bob