New A4000, some questions...

[alberonn]

AFAIK, the battery just runs the clock when you power down. You can either set the clock youself when your power up or if your Amiga is on the 'net you can use a program like FACTS to set the clock for you.

I have a battery in mine, but my board was supposedly refurbished by Software Hut a few years ago.

My experience with Zorro-II RAM came when I plugged in an 8MB SupraRAM card I had in my old A2000 into the A4000. Sure the memory showed up, but it really bogged my system down bad. It would be nice if I could add some extra RAM without taking such a huge speed hit.

What really made it stand out was watching how slow the buttons were being drawn in on iBrowse when I fired it up. While I need the RAM, it wasn't worth the price I was paying by adding it the way I did. For this reason, I have the RAM on my A2091 disabled. (It's fully populated with a whopping 2MB of RAM. LOL Pity I cannot take advantage of DMA transfers with the board.)

Your SCSI controller looks like it's fully populated with RAM anyway. One thing to keep in mind is that the GVP controllers usually required special GVP SIMMs.

[Imerion]

I have removed the battery. I really wont need a clock anyway. The board is fully populated, but its only a total of 12 mb, so I might get som bigger sims. Perhaps I can find som from GVP on an auction. I also have an empty slot on the mother-board. Can I add some mem there?

Also, I checked the settings in MCP. These are the processor settings I have for the moment :
An (X) after something means its currently turned on.

VBR to Fast-Memory (X)
Instruction Cache (X)
SpeedRamsey - Tried this, it crashed
SSP to Fast-Memory
Copyback (X)
Data Chache (X)
FastGary (X)
FastRom
Audio Filter

Can someone tell which should be checked/unchecked to get maximum speed. The help-file is not very useful in this area

[Holley]

On your motherboard you can have 2Mb of chip ram (it's best to leave that be), and up to 16Mb in simms (it needs a set of 4!).  Unfortunately not all simms the right size work (IIRC they're 30 pin ones).

I'm guessing yours shows up 8Mb on the SCSI card and 2Mb of chip, which would explain why everything feel sluggish in games!

The accellerator isn't ideal, but it's ok :-)

Those settings should result in good performance as long as you have enough Ram (8Mb counts as enough, unless any games work better with a full 8Mb available - that I don't know).

EDIT: sorry, you said 12Mb ... disable/remove the SCSI card ram and see how much shows up! - only the Fast mem matters for counting if you already have the full 2Mb of chip.

[magnetic]

HI

Nice A4000. We have a nice Warp Engine 4040 accelerator in stock with 64mb 32mb ram on board and a Fast SCSI 2 controller on board - 10/mbs! All that for only $250! We are located in NYC.

www.magneticsystemsnyc.com

We also have tons of other Amiga gear let me know if you need anything.

magnetic

[TjLaZer]

@alberonn

You don't have to disable any 16bit RAM in the 4000 if you have higher priority 32bit RAM!  My 4000 has 2MB Chip, 16MB on the MB, 128MB on a DKB 3128 and 128MB on the GVP-m 4060 card!  It runs the same with or without the slower RAMs.  The way it works the system sets a priority to the RAM.  I think Chip is like -2, 16bit RAM is -1, MB RAM is 0 and 32bit RAM on a CPU card is like 3 or something.  What happends is the system always uses the higher priority RAM, then when all of that is exhausted, it uses the lower priority RAM until all RAM is used up.  So unless I use up 128MB of RAM, my system will never suffer from the slower RAM.

[TjLaZer]

@magnetic

Isn't that a little steep for a 040 card in 2004?  You can get a 060 card for ~$300 on eBay.

[Imerion]

I checked it, its 2 mb on the motherboard, and 12mb on the SCSI-card. And the reason its slow is because the SCSI card has slow acess to the memory. In another word, using only the 2 mb on the motherboard would be faster?

@TjLaZer

Isn't 300$ a little steep for a 060 when you can get a G3 for
500$

[Cyberus]

Holley wrote:
On your motherboard you can have 2Mb of chip ram (it's best to leave that be), and up to 16Mb in simms (it needs a set of 4!).  Unfortunately not all simms the right size work (IIRC they're 30 pin ones).

They're 72 pin SIMMS on the mobo :-)

[Gojirax]

The 3640 was the slowest/cheapest '040 board ever made in the history of the world according to the interview with Dave Haynie on this site: http://www.amiga.org/modules/sections/index.php?op=viewarticle&artid=15

I've had a few 4000 040/25's in the past, and I can say that for most operations it wasn't that noticably faster than my A1200's with 030/50's in em. (Except in certain functions.. it really did sorta depend on what you were doing.)

So how come I never hear people talking about Fblit when they are talking about performance improvement? That used to be one of my fave programs for getting my AGA Amigas to fly. (iBrowse especially flew and scrolled web pages in 256 colors nicely with Fblit.)

Regards,
Goji

[Holley]

My bad :-) Can you remember which kinds of Simm work, Cyberus?

I think this is a case of the 2Mb on the MB running out, then the slower being used pretty quickly - it certainly explains why Workbench seems fast, but games slow!

If you can find a set of 16Mb for the MB then it'll only slow when you run out of fast memory (I think that made sense ...).

When I was talking about disabling the SCSI memory I was thinking to work out how much memory was needed, but you know already, so no worries.

TJ is in the enviable position of having memory to cobble dogs with, I've got 16Mb in my A3000 and now 8 in my A1200 :-)

[alberonn]

-8<---

What happends is the system always uses the higher priority RAM, then when all of that is exhausted, it uses the lower priority RAM until all RAM is used up. So unless I use up 128MB of RAM, my system will never suffer from the slower RAM.

-8<---

Well my problem is that I would be touching that 16 bit RAM as I am using up all of my RAM...

I burn though 16MB of Fast RAM easily, especially when I'm surfin' the 'net

[TjLaZer]

Ahh yes indeed.  Having 272MB of FAST Ram on the Amiga is greeaat... lol  I just like having it, I hardly ever use it. (I got this DKB 3128 for $25 on eBay in 2002)

[Imerion]

Fblit? I got a program called SpeedBlit, I think.
Are there any other programs that patches or in other ways speeds up the system?

[Holley]

Alberonn - AWeb has been working ok for me with 16Mb of fastmem (though I've never really pushed it hard!).

TJ - no worries - TBH I havn't found the quantity bad, just the speed frustrating! Whenever I get another machine I just know I won't have a use for more than 256Mb, lol.

It's a shame all the nice big box accellerators are so flippin' expensive right now!

[alberonn]

It must be nice to have that much RAM on your system. Even with 16MB of Fast RAM, I'm usually left with under half of that when I boot up. Maybe I got too much stuff running on my system...

It does seem that OS 3.5+ did start to suck lotsa RAM since I remember having more RAM when I was running OS 3.1...

[Holley]

I'm usually left with under half of that when I boot up

:-? Errr, there's something eating that up which shouldn't be!  I just have 3.9 (with Amidock, Glowicons etc), CGX4 and MUI ... and very little else at startup!  It's basic, and takes up very little memory.  CGX helps as it makes use of the graphics card memory though.