Apollo 1230 MKIII accelerator board

[Beowulf]

Hi peoples

There is an Apollo 1230 accelerator on e bay im thinking about purchasing. There is no RAM with it. The big book of amiga hardware site says that the board can use EDO Ram but doesnt take advantage of it and that is has a jumper for 60ns mode memory. Does this mean EDO RAM will be just as fast as the default 72pin SIMM Ram the card uses? Is that custom RAM from GVP? or can you obtain the RAM elsewhere?
The seller also states:
"my 1200 with kickstart 3.1, would not boot with the jumper for FastRAM enabled. Disabled, the computer boots fine - with the cpu command in a shell, the 68030 and 68882 are shown as working fine. "
Does this sound like the card is stuffed? or just an isolated occurance on that machine?

Can anyone help me??
 :-?

[doctorq]

If I were you I would forget about the Apollo accelerator, and start looking for a Blizzard 1230 instead. The Blizzard board has no problems with any expansion you might want to throw at it, as most other accelerators have.

Unless the Apollo is dead cheap (around 20 EURO) save your money and buy a better accelerator from the start.

-EDIT-

Just found the auction; seems to me like the auction is screaming "AVOID, AVOID" all over it.

[Beowulf]

@doctorq

Thanks for your reply.
I won the bid anyway. It was cheap considering the prices of accelerators boards these days. Hopefully it was just a conflict with the Ram the seller was using
I know where to get some FPM Simm Ram this should work right?

[countzero]

yeah, the guy said "may be faulty" in the second title, which kind of looks funny from the search page ...

APOLLO 1230 Accelerator for the Amiga 1200 !!!
(may be faulty)

congrats !

[bludger]

I was the seller, as you can see from my composition, communication isn't my forte.

I had tried a variety of ram sticks in the board before asking a friend who's better at solving hardware mysteries to check the board.

He couldn't find a specific fault so he sent it back last week, and as I was offering a few things on ebay, I added this board.

Funny thing is, I looked at it a couple of days ago and I noticed that ALL the contacts on the first Simm slot were sitting [color=ff0000]below[/color] the sides making electrical contact unlikely.

The second slot is ok and I had tried just putting ram in that slot, but perhaps the first one has to be populated for the second to work? I did go to great pains to point out that I don't know if it's repairable - it's not as if I tried to mislead anybody.

Hey Beowulf, I'll throw in a few sticks for you to test with, my 1200 is in pieces on the floor, so I didn't experiment with the dodgy pins to see if that helped.

[doctorq]

I did go to great pains to point out that I don't know if it's repairable - it's not as if I tried to mislead anybody.

As I see it, none has said so you tried to mislead anybody. You state in the auction that the board is faulty, and bidders will have to accept that.

My remarks where only my point of view, as I haven't got a lot of faith in Apollo boards in general, and to add to that the auction says it may be faulty, so I thought "Why bother, go get an accelerator that is confirmed to work, if that is what you need."

[Beowulf]

@countzero

Yeah bit of a gamble. But if both the cpu and fpu are working fine then surely it was only a RAM problem? with the boot issues and all. Well im hoping it was only a RAM problem  :-(

[Beowulf]

@bludger

OK. Do you mean the first slot wasnt making contact or the ram stick wasnt making contact? Thanks for the extra ram too

[bludger]

Well we all have to find out sometime that some stuff is better than others!

So it is with Apollo boards, there are surely thousands of people who never had a moments worry with one of these cards. You just get the occaisional one that doesn't want to play nice.

I hope Beowulf has more luck than me getting it to work.

I got an A4000/040 since getting the accelerator, so the 1200 has become a low priority for me. :idea:

[bludger]

All the pins on one side are sitting a millimetre or so proud of the socket.

On the other side, it looks like they're half a mil below the surface!

I don't know if they will raise slightly when you put the ram in? :-?  :-?  :-?

The second slot has all the pins clearly visible.

I've never seen this before - anyone got any experience of something similar?

[swift240]

Hi, I also use an Apollo MkIII Turbo 40Mhz with 32 meg of fastram, no FPU,  With 3.1 roms and OS3.9.
Never had a problem with it, before installing my Mediator and with the Mediator.

The Blizzard is a better board, but I had not enough money to get one, so I stuck with the Apollo with still no problems.
It is possible it may be ok for you, but there again computers can be funny things at times.

Mike.  

[Beowulf]

@Swift

Hi

Are you using EDO ram with your apollo 1230 or FPM ram?

[doctorq]

Well we all have to find out sometime that some stuff is better than others!

So it is with Apollo boards, there are surely thousands of people who never had a moments worry with one of these cards. You just get the occaisional one that doesn't want to play nice.

The one I had worked fine, but it is public known that Blizzard boards are better than Apollo boards. I'm sure many people are happy with their Apollo board, but I reckon they would be happier if the had a Blizzard instead.