Why accelerate an Amiga?

[DonP1]

This is a funny question coming from someone who overclocks the hell out of PCs, but I'm wondering what you guys use the accellerated Amiga for?

Do games run correctly, or do you run into problems? I've seen a lot about compatibilty issues, so I was just wondering.

Thanks,

Don

[madsjm]

I would use it only for demos. From the demoscene, that is.

[motorollin]

Accelerators can cause problems for some older games, but most accelerators can be disabled by holding down a key when you power the Amiga on. Also, WHDLoad fixes most games so the work fine with any accelerator.

I use my 060 to make my tricked out Workbench nice and fast, and also for playing higher end games.

--
moto

[swift240]

Hmmm well Ok, I use an Apollo Turbo MkIII 030/40 Mhz
This is not the fastest out there, but I run programs with more speed, and the extra Fastram on board the accelerator helps a lot.

With just 2 meg of Chipram I can not run OS3.9 so with 32meg of Fastram on the accelerator I can.
Ok to be fair I dont need an accelerator to get Fastram but with the aid of an accelerator it does help a lot.

With an accelerator I make use of an Mediator 6 slot PCI board to make use of PCI cards.

So in short with no accelerator you can only do a certain amount of things, with an accelerator you can do much more.

Mike.

[Angus]

I'd say that the most compatible Amiga is an A1200 with a Blizzard 1230 with some extra ram, and WHDLoad installed.

There's an awful lot of games you won't be able to play on a vanilla 500/1200 or whatever.

A cool thing about having an accelerator is that the WHDLoad patchers often tweak the games so they will take advantage of more powerful machines, giving the games a new lease of life. Or in the case of games like Red Baron which in my view was just too slow to be playable in the first place, they have actually brought it to life.  

[Ross1]

Accelerators help with speeding up the rendering of 3D programs on the Amiga. I use Lightwave and it increases the rendering time by more than 20% and allows my scenes to be far more complicated. Also accelerators usually have on board memory (in my case 128mb) so using patches like FBlite will shift over some of the workbench graphics to fast ram rather then using chip.

[T3000]

Ross1 wrote:
it increases the rendering time by more than 20%

?increases? hmmm...   :-o

[Tomas]

DonP1 wrote:
This is a funny question coming from someone who overclocks the hell out of PCs, but I'm wondering what you guys use the accellerated Amiga for?

Do games run correctly, or do you run into problems? I've seen a lot about compatibilty issues, so I was just wondering.

Thanks,

Don

There might be some problems with early badly written games, but properly coded games do usually have no compatibility problems with accelerators.
And the reason for using one, is because it improves the speed significantly and is even required by more modern amiga games. A program called whdload fixes most compatibility problems in older games.

[dandelion]

If you want to do stuff other than mess about with games you'll need an accelerator. I used my 060 Amiga 4000 for web browsing and some 3d rendering and for both of these things you need an accelerator (and of course, more RAM). I would say, if you want to do anything other than play small older games you need to whack it at least more memory and a hard drive but your Amiga is going to feel a LOT more modern and responsive with a decent processor in there.

By the way, surely 20% is a bit of an underestimate even if you say "decreases rendering time".

[Akiko]

@Angus

Or in the case of games like Red Baron which in my view was just too slow to be playable in the first place, they have actually brought it to life.

Absolutely! I'm especially looking forward to a whdload version of Wing commander! :-)

 

[leirbag28]

@DonP1

How about to Speed up the Operating System?

In my opinion and observations........AmigaOS/Workbench is still one of the Zippiest and Smoothest OS's out there.  I have a Dell Pentium 4 and three G4 Macs with OSX and I still love Workench a whole lot better. Also Got Ubuntu Linux (Darn Good!)


Runs lovely with an accelerator.

Also I use it For SCALA MM300 (Amiga's PowerPoint) to do presentations on Video and run the Animations smoothly as well as run Larger animations.

[rkauer]

Just an example:

Do you try run Genetic Species with a plain 4000?

[James]

I guess it all depends on what you plan to do with the machine. If it's for nostalgia, circa 1991, then by all means leave it stock. Pretty much all the games on Amiga, except a few of the later titles, were designed to run on a stock machine.

I have had a LOT of compatibility problems with my DKB Cobra and older games. Unfortunately for me, the Cobra is about as easy to put in the Amiga as trying to push a thumbtack in your eyeball. At first I had removed all the casing from the amiga so I could rip out the Cobra easily, but that ain't good for the machine, and constantly removing the board wasn't exactly good for the connector either. Without the accelerator though, I have almost no compatibility problems. Some of the compatibility problems can be solved via the early boot menu, or with the use of tools like Degrader.

*BUT*, without my accelerator (and the 32mb of ram with it) using the workbench is...something else. You have to keep it as feature-less as possible to preserve RAM and performance and that ain't fun at all if you plan on using the amiga for more than games.

If you can afford it, get a 1200 and accelerate it so you can enjoy the latter part of the Amiga software history. Then get an A500+ or an A600 (most of them are dirt cheap now) and keep it away from compatibility-impairing hardware such as accelerators. HD's and RAM expansions are nothing to worry about. Personnally I'd go for the A600 if you're a little short on cash as the 500's HDs are getting rarer, and more expensive whereas you can just shove (almost) any 2.5" IDE drive in a 600 assuming it has KS2.05 (prior versions did not have support for HD or PCMCIA).

But don't expect PC-like tweaking. On a PC you can get anywhere from 10% to 500% speed increases with only a couple of BIOS settings and a cooling system. It's quite the opposite on the Amiga...Don't forget that while you can accelerate the processing power of the machine, most of the hardware inside remains that old 198x/199x technology.

[humppa]

@Akiko

I'm especially looking forward to a whdload version of Wing commander!

There are already patches for the CD32 version of Wing Commander (better graphics).

[Bug_racer]

Due to my lack of understanding of computers I'd like to understand the acceleration thing a little more .

How is it done ?
Apart from the extra heat are there any other negative aspects ? Can hardware/software wear out quicker ?

How much can you accelerate it by ?

Are there any programs that require an accelerator to work vs not having one and waiting for the program to load a bit slower (Im hoping I understand the basics of the accelerator to ask this question )

 :-D