My A500+ Project

[pyrre]

@ sim085

Here is your future accelerator for your A500+...
Just start bidding.

I have one of these myself. it is really great...
Although, it do not have any kind of hdd controller. but the speed is close to comparable to an A1200 with blizzard 1230 mkIV. A friend of mine has an A1200 such speced...
(though, i have the 50mhz version...)

EDIT: ooops. i forgot the link... :-D

[sim085]

At the moment I am also looking in an 040 accelerator card for the A500+.

I bought the ROM 3.1 (amigakit) and Workbench 3.1 (eBay). With the GVP HD8+ hard drive (with 4Mb fast ram) and the extra 1Mb slow ram I should be able to achieve my above goal right?; that is to browse the internet from my A500+.

If yes then would my A500+ be under so much stress (without the accelerator card) that it could burn?

Also I do intend to even try to install Workbench 3.9 on my A500+. However for that I would need to definitely buy a good accelerator card a CD drive and the actual workbench on CD. However I still have the same worry - could my A500+ get burn with all that stress processing?  

[rkauer]

sim085 wrote:
--zip--
 However I still have the same worry - could my A500+ get burn with all that stress processing?

 No. Maybe you will need another PSU to run all add-ons you want.

 A Goliath or a hacked AT/ATX PSU.

[darksun9210]

there are the PPS 040 accelerators out there, but i have never ever seen one come up on ebay :-D
trouble is that IIRC they are/were only expandable to 8Mb of ram...

the other option you have is to build some kind of slingshot device that bolts onto the sidecar expansion slot to give you an A2000 style CPU slot. then you can plug in A2000 style accelerators.

bit of a mission is you will probably have scsi cables and drives all over the place, not to mention some sort of uprated power hookup to drive an 040 or 060.

if you really really want to go that route, then i'd look out for an A500 zorro bus board. as these provide not only the CPU slot, but zorro2 slots aswell, for things like graphics, ethernet, and sound cards. then you'll need to put it all into some full height PC tower case.
have a look through the images as there is one guy who has done this already. and got an 060 powered A500.

otherwise, if you want to stick with the A500ness of your current setup, i'd get the derringer card. it'll outgun pretty much anything except top end 030 cards and above, being and order of magnitude faster than the stock 68000,
and be compatable with pretty much everything, and provide you with the most amount of ram, barring an A2000 type accelerator...

 :-)

[sim085]

My hard drive will have a PSU all for itself so that means I will have two PSU's, one for A500+ and one for the hard drive. What I am most worried is if the CPU (on the A500+ or the accelerator card) could get burned because of the amount of processing requested by the operating system.

Regarding Fast RAM; how much Fast RAM is enough? That is how much Fast RAM will actually make a difference for the processor?

Today's processor have an address space and having more RAM then the address space can support is pretty much useless right? Didn't the A500+ processor work the same way?

[alexh]

sim085 wrote:
I bought the ROM 3.1 (amigakit) and Workbench 3.1 (eBay). With the GVP HD8+ hard drive (with 4Mb fast ram) and the extra 1Mb slow ram I should be able to achieve my above goal right?; that is to browse the internet from my A500+.

Not graphically. How are you going to connect your Amiga to the internet? SLIP/PPP connection to the PC? An analog modem?

sim085 wrote:
If yes then would my A500+ be under so much stress (without the accelerator card) that it could burn?

Absolutely, make sure you've got a fire extinguisher. Or perhaps some liquid nitrogen! ;-)

sim085 wrote:
Also I do intend to even try to install Workbench 3.9 on my A500+. However for that I would need to definitely buy a good accelerator card a CD drive and the actual workbench on CD. However I still have the same worry - could my A500+ get burn with all that stress processing?  

I would say no, but it depends on the accelerator. Some 040's are known to run rediculously hot.

You do not need to have a CD-Drive to install OS3.9! Take your hard drive out, put it in the PC install using WinUAE.

sim085 wrote:
Regarding Fast RAM; how much Fast RAM is enough?

For 99.99% of everything Amiga, 32Mbytes will be fine. You could probably get away with 8Mbytes but if your accelerator can take more you'd be mad not to max it out.

32Mbytes is the maximum for most A500 accelerators.

[sim085]

alexh wrote:
Absolutely, make sure you've got a fire extinguisher. Or perhaps some liquid nitrogen! ;-)

You are joking or?  :-?

[alexh]

sim085 wrote:
You are joking or?  :-?

Of course

[sim085]

alexh wrote:

sim085 wrote:
You are joking or?  :-?

Of course

Thank god my heart missed a beat on that line

I will try to configure my A500+ as it is. I still have to remove the leaky battery, and make the keyboard work. Then I will install Workbench 3.1 on the hard drive and see if everything works fine. If so then I will try to connect the A500+ with my PC and see if I can manage to browse the internet Depending on the success of that I will decide what to do next.

How often do 'good' accelerator cards come over eBay? Or this is usually a very rare deal?

[darksun9210]

My hard drive will have a PSU all for itself so that means I will have two PSU's, one for A500+ and one for the hard drive. What I am most worried is if the CPU (on the A500+ or the accelerator card) could get burned because of the amount of processing requested by the operating system.

erm. nope, you should be ok. you can stick a heatsink to it if you really want...

Regarding Fast RAM; how much Fast RAM is enough? That is how much Fast RAM will actually make a difference for the processor?

64 kilobytes of fast ram will make a difference to the processor, as it has direct access and doesn't have to fight the custom chips to get to it. hence 'fast' ram. but this amount will be pretty useless to actually run stuff in.
4-8Mb makes a very usuable machine,
16-32Mb and you don't need to worry about running out of memory from running TCP/IP stacks, web browsers, paint packages, music players etc all at once...
64-128+Mb for big lightwave renders and openGL games,

Today's processor have an address space and having more RAM then the address space can support is pretty much useless right? Didn't the A500+ processor work the same way?

yup. the 68000, being a 16bit chip has a maximum of 16Mb of address space. on the A500+, this is (roughly speaking) split into, 2Mb is assigned to chipram, around 1Mb for the operating system rom, 8Mb for zorro2 ram space, around another meg for autoconfig space, and the remaining 4Mb for motherboard resources.
the 68030 being a fully 32bit chip has 4Gb of address space. hence being able to put 256Mb ram on a Blizzard 1230.
the Derringer board, cpu, and memory is fully 32bit, but has to comply with the above memory layout for the A500+. so its onboard memory is outside of the 16Mb upper limit for 16bit range. i think it autoconfigs properly to tell the amiga about this new memory area, but i could be wrong, and you may need to run a utility to tell the amiga this neew memory is there, before the memory is available.

anyway, the two advantages are, that this doesn't clash with the memory already in your GVP, as the GVP ram sits in the 16bit zorro2 ram addres range, AND that you are not limited to the 16bit address range for the Derringer's onboard 32bit ram, so you could (memory controllers permitting) have as much ram as you liked up to the upper 4Gb limit of the 32bit address range.

[alexh]

darksun9210 wrote:
yup. the 68000, being a 16bit chip has a maximum of 16Mb of address space.

[Snip]

the [accelerator] memory is outside of the 16Mb upper limit for 16bit range.

This is me just being pedantic but the 68000 has a 24-bit address bus and that is why it can access 16Mbytes. The 16-bit refers to the external data bus.

2^24 = 16M bytes
2^16 = 64K bytes

[darksun9210]

ahaaaaa... that makes sence, just like the range of the EC020 on an A1200...

good stuff, everyday's a school day :-)

[HyAmi]

How often do 'good' accelerator cards come over eBay? Or this is usually a very rare deal?

Not too often. I believe I've seen one viper530 the last  three years. Derringers are a little less rare; maybe 3 in the last 2 years. I'd say it must be a sign of God/Buddha/Jawhe/Allah/...* that a Derringer pops up on ebay right now.

* Select or add your preferred deity

[pyrre]

If i am not completely wrong it should be an easy task upgrading the derringer to 50 mhz.
However. the hard part is to get the 030 cpu that can handle 50mhz. after that it is just to replace the oscillator.
And add a heat sink to the cpu....

looking at the pictures there is not much difference in the 50 mhz and the 30mhz versions....

EDIT:
OH. and adding a 50mhz capable fpu and its separate oscillator for extra performance boost...
Doing so you get pretty close to what an A1200 with 1230 is doing...

EDIT:
I did a testrun on my A500.
In sysinfo 3.23 it gives 7636 dhrystones and 7.97 mips
(Anyone with any 1230 for comparing....?)

[sim085]

If I do get a Viper 530 and 128Mb of Fast RAM then would I also be able to install OS4.1 (I think this is the latest version) on my A500+ as well? Or I can only arrive till Workbench 3.9 max!

[darksun9210]

nope, the viper, being a 68k based accelerator, will only allow you to run OS3.9. so will the derringiner, and the GVP A530...

for OS 4.0 you need an A1200 or A4000 with a PPC cpu accelerator, and for OS 4.1, at the moment it seems you need a PPC based AmigaOne...