A2620 & A2630 Amiga 2000 accelertor questions

[playgeneration]

According to this site: http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=165 the Commodore A2620 and 2630 accelerators have boot roms on them, and they need to be of a specific version (6.6+) to be able to boot OS2.0 and up.
 
I'm wondering why these accelerators need boot roms at all? As far as I see it a rom is needed to boot unix (the cards have no SCSI), but wont Amiga OS boot at all if you just take the roms off the accelerator? or are the roms a necessary component of the accelerators being recognised by the amiga?
 
And the other question is does the onboard RAM on these accelerators occupy the 2000's 24bit RAM space? therefore if I bought one of these accelerators would I need to ditch some of the RAM on my HC+8 SCSI card to keep within the 8mb limit?

[Nostalgiac]

dunno about "why" the boot roms.

But yes... these card's memory lives in the 8Mb space so yes, you will need to remove 2 or 4mb from your HC+8

Tom UK

[Matt_H]

The boot ROMs are the accelerator's firmware. The modern equivalent is a Flash update.

[barney]

A very interresting thing you need to know about the A2630 is this.  Regardless if you have 2 or 4 mb on the A2630 card, the GVP SCSI HC+8 card can only be populated with 4MB.  I wrestled with this for 2 weeks until I finally listened to sombody on this site and tested it out.  Good luck.

Barney

[CLS2086]

the A2630 got 2/4mb and 64/128kb of "bios" in the ZII Space...
the GVP got 64/128kb of bios and 0/2/4/8 mb iin the ZII Space...

all must fit in the 8mb ZII window space...

[rkauer]

Nope. Autoconfig space is a different address area than the Fast RAM.