Help me trick out an A2000

[Zac67]

Look at that monster! Compare that to my PC's wireless card which is about the size of credit card.

Look at this and weep:

(Yes, it's 802.11n - and it's cheap.)

[bbond007]

Generally if you have enough fast ram, then you won't need to worry about chip ram so much when you're using RTG.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Amiga-Picasso-II-Video-Card-/250657513275

There's a great RTG card for the 2000 at a decent price.  Better than the Spectrum, I'd say.

I would say to expand the chip ram to 1mb no matter what you do. I'd not worry about the super denise if I was going RTG.

[bbond007]

Look at this and weep:

(Yes, it's 802.11n - and it's cheap.)

So what

I have wireless PCMCIA for my 1200 which is the size of a credit card

[runequester]

here's another question:

Lets say I get a card like the GVP 2060. This can take up to 128 mb RAM.

Would it be possible to add more ram in the zorro 2 slots or no?

[the_leander]

Question is, why would you want to? I seriously doubt you would ever get near using all 128Mb of ram on a 68k Amiga.

[runequester]

Question is, why would you want to? I seriously doubt you would ever get near using all 128Mb of ram on a 68k Amiga.

At this point, Im mostly just wondering what routes to take and what is possible.

[the_leander]

With 128Mb of fast ram you're going to be in a position where its more likely you'll run out of chipram before reaching the limits on the fast. Even with the Spectrum onboard you're gong to struggle to use it all. Also given the costs involved, even if it were possible to add more via the Z2 slots, that is a slot you have essentially wasted. Get a USB or a eithernet board before you start thinking about doing things "because I can".

[zipper]

You can add 8 MB of ZorroII RAM, but the space is shared with the GFX gard, so Spectrum leaves 6 MB available. It may act as safety margin if you somehow fill the accelerator RAM totally - and you see the machine to crawl with the max 3.5 MB/s ZorroII speed. Done it with my A500T/060/128MB Blizzard RAM + 4 MB Oktagon ZorroII RAM just to see the slowness...

[radzik]

Better solution is VMEM, on my Blizzard 2060 with FastSCSI2 and IDE HDD (by converter IDEtoSCSI) I have 8,5 MB/s, so it is much faster than Fast Ram on Zorro II.

And Deneb is a must, usb lan card will cost you only 5$. And you can connect modern wireless keyboard/mouse, pendrives, hdd etc. Plus you can make your own custom kickstart and put it on Deneb.

[gertsy]

If you want to do web browsing I could suggest getting a cheapy SFF Pentium 4 PC motherboard with a PWR Supply and nice display card. Running AROS, or for better mainstream browser compatibility an unbranded Amiga pimped full XP theme and WinUAE. A very cheap starter and it'll do what you're after X times faster than a 060 Amiga 2000.

But it won’t really be an Amiga.  Will it..

[runequester]

With 128Mb of fast ram you're going to be in a position where its more likely you'll run out of chipram before reaching the limits on the fast. Even with the Spectrum onboard you're gong to struggle to use it all. Also given the costs involved, even if it were possible to add more via the Z2 slots, that is a slot you have essentially wasted. Get a USB or a eithernet board before you start thinking about doing things "because I can".

yeah, you are probably right

If you want to do web browsing I could suggest getting a cheapy SFF Pentium 4 PC motherboard with a PWR Supply and nice display card. Running AROS, or for better mainstream browser compatibility an unbranded Amiga pimped full XP theme and WinUAE. A very cheap starter and it'll do what you're after X times faster than a 060 Amiga 2000.

But it won’t really be an Amiga. Will it..

The whole idea is to do it on an amiga I already have a linux pc that can do any "serious" internet stuff i need just fine. This is for fun

[mbrantley]

have you had any problems running with a usb stick as a hard drive or is it pretty straight forward ?
 
Also, if the machine is going to primarily run applications, and use RTG, will I get a lot of mileage out of the expanded chip memory ?

No problems with operating from USB sticks, though it took me a little bit of headscratching to figure out how to set it up. Then I ran across a thread on this forum (I think) telling me how to flash the Deneb firmware with what is necessary to boot from USB stick.

And I figure there's two things in life you can't get enough of. I won't mention one, but the other is chip RAM in an Amiga. :-) But you're right -- RTG board will alleviate your dependency on it for a lot of stuff.