I’ve just bought an Amitek A1200 Hawk RAM accelerator board from eBay, after I thought I’d already bought one from eBay, but the package didn’t actually contain the board itself!
This particular Amitek Hawk board is fitted with the full 8Mb RAM, but has no FPU or accompanying crystal, so I want to upgrade it. My main interest in doing this is not to speed up games, but to speed up Deluxe Paint, as well as to finally fulfil my fantasies of producing ray traced graphics on the Amiga using Sculpt 3D, Imagine, or some other application. This is something I always wanted to do on the Amiga and even creating a scene with a few shiny balls would make me happy. However, I recently saw a video showing that the game Elite, or a particular version of it, ran very smoothly on an accelerator which I think has a similar spec. Can anyone tell me about any other games that benefit from an FPU?
You might be thinking that the upgrade is quite straightforward, but I had a nasty experience attempting this kind of upgrade a few months ago, as I’ll explain.
I bought an FPU (but no crystal) from a well known current Amiga dealer to upgrade a RAM card I’d already bought from them. I ordered this card on the same day as I ordered a home brewing kit from Alaska, USA. The Amiga dealer is about 247Km away from my home address and in the same country. Alaska is about 7,117Km away from my home address. After the package from Alaska arrived first, I contacted the Amiga dealer to ask where my FPU order was, then they told me they hadn’t even posted it! They posted it later that day or the next day. I followed their instructions about how to fit it, but after I inserted the FPU, my Amiga A1200 wouldn’t even boot up! I think I also had a yellow screen and a red screen. I set the jumper to disable the FPU, but then had system Software Error messages. I bought a PLCC extractor tool and removed the FPU. Unfortunately, after this I still had problems and found that I’m no longer able to use the full 8Mb of RAM on the board. Cleaning the contacts on the A1200 motherboard and cleaning the RAM card connector made no difference. As this particular Amiga dealer has been taking ages to send out orders for some time now, I didn’t feel like sending the board and FPU back to them to look at, then waiting several weeks, or 2-3 months with my Amiga A1200 reduced to its onboard 2Mb RAM. One of their team told me there are only two of them there building and fixing things!
I bought the Amitek Hawk RAM board accelerator, to get my A1200 back up to a total of 10Mb RAM, so I can run lots of different WHDload games, instead of only a few. I also want to accelerate it for applications, though.
According to the box and the manual I’ve already got, I need a 33Mhz 68882 FPU, as well as an accompanying 33Mhz crystal for the maximum performance from this board. Unfortunately, I still don’t know what went wrong when I did my unsuccessful upgrade, so I hope someone out there can advise me exactly what type of FPU and crystal to buy, where from, and exactly how to fit them without damaging the FPU, the crystal, or the board.
After this board arrives, I also plan to send back the damaged 8Mb board with its FPU to the Amiga dealer with the very slow service. I think I’ll also ask them to perform a full FPU and crystal upgrade while they’ve got it. If I send it to them next week, I might get it back before Christmas, if I’m lucky. Then, if anything goes wrong with my Amitek Hawk board, I’ll have a backup.
