A1200 with 4mb Trapdoor expansion

[Robert17]

Hey guys just bought myself some kit from ebay, a 4.1gb laptop hard drive (I've been told I can format it to 4gb and use it that way with OS 3.0) And one of those trapdoor memory expansions for the A1200 with 4mb, What kind of a performance boost can I expect from adding 4mb Fast ram?

Cheers

[Linchpin]

Hi there!

Proberbly not a great deal using the standard CPU.

Your best bet would be to get an Accelerator card ..

Best way to test it is to plug it in and see :-)

[mikeymike]

RAM access will be faster as you'd be using newer RAM and a better CPU on an accelerator card.

[Robert17]

Just I read somewhere ages ago from a company selling the ram expansions that adding fastram doubles the speed of the A1200 to 28mhz, I didn't think it was true either lol

[nOw2]

Any fast RAM in the trapdoor will around double the speed of the machine.

No, not in terms of MHz, that would be silly. In terms of, 'here Mr. CPU, have some memory you don't have to argue with the custom chips over for every access'.

[mikeymike]

Yeah, cobblers :-)  It would have to have an 030 CPU onboard to manage that at least, and you wouldn't see a doubling in speed I don't think, anyway.

I think an 040/40FPU (plus some RAM, say 8 to 16MB would be fine) accelerator would be about right for someone not wanting to expand much further (ie. a graphics card).

YAM (my email software) is fast enough.  Web browsing (with IBrowse 2.3) is slowed mainly by the AGA graphics, I don't think the CPU is holding it back in that respect, unless I were to get a better graphics card.

[Robert17]

ah okie doke, so do you reckon I'll get any speed improvement playing any games, Gloom which I have get's a little slow with lots of enemies and stuff and other titles come to mind, I suppose in the least I'll be able to install all my games to hard disk and not have to worry about running out of memory :-)

[Robert17]

Is there any way to put better graphics into the desktop case though? I'd like to get out of towerising but I'm nto really interested in going PPC.

[mikeymike]

A better CPU + RAM would noticeably help with newer games such as Gloom I think.  Extra RAM only might help a tiny bit.

[mikeymike]

Robert17 wrote:
Is there any way to put better graphics into the desktop case though? I'd like to get out of towerising but I'm nto really interested in going PPC.

I don't think there is, but don't take my word for it.

[Robert17]

I purely keep the A1200 for nostalgia purposes though, and I wouldn't ask it to do what my modern P.C does because that's just silly, I'll probably only go totally amiga if OS 4 is good (which I suspect it will be) but for now I'm quite happy toying with the oldie and using the pc for internet.

[mikeymike]

Your Amiga would require huge amounts of upgrading, probably costing as much as an AmigaOne (and still nowhere near as fast as an AmigaOne) to upgrade to OS4.

TBH my A1200 sits in the cupboard behind me and I emulate it on my PC :-)

[Linchpin]

I agree with Mikeymike - a1200 is old now.

TBH - i have one for nostalgia reasons and if there was no OS4 in the pipeline i would proberbly sell it and focus on something else.

[Holley]

The harddisk will make a huge difference if you've not had one already.  Now if you had a CDRom drive you could try out OS3.9 ;-)

[guest1955]

mikeymike wrote:

Robert17 wrote:
Is there any way to put better graphics into the desktop case though? I'd like to get out of towerising but I'm nto really interested in going PPC.

I don't think there is, but don't take my word for it.

What about the Graffiti by Individual Computers? I have saw the write up on their website and not entirely sure what it does, it seems it is what Robert17 wants but I'm skeptical...