English Amiga Board - View Single Post - Purchased an ACA500 (not plus) any downsides?

Photon · 03 February 2020, 20:07

An ACA500 has many uses, and is an easy expansion to install and use!

But for the specific use case of WHDLoad from clicking icons in Workbench, you would want a >0.5MB trapdoor memory expansion if supported.

Many games will run, most multidisk games will blink the screen while loading due to not enough FastRAM to cache the disk images. This will disappear with the ACA500Plus, because of the bigger onboard FastRAM. ACA500Plus also installs Workbench without Workbench disks due to a bigger Flash RAM - the Wiki pages will tell you if 3.1.4 firmware is available, otherwise the highest is 3.1 for both.

I have said it before and I will say it again - A500 is not the ideal WHDLoad machine for running A500 games. A1200/030 is. This is due to a relatively small fraction (say, 2%) of slaves not being updated to support OCS/000, or finding issue with 040/060. But if the game you love is in that small fraction, you want as close to 100% as possible.

That said, I have a ton of games that work on both. And no, I don't have an A1200/030 but an A1200/060, and sigh when the odd game doesn't work on one of my setups and select another.

03 February 2020, 20:07	#11
Photon Moderator Join Date: Nov 2004 Location: Eksjö / Sweden Posts: 5,629	An ACA500 has many uses, and is an easy expansion to install and use! But for the specific use case of WHDLoad from clicking icons in Workbench, you would want a >0.5MB trapdoor memory expansion if supported. Many games will run, most multidisk games will blink the screen while loading due to not enough FastRAM to cache the disk images. This will disappear with the ACA500Plus, because of the bigger onboard FastRAM. ACA500Plus also installs Workbench without Workbench disks due to a bigger Flash RAM - the Wiki pages will tell you if 3.1.4 firmware is available, otherwise the highest is 3.1 for both. I have said it before and I will say it again - A500 is not the ideal WHDLoad machine for running A500 games. A1200/030 is. This is due to a relatively small fraction (say, 2%) of slaves not being updated to support OCS/000, or finding issue with 040/060. But if the game you love is in that small fraction, you want as close to 100% as possible. That said, I have a ton of games that work on both. And no, I don't have an A1200/030 but an A1200/060, and sigh when the odd game doesn't work on one of my setups and select another.