a600 with aca620

[gntavelis]

Hello guys,


Yesterday i bought an aca620 from vesalia and i am waiting for the parcel.
I have a stock a600, it will be possible combined with the aca620 to run smoothly ocs/ecs games using whdload? Personally i believe that i will have big problems because of the 1MB chip that i will have :/

The reason i am asking this is because i am wondering if kipper's a600 8mb fast would be better solution...

[duga]

Most games should be fine.

[gntavelis]

I hope because my a500+ with aca500 and 1MB additional chip ram (a504+ 3state) didnt do the the trick.

Some games including agony if i remember correctly pauses for a few seconds or more during the loading times and it drives me crazy!

[duga]

With or without PRELOAD?

[gntavelis]

i dont really know how to check if the option PRELOAD is enable or not :/

[Amiga1992]

By default it isn't, you have to add it as an option in the commandline or as a tooltype in its icon, or if you want it set globally (don't), write it in whdload.prefs in S:

Suffice to say, games with many disks (I'd say 5+ to be safe) will NOT work if you have Preload on.
You have 10MB to fill up with stuff, so most games will work fine with Preload as they usually come in 2 or 3 disks.

You should buy a 1MB Chip RAM expansion though.

[gntavelis]

I use iGame for lanching a whdload game so maybe preload is enabled by default.
Could you please tell me what i have to write in CLI to run a whdload slave? if i go to the slave directory and write something like whdload agony.slave without any switches it will be ok?

[Amiga1992]

If your games were skipping with OS flashes ("pause while loading"), then Preload wasn't working/activated.

The default command would be:
whdload GameName.slave
This will blink black and stop like fuck, you don't want this unless you don't have enough RAM and want to use WHDLoad anyway (CD32 game compilations).

With preload:
whdload GameName.slave preload
This won't work unless you have enough RAM, your A500 obviously doesn't have enough. Your A600 with ACA620 will (but Chip RAM might limit you anyway)

[gntavelis]

So my a500+ with aca500 is doomed due to lack of ram. I cant preload stuff or play normal a game so there is no point of keeping her.

I will buy an a604n card to upgrade the chip ram to 2mb and then i will do some testing.

The one thing i cant really understand (please dont get me wrong, i really like whdload) is that back in amiga years i was able to load agony from floppies with 1mb of ram. Today i need economy accelerators and other stuff to play some games.


Why the people behind individual computers dont sell "full" products , and i mean by that ... how difficult it was for them to find a way to put to aca620 +1mb chip ram with additional cost...

[demolition]

They already sell the A604, so no point in making a second version of the ACA620.
WHDLoad was made for high end Amigas (1200 with accelerator or 3000/4000) which usually had plenty of memory so you could preload all floppies before launching the game, and not having to wait on any loading screens. Thus, to use it properly you should have 2MB chip and a good amount of fast mem. The 10MB you get on ACA620 is good for 95% of all games, but it should be combined with a 1MB chip upgrade like the A604(n).

I have an A600 with ACA620 and have not run across any ECS games that didn't seem to work right.

[fitzsteve]

You can get an A604 for your A600 by the same company which gives you an extra 1mb Chip Ram for a full 2mb.

The ACA620 has plenty of Ram for most WHDLoad Games though so you should be fine without expanding the chip Ram, more Chip Ram is good if you want to run a high resolution, High Colour Workbench only few Games need more than 1mb Chip if you run a basic Workbench.

As for ACA500, indeed with only 2mb Ram if you have a basic 1mb A500 you will struggle, I have an A500+ with 2mb Chip Ram and a 2mb Fast Ram adapter on the CPU, this runs most 1-3 Disk Games fine.

You can get away with 2+2mb but many games (even some 2 Disk) like you saw will have the loading pauses.

[Amiga1992]

Loading off floppy and off the hard drive through WHDLoad is a totally different process and questioning why it doesn't work like floppies makes no sense.

The point of ACA500 is to connect an accelerator and a hard drive to the A500, but nowadays, using an A500 is only for the hardcore. I would never, ever own an A500.

I say the bare minimum spec to have WHDload gaming done right today is a machine with 2MB of Chip RAM and 4MB of Fast RAM. You don't even need an accelerator.

You can get kipper2k's 4MB adapter for an A600 and that would give you plenty of gaming power through WHDLoad.

[b00mer]

I wouldn't bash ACA-500. IMHO, it is still a better choice than A600 with 4 MB FAST. Since some WHDLoad fixed games and a lot of demos have slowdowns on 7 MHz MC68000, you won't experience these on faster ACA-500 CPU than you do on stock A600.

[gntavelis]

@b00mer: A standalone aca500 is better choice than a600 with aca620? Please explain.
With aca620 you have an 68EC020 @ 16.67Mhz , i believe that there will be no slowdowns.

[b00mer]

@gntavelis, sorry I was replying to the last (Akira's) post. ACA-620 should be great both memory and CPU wise, I just don't know how hot it gets inside. This is why I like ACA-500.

[Amiga1992]

b00mer, you replied wrong it seems, because I didn't bash the ACA-500, actually, I said comparing ACA-500 and ACA-620 is very unfair.

I actually bashed the Amiga 500 :P

[DonutKing]

I've an Amiga 500 with ACA500, and in stock form you won't be able to run most whdload games/demos due to lack of memory.

I installed a trapdoor expansion that gave me a total of 1MB Chip RAM and 1.5MB Fast RAM, and also installed a physical 3.1 kickstart ROM chip to save the 512KB that the ACA500's MapROM feature would use. This gives me enough free memory to run a lot more whdload slaves. Obviously stuff that needs more than 1MB Chip RAM won't work and you'll still get flashing when preloading big games.

I really must advise against installing an ACA1220 or ACA1232 into your ACA500 if whdload is your goal. I did so and found many games/demos would stutter and slow down - it actually made things worse.

Ideally, for whdload you want an AGA machine with 2MB chip and some fast RAM.

[FOL]

Originally Posted by DonutKing

Ideally, for whdload you want an AGA machine with 2MB chip and some fast RAM.

Or an A600, .

[Amiga1992]

Yeah, you don't need AGA, really.

[gntavelis]

So we came to a conclusion?...

a500+ with aca500 (with or without softkicking 3.1 rom) : waste of time , hate to say because i really like a500.
a600 with a604n and aca620 : most of the games will run properly
a1200 with or without accelerator but with some >=8MB ram : awesome