Possible ACA for A500/500+/2000 etc thread.

[Photon]

Originally Posted by Lockon

So, something called A520 is, in fact, an adapter including 68000 clocked at 14 or even 21MHz, accompanied with KS1.3 autobooting IDE and clockport, but no onboard kickflash capability. For 030 power upgrade, there's a provision for ACA1230.

Correct ?
How many WHDLOAD games can work with plain 68000 which lack VBR support ?

It was supposed to have a 68000 DIL socket next to the 68020, now it has a 68000 CPU and a 68020 CPU on board. I'm sure Jens is sane, so the 68000 will run at the normal 7-ish MHz.

Or what did you mean?


WHDLoad is no fun on an A500, due to quite a few games you wouldn't think whose slaves require >512k chipmem, and the quit thing, and keyboard interrupt (or whatever) gurus. A500+ removes one of those obstacles, a CPU with MMU is really what most WHDLoad slaves are made for, else you have to use WHDLoad for the subset of games that don't guru/complain on 'lesser' Amigas. So even with 68020 WHDLoad won't be perfect, I think. But of course Jens can't make a more niched product because some slaves don't properly support all Amigas...

[Lockon]

Check the A1K thread...my German isn't exactly fit for grammar school, but somehow I fail to see 020 in recent discussions...

[OverDose]

It's late in this discussion, but isn't the GVP A530 the thing that A500 owners drool over: SCSI, 8MB RAM, 68030. Sounds like Jens's idea is quite similar, but IDE instead of SCSI, which broadly speaking makes more sense today (as far as HDD, CF and CD/DVD goes).

It would be /nice/ to me if it were a sidecar expansion, but then that would have several more issues to make it more expensive (separate design for a500 and a1000 and a2000, and expense of the actual case).

[Lockon]

I can agree with most if not at all you said, but in order to stay fair, you have to value most of 'survived' A500 users and Jens equally.

Yes, A530 is one of holy grails for A500 crowd, heck I'm a proud owner of one of it.
It's overpriced, with fair performance, never 1st compared to other solutions (Derringer, Viper, PPS040), but it is a all-in-one solution and a well-implemented sidecar.

Jens is smart guy; he bets on safe hand and maximizes his market odds carefuly; for that he should be credited with the outmost respect from every Amiga member still taking care of this legacy. However, his ACA520 project won't put your A500 right ahead of old GVP solutions, In order to achieve and surpass it, you have to buy ACA1230 and then compare it as 'apples-to-apples' from the feature, maintenance and cost perspective. Cost can be compared easily through R&D efforts - obviously for OCS/ECS machines, the core remains same saving great fraction of development , but then he gets slammed with prototyping costs.

Anyway, it all bears down towards your A500's mission and a ceiling of money you want to invest in this peripheral. IMHO, I think that A500's general availability is much larger than one found at A600 machines. For that reason I fail to see why he wont treat A500 accelerator equally (030, kickflash, a lot of RAM) and expect good sales here also.

Unless you have a large stock of ACA1230 components and deplete that by another clever distribution channel for maximizing your profit margin. Another smart thing worth of respect.

That's the reason I will probably buy 2 complete sets.

[Photon]

Well, we know each other Lockon and we have the same dream for the A500 But I can't believe he'd changed the product completely, as you hint.

As I see it the onboard 68000 is there to save space and a socket. A non-original-speed 68000 is not much of a fallback, and a 14+ MHz 68000 is not much of a Workbench workhorse for 99 EUR...

If he doesn't add a (noticably) faster CPU, the features of the board is IDE, clockport, and A1200 adapter. Still great, but the board itself then compares equally to similarly priced boards already preorderable, or indeed a sidecar expansion like 2MB GVP SCSI. Since he dislikes those I don't think he'd risk that, not many will buy the board just to buy a USB board too for 150 EUR extra to surf with a 68000...

I have more reasons why I don't think it is as you fear, but to sum it up I think Jens's thinking has always been right on, market-wise. And so I think he will make a board that is attractive to many - making it just a springboard to further expansion investment (when there are cheap A600s/A1200 available) would not reach that goal.

[_ThEcRoW]

go 500 go!!!
I would love an a500 accel for the favourite of my amigas. Also ide controller would be f*****g awesome!!!

[DyLucke]

Hmm, i think WHDLoad could work on all Amigas if you do the correct board hacking to give 1mb chip (1mb Agnus needed) using the trapdoor expansion. Thus with 1mb chip and this new accelerator-IDE-RAM we might be able to run the complete WHDLoad ECS-OCS catalogue.

However how much fastram are we talking about? Would it come with an embedded 68000 faster than the stock one? Would it be replaceable? What if we replace it with a 68010? Would it work? Would we get any kind of improvement with it? Will it allow any other kind of processor upgrade?

Under my point of view and talking about my needings, a 68000 14-16mhz, or a 020 14mhz with 4mb FastRam, after doing the mobo hack to get 1mb chip would be enough. I don't plan to have some kind of monster that could compete with an accelerated A1200 since i already own one.

Too many questions i guess... ^^
Anticipated thanks for the answers... ^^

[rkauer]

I have a lot of WHDLoad games working on my plain 68000 machines (1Mb chip + 4Mb FAST + SCSI or IDE). But most slaves are designed for more than 1Mb chip...
Heck, the same games work on my 010 A500 (yes, I have more than one!), only the quit key works all the time on this one.

Now: a simple "AddSpeed mk2"????????????????? Sorry, not my cuppa.

A full blown 020 or 030 with a decent amount of RAM (16Mb @ least!) and IDE controller will be enough.

OK, if a LAN card can be added, count me in!

[netagra]

A great projectt i hope it will be finished soon.
It's a good time to get a second A500 because i love my side expansions...

[Photon]

Originally Posted by DyLucke

Hmm, i think WHDLoad could work on all Amigas if you do the correct board hacking to give 1mb chip (1mb Agnus needed) using the trapdoor expansion. Thus with 1mb chip and this new accelerator-IDE-RAM we might be able to run the complete WHDLoad ECS-OCS catalogue.

However how much fastram are we talking about? Would it come with an embedded 68000 faster than the stock one? Would it be replaceable? What if we replace it with a 68010? Would it work? Would we get any kind of improvement with it? Will it allow any other kind of processor upgrade?

Under my point of view and talking about my needings, a 68000 14-16mhz, or a 020 14mhz with 4mb FastRam, after doing the mobo hack to get 1mb chip would be enough. I don't plan to have some kind of monster that could compete with an accelerated A1200 since i already own one.

Too many questions i guess... ^^
Anticipated thanks for the answers... ^^

What RKauer said, plus:

Basically WHDLoad itself will work with most any Amiga but different slaves show different behavior with and without MMU in the CPU and 1MB chip or less than 1 MB chip etc. Even for games that were fine with 0.5MB chip and 0.5MB "fastmem". Even for games that occupied ~300 MB chip only with no other requirements. The exit key might not work on some, requiring a reboot, which defeats its purpose.

Estimating that about 25% of the games will not work (as in not start, play, and return to WB on a machine with enough memory to support WHDLoad+the game) due to this that or the other reason, I would prefer a 1MB chip machine with at least 68030 (MMU) as a WHDload machine.

I'm sure Jens is already in progress and the specs won't change. I think a 1MB A500 with his 68020 will reduce the 25% to much less, so it will probably be all right as a WHDLoad machine.

[DyLucke]

That would be great, Photon. Declaring interest oficially on buying one board.

[Photon]

Well, this thread is not official in any way so not the best place to pre-order. Best wait for one of the Internette Boutiques to open up a pre-order page. Perhaps end of May?

[netagra]

What would be possible for an Amiga 500 to do with this 68020 ? Exactly how powerful this machine will be, some of us already own an A1200 as well for many reasons.

[Photon]

Well, this board is to enable the earlier models, for those who like them for various reasons mentioned elsewhere. I for example like 'the Amiga we all had', A500 OCS with 512KB trapdoor fastmem. I'm a coder, so I wouldn't mind a 68020 for assembling faster while still being able to develop for the exact-same-chipset. I'm buying one or two, but not for that since I already have a dev A500 with 68040.

I'm buying the boards as newly made replacement parts instead of fiddling around with sidecar harddisk/ram expansions that may or may not work with various libs and kickstarts. Plop it in and you can transfer anything you want to an A500 in your living room. I'm a demo guy so few A500 demos would work on some later model. Much better than searching for lib version combos that work with kickstart x and SCSI adapter y.

Also, with the A1200 adapter there's at least the hope of getting an A500-060 running. Maybe. That's my other angle

While you could go all internetty and USBey with a clockport-enabled 68020 or higher A500, that's not my aim. It's simply a better solution. Stock A500 (or similar model) (that you already have or can be got cheaply) + 1 board and you have a faster machine with actually more possibilities than an A600+ACA630!

The 68020 does give a good boost over sidecar expansions when it comes to IDE performance though. Some may think this reason enough

As I said, a 1-card 'enabler'. Just like the 4 MB fast+kick socket+IDE board by Tom (see Amibay thread)

[Claw22000]

I would be defenatly interested in one of these now that I have an A500. I plan on using that as my portable since I love my A1200 too much to take it with me. I wanted to take my Amiga places and run Demos on my projector. Can't wait to see how it turns out at the parties this summer. If I could have an actual WB3.1 running one it with all the goodies, that would be awesome. I do realize the 2.0 roms are limited but thats ok it will still run alot of demos.

[Amigafanboi]

Would of thought an A600 was more suitable as a portable solution with its size and extra features.

[Claw22000]

It less about actual portability and more about willingness to have get broken. I wouldn't move my a1200 unless I have too. So now I have an extra a500 around why not use it to go places. This A500 wasn't hard to find.

[Photon]

I recommend upgrading the kickstart to 3.1 for more reasons than that more demos will work with it 2.0 is the worst kickstart of them all for demo/game compatibility. The board itself should work fine with 1.3 and up, but clockport and A1200 port or what's shoved in it might require some software that harrumphs at < 3.1 or < 2.0. At least that seems likely.

[Claw22000]

I didn't know the A500 could take a 3.1 rom. I see Amigakit dosn't sell these where does one find such a Amigoodie!

[prowler]

Originally Posted by Claw22000

I didn't know the A500 could take a 3.1 rom. I see Amigakit dosn't sell these where does one find such a Amigoodie!

http://www.vesalia.de/e_kickstart.htm

Look for Kickstart ROM 3.1 for Amiga 500/600/2000 (€17.90)