Individual Computers - New accelerator cards for A600 & A1200

[fatboy]

Not wishing to rock the boat as ANY new bit of hardware for orignal Amiga's is fantastic

I'm just trying to get my head around the pricing?

The ACA 1230/28 Mhz @ £83.49 is a super low price IMHO and is outstanding value. It just makes the ACA 1230/56 Mhz @ £164.99 seem expensive in comparison (not for specialist hardware of course!).

It might seem daft but the great low price of the 28Mhz is slightly putting me off the 56Mhz model??.....is it actually twice as good, twice as expensive to make and therfore twice the cost as the the slower model.

If there wasn't the cheap 28 Mhz model I would have no hesitation to buy the 56 Mhz version.

I'm sure I'm going to get roasted for my comments but I am not putting down all the great work that has gone into making us this new range of cards. I'm just finding it hard to justify (and the wife) paying twice the price for the 56 Mhz model.

Whatever I WILL be buying a new ACA card....but just don't know where to put my money

[CU_AMiGA]

Originally Posted by Retrofan

@CU_AMiGA, don't you know that it sounds very bad that the first (here, it has been tried by a lot of people outside this forum) one to receive it has such problems?

That makes no sense. So wot do you want me to do just pretend everything is working just to keep people happy?

Anyways, i am now getting another PSU and A1200 motherboard. I havent broken the bank that much and managed to get it cheaply. Like i said i think the accelerator is working fine (as it has been tested by Jens and Amigakit). But my Amiga 1200 hadnt appeared to be working "right" even with the Blizzard. I will try out the with the Amiga setup and if i get more problems i will report to the problem hardware section like someone mentioned before. My full setup is Amiga 1200/ACA56/3.1ROM/3.9OS/4GB2.5"HD. I m pretty sure i configured it fine as it appears ok in the ACATUNE -status (but not recognised in early startup?!). It ran DoomAttack pretty blazingly fast!

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by fatboy

Not wishing to rock the boat as ANY new bit of hardware for orignal Amiga's is fantastic

I'm just trying to get my head around the pricing?

The ACA 1230/28 Mhz @ £83.49 is a super low price IMHO and is outstanding value. It just makes the ACA 1230/56 Mhz @ £164.99 seem expensive in comparison (not for specialist hardware of course!).

It might seem daft but the great low price of the 28Mhz is slightly putting me off the 56Mhz model??.....is it actually twice as good, twice as expensive to make and therfore twice the cost as the the slower model.

If there wasn't the cheap 28 Mhz model I would have no hesitation to buy the 56 Mhz version.

I'm sure I'm going to get roasted for my comments but I am not putting down all the great work that has gone into making us this new range of cards. I'm just finding it hard to justify (and the wife) paying twice the price for the 56 Mhz model.

Whatever I WILL be buying a new ACA card....but just don't know where to put my money

The more expensive card has Full 68030 not EC chip like the 28mhz version so you're getting quite a bit more bang for your buck.

I did think the price gap was a little wide myself but as Amigakit has said before there really isn't much margin on these so I think with that in mind they've done the best possible with the pricing.

With regards to performance, the entry level version whilst it will run some emaulators and provide a nice little boost for your workbench the 56mhz version will be a lot more capable, especially of you want to run the likes of Doom and Shapeshifter

If you'll just run a WHDLoad machine, grab the 28mhz unit if you think you'll want to explore more than that go for the 56mhz version

Steve.

[amigakit.com]

The 56Mhz versions are strictly limited and the CPUs used for them are very expensive from chip brokers at the moment (as opposed to the CPUs used in the 28Mhz version).

[Steven]

Both the ACA 1230 cards have 64mb ram.

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by Steven

Both the ACA 1230 cards have 64mb ram.

Thanks, for some reason I had it in my head it has 128mb

[Steven]

Originally Posted by fitzsteve

Thanks, for some reason I had it in my head it has 128mb

It would be great if they did as I think that's the only thing that's letting them down. 64mb just isn't enough...

96mb would be better and 128mb would be fantastic!

Edited to add:

But that's just me as I like to have more Ram than I will ever need!!!

[mfilos]

I seen some days ago the post in a1k.org the following picture:
http://www.a1k.org/forum/attachment....1&d=1292346556

Are the blank memory spots (along with the capacitor spots) on the lower part of PCB available for a future upgrade of more RAM, or they were designed there in case the memory chips were fewer Megs than the ones installed?

[Retrofan]

Originally Posted by CU_AMiGA

That makes no sense. So wot do you want me to do just pretend everything is working just to keep people happy?

I didn't say so. I said it was a bad thing the first to receive it had such problems.

Originally Posted by fitzsteve

Thanks, for some reason I had it in my head it has 128mb

Is there any problem if I change the memory ram and I put a 128mb one I have? Do I loose the warranty?

[Predseda]

Originally Posted by Retrofan

Do I loose the warranty?

What would you think?

[Retrofan]

Yes, I don't think I will need more ram than those 64mb... and I believe it was discussed here before.

How long is the Warranty period? I don't know and I don't see it at Amigakit http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/...oducts_id=1005

[BrooksterMax]

Warranty - good question, I would expect like "electricals" it should be 1 year in the UK? I think in Germany, it is 2 years by law. But is it classified this way?

Looking forward to my ACA 1230 shortly

[Schoenfeld]

Warranty is two years, right.

128MB is possible from a PCB point of view only on the AC1230. However, the memory is not user-upgradable. Since we're doing quite some memory shuffling, the $c0 mem and kickstart/MapROM area need to be in a fixed place at the end of the memory chunk, therefore the CPLD program must be adapted if more memory shall be installed.

I really don't get it why you want all this memory, as a WHDload machine is perfectly happy with 32 megs. Just one or two games make use of roughly 40megs using pre-load, and these work great with the 64 megs that are included with every ACA1230.

The memory chips on the ACA1230 are special - they are 200MHz types that are not widely available. These are brand new Winbond types that only became available in summer of this year. We were the first in Europe who had them, and we're putting the tight timing possibilities to good use, even though the memory controller runs at 56MHz only (also on the 28MHz cards!). Even if memory would be user-upgradable, you would not be able to buy the chips anywhere.

Jens

[DyLucke]

Would that mean if one of the chips gets ruined the board wouldn't work at all?

[amigarobbo]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

Guys,

I'd suggest NOT to post support cases in this thread, but to go through the established channels for support. We have always refused to give support in public forums for a simple reason: Local records (which we have to keep by law). This is also the reason why I have disabled PMs here (and PMs still come through, could someone check that? I want PMs DISABLED!).

The standard procedure for support is to contact your reseller. Please include all information you have about the system (as Oliver requested before):

1. What exact Os revision are you running? Both Kickstart and Workbench.
2. Do you run any system patches on startup? If yes, what patches?
3. What does the ACATune tool say on CLI, if you type acatune -status. Does it recognize the card?
4. Aside from the ACA1230, do you have any other expansions installed in your A1200?
5. How much Ampere does your power supply provide on the +5V rail? We tested all cards with 3A power supplies.
6. Are there any leaked capacitors on your mainboard? Look careful, since it can be easily overlooked. If you don't know what to look for, provide us with a high resolution photo of the mainboard, if possible.

Again, the standard procedure to get support for any Individual Computers product is through your reseller. If the result of the support case is of interest to the public, we'll post it here.

Amigarobbo, please contact your reseller with the information listed above.

Jens

No thank you, I'd rather discuss it here.

Cold Boot from a standard 3.1 floppy disk, kickstart 40.68, workbench 40.42
everything seems fine, run

acatune -maprom *

And reboot from the floppy and the hard drive has gone missing from the early boot screen and workbench. If I run the standard 3.1 harddrive tools it shows the drive and all the partitions correctly in there.

How odd.

Also the Silkcut demo crashs with a $800000B error at startup, and iBrowse crashes as soon as it gets to a google results page with the IndivuDUAL card, both of which work correctly with a Blizzard 12030 card.

[Cosmos]

E123 and E125 ?

[Amigaman]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

I really don't get it why you want all this memory,

I admit that I have had just 38Mb total Ram with my a Blizzard 1260 and did quite a lot of Imagine 3D renderings and Vista Animations in my time, but I suspect its more of a status thing than a real user practical thing.

[amigakit.com]

Just checked package tracking and the package containing ACA 1230/28Mhz and 56Mhz accelerators have just entered the UK.. :-)

[Schoenfeld]

Originally Posted by amigarobbo

No thank you, I'd rather discuss it here.

If you want to discuss it here, please answer all the questions. We cannot smell from a distance what board rev and what power supply you have. We asked what acatune -status gives, and you keep repeating the same description. In other words: You don't cooperate with us on service. We cannot help you like that.

One more time, file a support ticket with your reseller, and we'll solve the problem. If all else fails, send the computer and the card back to your reseller and we'll do the magic. However, if you don't answer our questions, you cannot expect any help.

Jens

[Retrofan]

I understand you can not try all the patches on startup, but is there any with known conflicts with the ACA1230/56?