ACA500 plus?

[Photon]

Originally Posted by roondar

I have a small question about the ACA500+ and it's "make DF1: act as DF0:" feature. I've been having trouble getting this to work, whenever I use it the external drive does start booting but then the Amiga ends up hanging.

How should I set this up for it to work correctly and does it actually work for non-DOS disks?

Yeah I've used this quite a bit and it works fine for e.g. a DF1 Gotek with no switch/soldering needed. I forget what it's called but you have the options in top right IIRC.

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

It's only taken me a year to get round to doing it but I can finally report that the Z2 graphics card works with the latest firmware and an X-surf-500 also. The ungainly stack of accelerators is a bit flakey but I strongly suspect power supply issues.

When mentioned on the iComp forum Jens made it quite clear this is an unsupported configuration working by luck than judgement, so your mileage may vary

Well there are a ton of configurations out there, that's why stating "not tested by me" or he'd have to have probably 1000 Amiga setups of different flavors... Glad you got it working so now if someone find this semi-official thread and reads your post, he knows he could make a go of it. That's awesome.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Nightshft

Hello Roondar,
just tried this and it works fine using the F3 Standard A500 Profile Menu.

I booted and loaded 3 different games from floppy in DF1.
ZakMcKracken, Super Wonderboy ML and Pipe Dream, no problems. Loaded them completely until "into the game".

First I used "KS1.3, 0.5+0.5MB, no Freezer, DF1 Bootselect, 7Mhz" as a config, but a completely different worked too.
I also tried 2 different ext. drives. An Okano AF500 and a noname drive, both worked.

Do you use the F3 Standard A500 Profile Menu or the F10 expert menu?
Your A500s Memory is fine? You could use a Memtest.
How "far" does it boot before it crashes?
It happens with Dos and Non-Dos Disks to you?

Originally Posted by Photon

Yeah I've used this quite a bit and it works fine for e.g. a DF1 Gotek with no switch/soldering needed. I forget what it's called but you have the options in top right IIRC.

Hmm, seems I'll have to test it out again then.


Just to be on the safe side, my only working '512KB expansion' is a KCS Power PC board, which is not a very standard card. Could that be causing problems?

[spudje]

Originally Posted by Photon

Yeah I've used this quite a bit and it works fine for e.g. a DF1 Gotek with no switch/soldering needed. I forget what it's called but you have the options in top right IIRC.

How do you configure the Gotek, jumper wise, as df0: (S0)? or not (S1)?

[demolition]

Originally Posted by spudje

How do you configure the Gotek, jumper wise, as df0: (S))? or not (S1)?

Whether it should be configured as S0 or S1 depends on the adapter board that you use to connect the Gotek to the external drive connector. Many external cases use PC configured drives which I believe are normally configured as DS1. In any case, if one doesn't work, then just try the other setting.

[Nightshft]

Originally Posted by Nightshft

What about the higher speeds, like 21Mhz and more. Is there cooling or anything else required? Is there any risk of using it?

Push...

[spudje]

It took a while, due to the drive housing having the ribbon cable inverted, before I got it working, but now the external Gotek runs smoothly (with latest FF 2.12) with jumper on S0 with my ACA500plus.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by Nightshft

What about the higher speeds, like 21Mhz and more. Is there cooling or anything else required? Is there any risk of using it?

My ACA500plus runs perfectly stable at 42 MHz and I have no extra cooling, but others are only be able to go to 21 MHz so your milage may vary. The risk is that you could corrupt your file system if it is not running stable so be sure to test it properly before you let it loose on an installation that you have spent a lot of time on since the last backup. Restoring an image from a backup is often a lot easier and faster than trying to resolve file system errors.

[Nightshft]

Thats very interesting and helpful, thanks!
The few times I switched to 42mhz it ran stable - seems to be a fine card.

Talking about system backups. Whats the easiest way to do this? Copy all the files to an empty CF, which is in the 2nd slot and has FAT32?

[demolition]

Originally Posted by Nightshft

Talking about system backups. Whats the easiest way to do this? Copy all the files to an empty CF, which is in the 2nd slot and has FAT32?

I use a CF reader on my PC and create an image of the card using WinImage or dd. You could do the same with two cards in the ACA500plus, but your AUX card would need to be larger then the boot card and it would take quite a while as the transfer speed is much slower than on a PC. Dumping a fast 4GB card will only takes minutes on a PC with a USB 3.0 card reader.

Edit: If you have a small bootable Workbench partition and only wish to back up that one, then you could use lha or lzx to dump the contents into an archive on the AUX card.

[E-Penguin]

dd if=/dev/sda of=sdcard.img

Or whatever the appropriate device is. You can also mount it in winuae which is great for image preparation.

[DataBasic]

Originally Posted by Nightshft

Talking about system backups. Whats the easiest way to do this? Copy all the files to an empty CF, which is in the 2nd slot and has FAT32?

I use HDD RAW COPY TOOL on the PC. It's free. You can copy CF to CF, CF to File, File to CF etc.
No need to worry about formatting it makes a 1-1 copy.

[Photon]

Diskimages are great for making images to reset all of the Amiga system to that point. Good for preparing ready WB setups. If the CF card is where you create your works though, if something happened to it you wouldn't want to restore it to last week's backup

(Obviously if you do backups every night you used your Amiga, you wouldn't lose anything. Depends on how big the CF card is, I guess. For backup time, I mean. For space, you could just keep the last two backups or so.)

I'm lazy, I just have a PC folder that I copy the work folder to with DiskMaster in WinUAE and hit Warp Mode But my card never gets corrupted, so I stopped doing even that

[d4rk3lf]

Random question:

Would Nemac IV is possible to run on Aca 500+ (on 42Mhz)?
It says it is OCS... but then again... I can't find any videos someone did it.

[Nightshft]

I just tried it.

I downloaded the zip from myabandonware.com
It contains 4 versions of Nemac 4
- 3 AGA versions with 8 adf each
- another version (OCS?) with 4 adf

So I chose the last version and unadf'ed the contents to a folder on my A1200 (as unadf needs a 68020 and thus wont run on the A500).

Tested it on the A1200, 4MB, 28Mhz runs fine at LowRes, Window 160x256 with about 15fps.

Checked it out on the ACA500+ but it says: "This version needs at least an 68020"

This was just a quick test. Maybe there are other options.

Sidequestion: Would an ACA500+ card with 68020 technically be possible?

Edit: I uploaded a zip with the hdd-files to the zone.

[d4rk3lf]

Thanks for trying man.
Yeah, probably a 020 is the minimum to run it, so I guess some ACA for 1200 attached to Aca 500+ could technically be possible.

[Photon]

And even if it did, I suspect it would behave like Quake, which can "run on OCS" but if we're being realistic, not really, if we're talking about something that behaves like a game.

I'm going to step up on a soapbox and say that this is exactly the reason you don't release anything for 68020+ only, since 68020 adds so extremely little to 68000.

In comparison, releasing for 68040+ makes much more sense, and planning your code to take advantage of caches while being 100% 68000 compatible makes even more sense. Checking some 68020 checkbox, no, GTFO, why on Earth, just no.

FPU is completely different and is an absolute requirement for 68060 releases on the cutting edge, here nothing else compares, for serious precision utilities. For games there would be no use of an FPU; easily substituted, and with a performance gain. I would have to see a use case for game to warrant an FPU requirement even on 060.

It's just so sad some releases went this way cos 50 MHz 68000 with superfast Fastram is certainly possible since some time now, and now we can't even run them. Because there were only 14 MHz ones then, I mean I see that. Still checking that 68020 box was needless and still is.

Steps down from soapbox

[d4rk3lf]

Quake should be possible even on vanilla A500 1MB...
not silky smooth.. but 15-20 fps at least.
Just make a blitter fill cooper shading, and Goraud do the rest, with the help of 68000.
Hah... got ya...
-----------------

For me personally, 3D shooters are one of the most boring genders, ever. I think I only finished Blood 2 (maybe 1-2 more games that I forgot), even I really like to play just about everything (strategy, adventure, sports, rpg's... etc)... only gender that I dont play (but respect) are sports managers.
I was just curious about this.
If it worked, I'd probably try to set up a best setting possible, play a few levels, then quit.
Part of trying to set the best setting possible would probably be the most fun part, for me.

Thanks for the insight Photon.. that was fun read... the soapbox is all yours!
----------------------

Now, another random question:
Could you guys help me install Lightwave 3.5 on A500 (with Aca 500 +)?
How would you approach this?

I tried first installing in winuae, and installation crashed (red reboot screen), and I've downloaded 3 versions (one from the Zone), of LW first disk, but it seems that they are all the same version (same crash).
Then I found some, already installed 3.5, and it works on my Winua-e, but when I copied on CF, and transfered to real Amiga, it was some error (can't record now)...
some 8000000004 error, and it gave me options to "suspend", or "reboot".

I am quite fairly new to Amiga world (whatever I little know before 20 years, I forgot), and even I am playing with Amiga last 2 years, I am still very beginner in every field.

[d4rk3lf]

I did it.
Had to install workbench for A500, in Winua-e, and the installation of Lightwave 3.5 worked. Copied to CF and run it on real A500.
The only problem I have now is that UI resolution is way to high res, and my (old) TV screen is shivering like crazy... in the options, I can only go higher res.
Oh well... I guess, I can't do anything about it.

[Turrican_3]

I know it's an unsupported configuration (and Jens isn't writing here anymore, or at least he hasn't for quite some time), but I'd like to ask anyway.

I've recently got an ACA500plus that is connected to a PAL A1000, I believe it's an early model since it has signatures on the chassis and the daughterboard.

The accelerator seems to be working flawlessly, no issues/uncertainties at powep up at all for example... except for one, weird (?) thing: any Kickstart greater or equal than 3.0 gives an exception screen (the green one I mean) whenever I click either of the boot options on the Amiga Early Startup Control.

Any thoughts?

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by Turrican_3

I've recently got an ACA500plus that is connected to a PAL A1000, I believe it's an early model since it has signatures on the chassis and the daughterboard.

Don't know about the daughterboard, but every single A1000 produced has signatures inside the case, it was part of the mold and the mold was never changed.