New products for C64 and Amiga from Individual Computers

[Mr B]

I agree with Jens, on the topic of plastic. As a general rule, someone has to make money on you not using cash. This someone is the bank. Yet I pay the same price for my purchase. This means the bank issuing the card has to make it's profit from the reseller, and that in turn means a (to me, the buyer) hidden cost making whatever i buy that much more expensive. So when ever possible, i use cash. I use plastic at 2 different times. When putting fuel in the car, using the company card means no tax, and the price is about 7% less then what it says on the pump on top of that. The other time is online shopping. I use a debit card+Paypal for that. (Not the American kind of debit card, if i understood the description above correctly. The kind i got means you have to have the money on the account tied to the card, or the card wont be able to do the payment. The money is then deducted at once, or in rare cases "reserved" and deducted within a few days.)

But i feel we strayed fairly long of topic.

Jens. Please keep us up to date on the software. It's good to hear that everything is back on track, and i hope we'll see stuff soon.

[kipper2k]

Originally Posted by alenppc

Hmm, well you get the minimum required payment on your credit card, but nothing prevents you from paying the full amount and not paying any fees, just don't overspend what you don't have.

I use almost exclusively my credit card, since I never pay any interest on it (always pay the full bill), there are no yearly fees and I get a 1% cashback on all purchases. I try not to carry cash at all.

I get my free flights, when the cost of a full fare flight is $1200 to get out of churchill it pays for itself

[SpeedGeek]

OK, can we get back to the original topic of this thread please!

[Amigaman]

Actually I do have a question or two concerning the A600 card.

Firstly Jens, a big thank you once again for all the hard work you put into making our hobby fun.

1 Will there be any kind of disable option? ie without having to open the machine and remove the card, as the previous model you helpfully provided? you had a disable jumper that we could add a switch to before, has been very useful from time to time.

2 Will the PCMCIA port still work for things like network cards even though you are adding so much ram?

[Schoenfeld]

Originally Posted by Amigaman

1 Will there be any kind of disable option? ie without having to open the machine and remove the card, as the previous model you helpfully provided? you had a disable jumper that we could add a switch to before, has been very useful from time to time.

Yes, the ACA620, but also ACA1220 and ACA1232 will have "disable" jumpers: Open=turbo+RAM, closed=no turbo, no RAM.

Originally Posted by Amigaman

2 Will the PCMCIA port still work for things like network cards even though you are adding so much ram?

Will work, no problem. PCMCIA memory cards don't work, but peripheral such as networking is fine.

Another thing that was previously only found on the ACA630 is the NMI-jumper/button. Those of you who like to use HRTmon will have two solderspots for a button on ACA620, ACA1220 and ACA1232.

Jens

[alenppc]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

Will work, no problem. PCMCIA memory cards don't work, but peripheral such as networking is fine.

...Unless you are running kick 3.1 which disables the PCMCIA port entirely, and not just for overlapping memory mapped devices. So a jumper limiting the ram to 4 mb might be useful to avoid this.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by alenppc

...Unless you are running kick 3.1 which disables the PCMCIA port entirely, and not just for overlapping memory mapped devices.

Really, the people looking at it before said that card.resource in kick 3.1 only disabled PCMCIA when the memory overlapped..

What have you seen that is different?

desiv

[alenppc]

The card is using an EC020 CPU so the memory is going to overlap above 4 mb, there is nowhere else to map it. What I meant was that Kick3.1 disables the PCMCIA port entirely, so not even Ethernet could be used in this case.

[kolla]

Acc cards these days would do good with onboard SD slot and ethernet.

[TotO]

So much things can be improved on the Amiga...
Amiga is from the past and never get the good factory improvements hopped in it's time. It's mostly why he became to be deprecated 5 years after it's born.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by alenppc

The card is using an EC020 CPU so the memory is going to overlap above 4 mb, there is nowhere else to map it.

I suppose, unless Jens has a way/place to map it elsewhere... He can be pretty tricky sometimes..

Also, I remember somewhere on here (I think somewhere on EAB) that Toni from WinUAE had a patch to the module that "should" take care of it...
So, I wonder if this is something that could be patched if it's still an issue..

(Not sure if the patch has to be in the ROM (and therefor need a new rom or a rekick) or if it could be a software patch in the startup-sequence???)

desiv

[Schoenfeld]

At this point, the card only adds 4MByte mem with autoconfig, and another 1MByte in $c0 area for compatibility with old A500 software. Further memory is added by the ACAtune tool. In other words: You have 5MByte fastmem on a cold-start and more memory after using ACAtune. In addition to that, you DO NOT LOSE memory if you use maprom.

Yes, there are differencies in PCMCIA handling between Kickstart versions and yes, I'm on the safe side with 4MByte-only-autoconfig. With the limited space in the logic chip, I don't want to waste too much on different Kickstart versions, because for floppy-boot-software, 5MByte fastmem is surely enough, and for HD-boot, you have more mem.

The tricky question at this point is: What will we do with the "hidden" memory areas? The ACA620 has 16MByte physical memory, where only 10MBytes are being used right now (9MBytes fastmem and 1MByte for Maprom). Toni Wilen has already made an interesting suggestion for that, which I will investigate when the final PCBs have been delivered.

Jens

[Jope]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

The tricky question at this point is: What will we do with the "hidden" memory areas? The ACA620 has 16MByte physical memory, where only 10MBytes are being used right now (9MBytes fastmem and 1MByte for Maprom). Toni Wilen has already made an interesting suggestion for that, which I will investigate when the final PCBs have been delivered.

I'll say it here too: Just fill every available unused (but reserved) piece of address space with RAM. ;-)

[Lord Aga]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

ACA1232

Waitwaitwait. Have I missed something... What is this ?

[crasbe]

Originally Posted by Lord Aga

Waitwaitwait. Have I missed something... What is this ?

It is a modified ACA1220 with a 030 processor, but it's still slower than an ACA1231.

[Lord Aga]

Good news ! We'll have cards for all budget sizes

[SpeedGeek]

Just a reminder, these ACA cards have Fast memory which is at least 5x faster than PCMCIA memory so the only reason to have it is if you use the ACA disable jumper... and in that case there is no mapping conflict.

[alenppc]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

At this point, the card only adds 4MByte mem with autoconfig, and another 1MByte in $c0 area for compatibility with old A500 software. Further memory is added by the ACAtune tool. In other words: You have 5MByte fastmem on a cold-start and more memory after using ACAtune. In addition to that, you DO NOT LOSE memory if you use maprom.

Excellent choice, this will make it easy to make the PCMCIA work.
I have the Viper 630 which maps the RAM into Z-II space which means that you can use max 4 mb which is a terrible terrible design, especially considering that the card mounts the full 68030 CPU. Furthermore, on that card once you load AmiTCP you don't have enough fastram left to even load AWeb and actually use it for anything, and only the simplest FTP programs work with such a limited amount of memory (GuiFTP, for example).

Having an extra 1 MB in $c0 area is a definite boost, so even if you don't add the extra ram in order to be able to use Ethernet cards, it should make a major difference.

[Phantom]

I'll be after a BigRAMPlus for sure.

[1time]

crasbe: How do you know that it will be slower then 1231?