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

[Claw22000]

Originally Posted by prowler

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

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

Sweet another source for Amigoodies! Thanks!

[Omolungo]

Any news about ACA520?

[_ThEcRoW]

Would be sweet to empower my a500!. Any news

[Omolungo]

The project is still alive right?

[rkauer]

Final tuppence on the matter: a plain EC020/14MHz for a bit of WHDLoad compatibility, IDE for costless devices, clockport and a cheerful amount of memory (OK, 8Mb ought be enough), plus the possibility of hooking another A1200 accelerator (ANY OTHER A1200 accelerator!) to improve the "game" far beyond.

That's for less than US$100 ~ €70 will be a Godsend!

[cpiac64]

in the 2004 gratteri make a zorro2 on a500 and use a gvp card and other

http://www.webalice.it/gratteri/a500pro_eng.html
http://www.webalice.it/gratteri/cpuslot.html

[cv643d]

In 1995 there was transputer systems running on the A4000, they had like dual cpu systems the size of a small shopping cart under the A4000D case.

[mazxim]

Originally Posted by rkauer

Final tuppence on the matter: a plain EC020/14MHz for a bit of WHDLoad compatibility, IDE for costless devices, clockport and a cheerful amount of memory (OK, 8Mb ought be enough)...[CUT]..That's for less than US$100 ~ €70 will be a Godsend!

That's the final word, I'm completely agree with your point (especially the price.. come on guys, do you really want to spent a crazy amount of money into an expansion for your A500, didn't you?..)
It would be also amazing to unlock the potential of the WB 1.3 environment with it's classic apps. Long life to the A500!

[Photon]

This is what I gathered from reading back a couple of weeks in the thread on a1k. This info is the latest available in that thread, but it's from April, so if someone has more current info then please educate us

Status: A500 adapter designed, end of April: figuring out CPLD routing / accelerator (he's working on both the ACA520 and Indivision Mk2 to finish them at the same time).

Design: Passive CPU-socket adapter for A500 (A1000/A2000 adapters planned, A1000 one will maybe have chipmem expansion but not the others. CDTV is not supported.) There are no chips on this board. Board has a 68-pin adapter in the front right corner where the accelerator sits. A1200 Turbo Card adapter is on the accelerator.

A500 adapter design:


From this follows that IDE, clockport, and fastmem are on the accelerator and none will be accessible for the 68000; in fact, you throw away your 68000. Instead he will try to make a slowed down emulated mode: 7MHz 68020, all fastmem off, caches off, 24-bit addressing mode.

New specs:

• 68020 card+16 MB fastram+clockport in a CPU-adapter
• port for A1200 turbo card that can use Buddha IDE and 1MB of the fastmem
• IDE port (supporting TrueIDE without multiboot) to onboard CF card adapter, supports all CF cards that are not too slow
• IDE port "for extra IDE unit like CD-ROM"
• 100Mbps network port
• 1MB flash memory for large or custom Kickstarts (Deneb was mentioned)
• MapROM supported (uses 1MB fastram)
• Supports Buddha via install disk
• any expansion meant for side expansion port or CPU socket is not supported
• Built-in autoboot for kick 1.3
• Fits with most chipram expansions for A500, GAL ones must be modified to fit.
• supports Kickstart-floppies (to be used instead of a ROM-switch, presumably; motherboard Kickstart-ROM is to be thrown away. Kick 1.2 will work with CF card, f.ex.)

Again, this is preliminary (and old) info, and I may have misread something, but I don't think so. An educated guess puts the release date of Indivision Mk2 and ACA520 at end of August.

[Omolungo]

Nice info

[jrom]

OMG! It's gonna be even better then I thought it would be! *pinch* No I'm not dreaming :-D

[Photon]

My reaction is that this will be a nice beast if you never need a real 68000.

I do, since I don't want the A500 to be the "portdown target" of already slow software. I foresee drivers and file systems never being made 68000 compatible because of this.

It seems a tiny bit strange without the 68000; the one advantage of owning a real A500, that all games and demos run perfectly, is replaced with a solution that could be a little more compatible than WinUAE, perhaps a lot less.

It could be a WHDLoad machine for those who have expanded chipmem. For the others, an A1200 with fastmem (or ACA1230) is still a better solution to run all OCS games.

Was planning to buy two, but I can't really use this to 'enable' my OCS demomachine until 68000 compatibility is guaranteed. Lucky I kept my SCSI interface!

Lots of text and seems a bit harsh, but this is the only criticism I have for it. It will certainly be a cheap enabler for all those A500s in the closet. As such it's inevitable that we will get more Amiga users! But I still think an "accelerator off, my old A500 back so I can run this stubborn program please" would have been a good idea.

He decided to lock 1 IDE port to an onboard CF slot, so presumably it's meant to be 'the harddisk' and adding files and backing up is done via network. At least the network port is outwardly accessible, so if there's built-in network drivers and software to transfer files hopefully the chicken-and-egg problem is neatly solved. If that happens, that alone is a selling point for the ACA520 - in a few minutes your unused A500 is back in business without any hassle!


Edit: someone on a1k asked about transfer speeds; I saw no reply by Jens but it's reasonable to assume that it will be "Buddha IDE speeds for a stock A1200 with fastmem with 0 wait state". If someone has such a rig and post the results in the Performance Gather 2011 thread, we'd have a good estimate

[jrom]

well... I was hoping Jens also did something about that chipmem limit... then again... I also own an A500+ with KCS powerboard (which gives it 1 mb chipmem extra :-D).

[Photon]

Maybe it would have made the board motherboard-revision-specific and require some extra cable to the mobo what with Agnus revision etc. But if the only reason is a few more bucks in cost or the 68000 emu mode where fastmem is turned off and can't be mapped, then it's a bit strange. It would have made it a more complete WHDLoad machine, even if many OCS games can be run.

[Omolungo]

It would be a great thing if there is a switch button to disable the accelerator, so with a KS switcher you can use KS 1.3 for old floppy games or program, with KS 3.1 you can use your A500+ as a perfect whdload machine

[Photon]

Well, any switch would be a jumper to which you would yourself connect a switch, but yes, that would have been perfect I'm not sure a kickswitch board would fit under the adapter, but a switch would be nice.

Perhaps the accelerator is planned to overlap the 68000-pins so tight that he can't physically fit a socket+original CPU there, or perhaps there is some bus-switching problem related to the A1200 accelerator port.

It would be great if ACA520 had a switch like ACA630, but maybe it's not compatible with some current features, I don't know.

[cv643d]

IMHO, that is too weird hardware. But I guess there is a market for it.

[_ThEcRoW]

It's a interesting accelerator, but i am concerned with the 68000 compatibility for old games and demos. Like photon said, it's also for me important to run the legacy a500 software library. Other than that, it really would make a killer a500. The switch for disabling the expansion is also a good option for the board.
Hope new info is seen in the future about it.

[Photon]

Well, most of the legacy software will run fine, perhaps almost all, with this 7 MHz 68020 mode. I'm not worried about that part of the compatibility, really, especially with exchangable kickstarts you could run A1000 and A500 kick 1.2 games and demos! So in fact it's already better than for example an A500 with kick 2.0 and unswitchable fastmem.

Sometimes I go on about things closest to my heart and write a lot of justifications to push for my view. You can see I've typed a lot about this single feature already

Well, the A500 is closest to my heart. The future I see is that fewer and fewer people develop for the A500 class of Amiga, in fact all the earlier Amigas up to and including unexpanded A1200.

I want a switch because I'm a programmer, ACA630 has it and it's great!

Why is it important to me? Because it gives me a fast coding machine, and still allows me to check exactly how it will perform on unexpanded Amigas. Why is that important to you? Because if nobody codes for unexpanded Amigas, all the ones who have Amigas in their closets will have to 'invest' if they want to take them out again. And that will make it not happen, in many cases. Another Amiga user offline...

I believe that to get more Amiga users, there must be new software for the unexpanded, and coders shouldn't have to set up a dev Amiga+a target Amiga with CF cards and shuffle data back and forth. The more obstacles that are removed for coder and user, the better the odds that new software is being made and that old and new users come to Amiga. And new software for Amiga really needs much better odds.

I will buy one regardless of switch or not, because I'm sure it will be great. Users will have a cheap fast Amiga, and one that runs the familiar games etc very well. I think that for many, it will be better to buy this than to fiddle with kickstart switches or ordering kickstarts, to get a few stubborn games (the ones that don't start with a click in WHDload) running.

It's just that other turbo cards had a switch for a reason. But if it's not possible, it's not possible and still a great piece of hardware, of course.

[Omolungo]

I think I'll buy one of these when it will be available