ACA500 tested

[fitzsteve]

Hi All!

I've finally finished my review on the ACA500:

http://www.fitzstevesamigaworld.co.uk/?p=119

I hope you enjoy reading it

[CrashMidnick]

Very nice review Steve, thanks for sharing !

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by CrashMidnick

Very nice review Steve, thanks for sharing !

Cheers! You're welcome & Thanks for reading

[BarryB]

All the info in one place

[corpsicle]

Nice read! Great job fitzsteve.

[amiga1]

Hi! My ACA500 arrived last evening (Merry XMAS!!! Yum!). I haven't had a chance to get it up and going yet, but I was wondering if it's possible to use the CF card, with its FAT file system, as a boot device straight from FAT? Or do we still have to prepare the card under emulation with fastfs or pfs3 first? Has anyone booted from a FAT format yet?

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by BarryB

All the info in one place

Originally Posted by corpsicle

Nice read! Great job fitzsteve.

Glad you enjoyed the read corpsicle & indeed BarryB the idea was to get all the info collated

Originally Posted by amiga1

Hi! My ACA500 arrived last evening (Merry XMAS!!! Yum!). I haven't had a chance to get it up and going yet, but I was wondering if it's possible to use the CF card, with its FAT file system, as a boot device straight from FAT? Or do we still have to prepare the card under emulation with fastfs or pfs3 first? Has anyone booted from a FAT format yet?

I haven't tried but yes I am pretty sure you can use the FAT CF to boot so you will need to use WinUAE to install workbench to to your CF (mount it as a directory) and it should boot

I'll try this myself at some point! I think you would be better running your workbench from an Amiga file system though in the long term.

[fitzsteve]

@Amiga1

Just tested it here with my 4gb Sandisk card, FAT32 formatted it clean and used WinUAE to transfer WB3.1 files over (to preserve the protection bits) and boots/works just fine.

[amiga1]

Originally Posted by fitzsteve

@Amiga1

Just tested it here with my 4gb Sandisk card, FAT32 formatted it clean and used WinUAE to transfer WB3.1 files over (to preserve the protection bits) and boots/works just fine.

Nice! Cheers.

[Photon]

Originally Posted by amiga1

Hi! My ACA500 arrived last evening (Merry XMAS!!! Yum!). I haven't had a chance to get it up and going yet, but I was wondering if it's possible to use the CF card, with its FAT file system, as a boot device straight from FAT? Or do we still have to prepare the card under emulation with fastfs or pfs3 first? Has anyone booted from a FAT format yet?

I have! You must put it in the Aux slot and enable that slot, which eats 261K FastRAM for some reason. (Sounds very high to my ears, maybe this will be changed/fixed in a later firmware.) But it works fine and speed matches a normal Amiga-formatted card.

FitzSteve: great review I linked it and the ACA1232 vid in my review. I especially liked the listing of accelerator and CF card compatibility. (Too bad about the Apollo 1240/1260 RAM, maybe something can be done as for Blizzard? Not that I need to put it in my A500, but others might want to.)

If you want, you can add the Lexar 80x to your list - they're slow though, around 1200KB/s IIRC...!

[fitzsteve]

Hey Photon. peeps are always hacking stuff do you never know what they will achieve! Already seeing Blizzard 1260's working is awesome.

I'll add your CF to the list and will keep my review updated with any new info collated.

[Coltch]

Amzingly the 2GB Fuji 100x CF card that refuses to work with my A1200 works in the AUX slot.

I haven't connected my ACA1231 up yet but on it's own workbench 3.1 feels quite snappyw

[kipper2k]

Not sure if it is possible, but a clone CF card option would be nice accessed from the Advanced menu so it can be done directly from the firmware instead of going through the Amiga.

[Schoenfeld]

Originally Posted by kipper2k

Not sure if it is possible, but a clone CF card option would be nice accessed from the Advanced menu so it can be done directly from the firmware instead of going through the Amiga.

about 700 bytes left in the ROM. Not exactly the kind of space that allows tools to be added - I'd like to add some more menu languages first, and Toni may do some restructuring of the code that gives some free space, but "clone card" would not be high on my list. I'd prefer ADF read/write tools over that, and other people probably have other preferences.

Since space is so contrained in the ROM, the most important thing for me was to be able to boot from a FAT-formatted card. This way, the community can create installs that are specific to a certain task and spread them as ZIP files that you can unpack to a CF card with any PC and no special knowledge. Even if you take the detour through an ADF that contains the CF-card-clone action, it can be done with simple steps that everyone with a PC, internet and USB CF card reader can accomplish.

Jens

[Loedown]

Are there enough inputs on the FPGA to connect a serial EEPROM to ease the congestion in the ROM and adjust the code accordingly to acknowledge the new EEPROM, can easily get 64 Mb serial EEPROM now for next to nothing and a footprint of a SOIC 8?

[Coltch]

Managed to hook my ACA1231 up this morning (no ACA Tune running), Sysinfo 4 shows 9.89 Mips which is quite close to the 10.15 I get in my A1200!.

My A500 is having a new lease of life at the moment

[alexh]

I wonder if it would fit in a GVP HD8+ case?

[BarryB]

Just tested one of my favourite games (Turrican) on the ACA500+ACA1232 (68030/40/128mb) and compared to my A1200 (68030/40/32mb) it runs about the same, slight slowdown when the rocks are falling and you use the beam weapon to blow them up but not a game breaker, it also takes 14 seconds longer to get into the game after pressing fire and the game screen appears, takes 3 seconds on my A1200? It's all preloaded and requires 1mb chip which I now have. I also have to use NOAUTOVEC (set that in WHDLoad.prefs) as I got an NMI error when exiting the first level (Registered WHDLoad 17.2). This is just 1 game I've compared to the A1200 though and the AGA chipset on my A1200 probably helps the game run better compared to ECS on my A500.

Have also tried about 14 pre-installed WHDLoad games on the same combination of ACA500+ACA1232 and all of them run fine and can quit back to WB in every one so that's a plus, don't need NOVBRMOVE like on my A1200 and MX1230! So overall this has made my A500 into a proper games machine or poor mans A1200 if you prefer

[Photon]

BarryB: I think there are slowdowns there on the original A500 as well. Have you compared?

At least I don't think WHDLoad adds much more frame overhead than the keyboard interrupt.

[BarryB]

Originally Posted by Photon

BarryB: I think there are slowdowns there on the original A500 as well. Have you compared?

At least I don't think WHDLoad adds much more frame overhead than the keyboard interrupt.

Yes, I pulled the ACA500 out and booted from disk and my A500 with 512kb trapdoor expansion runs about the same loading wise, but did get the feeling it ran better when those rocks appeared though so double checked and 1mb A500 runs better, no noticeable slowdown when destroying rocks, also when using the beam weapon on those beetle things that drop diamonds hardly slows down when they are on the screen as well where the ACA500+ACA1232 has slowdown on both!