Introducing ACA 1221 Low Cost Accelerator At AmigaKit.com

[Arnie]

Originally Posted by afanabola

Two topics earlier:


Saw it too. In this case, I don't have much of a choice.

Did you buy it?

Nope.
I mean, there is no other choice but to buy from Jens.

[Arnie]

Originally Posted by afanabola

Nope.
I mean, there is no other choice but to buy from Jens.

That's not so bad. If I had the money I'd still sooner buy from Jens than pay those prices.

[Schoenfeld]

Originally Posted by Leffmann

The thing with these deals, that seem great to the unsuspecting customer, is that the lowest base price has already paid for the full hardware with everything enabled, with profit margins. Anything you pay to activate more features is just extra profit.

Which part of "the ACA1221 in it's base configuration is sold at component cost" did you not understand? That low price is only possible because I did NOT factor in my own development work and financing cost. If nobody decides to upgrade, the whole project will be a (financial) failure.

The extras that I will hopefully sell are my *only* source of profit in this project. I'm pretty sure that I have mentioned it more than once in this thread, and I kindly request from you (and others) to not spread this kind of rumor.

This new business model is an experiment. There are other (also quite modern) forms of finding a price for a product that I will try in the future. They all have the same goal: Keep prices for our hobby at an affordable level. 300 pounds for a 20-year old used accelerator without warranty? Don't you *see* that there is a requirement for lower-price products?

My other alternative for the ACA1221 would have been to do overclocking tests with each and every CPU, which would have made it much more expensive (a lot more than the old ACA1220 design). Then I could have enabled all features from the start and put a price tag of 129,- EUR on it. My goal of providing a lower-price product would not have been met, as that's more expensive than the ACA1220-25, and it would not provide much more: Faster memory, faster chipram access, dynamic clock speed - I'm not sure if people like you would have spared some or all of their criticism.

Don't get me wrong - I do like the discussion about new forms of finding a price, but please keep your criticism constructive: Don't just demand to make something cheaper (which you essentially did), but also give your claim a foundation of numbers. Just ignoring what I have written before (no profit in base config) and claiming that I'm making enough money already is not very constructive.

Jens

[NovaCoder]

I must admit to being against this kind of business model at first but I'm actually warming to the idea now, esp. if you are just after a cheap basic card.

[dJOS]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

I must admit to being against this kind of business model at first but I'm actually warming to the idea now, esp. if you are just after a cheap basic card.

I was too but now wish Jens used this biz model on my aca1220 so I could get an easy overclock from 16mhz to 28Mhz.

[SKOLMAN_MWS]

on eBay cpu 030 25MHz it is cheaper than 020 link

[dJOS]

Originally Posted by SKOLMAN_MWS

on eBay cpu 030 25MHz it is cheaper than 020 link

That's not much good without a card to plug it into!

[Arnie]

Yeah but, it's cheaper

[demolition]

Originally Posted by Arnie

Yeah but, it's cheaper

So is a carton of milk, but it's not exactly comparable.
Also, buying CPUs off ebay from a Chinese seller carries a big risk that it is a fake.

[crazyc]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

I must admit to being against this kind of business model at first but I'm actually warming to the idea now, esp. if you are just after a cheap basic card.

Thats exactly how I felt. My first gut reaction was not positive, but the more I actually thought about it, the more I came round to it, and have in fact pre-ordered.....

[amigakit.com]

@crazyc

Thanks

[TenLeftFingers]

I'll be ordering one too, at Christmas. Although I'll let the early adopters check it out first. Because of this cheaper model, I should be able to afford to post my Amiga off and get the timing fix done. I'll upgrade it on birthdays etc

[eXeler0]

Ill order one when theres a CD32\ACA500 adapter available ;-)
The A1200 is happy with the 060, the A600 is waiting for Vampire V2 and the A500 will remain unexpanded ;-)

[duga]

So, the manufacturing should be finished or at least ongoing at this point. Correct?

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by TenLeftFingers

Because of this cheaper model, I should be able to afford to post my Amiga off and get the timing fix done.

Did you not find someone local able to do the fixes? I'll be home in November for a couple of days, and again the week before Christmas if you wanted to make the trip up to Wicklow with it, save having to ship it overseas? I'll also be home a couple of weekends in September but it might have to be before lunch one of the days as the afternoons/evenings are all booked up.

[GhstWlf]

With a ACA500 and a A500 with 512+512 ram can the ACA1221 use the full 64MBytes of ram as fast?

[TenLeftFingers]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Did you not find someone local able to do the fixes? I'll be home in November for a couple of days, and again the week before Christmas if you wanted to make the trip up to Wicklow with it, save having to ship it overseas? I'll also be home a couple of weekends in September but it might have to be before lunch one of the days as the afternoons/evenings are all booked up.

Hi Daedalus, thanks so much for the offer! I do have to be in Dublin in late September and late October and could make it to Wicklow if the missus doesn't mind driving. But it might be tricky for us since we finish our workshops at about 6pm and have to be back in the next morning. Add a pre-teen who needs to be dropped at and collected from relations and you can see how manic our time in Dublin can be if anything doesn't go smoothly

I found someone in Ireland who can recap and do timing fixes ( http://www.vintagerecapeurope.com/ ). I guess since I want it recapped too I could just get him to do the timing fix as well. The prices are the same but I'll be happier posting it within the country. Let me chat to the missus about squeezing in a trip down to you and see if we can possibly leave a day early.

[Schoenfeld]

Originally Posted by duga

So, the manufacturing should be finished or at least ongoing at this point. Correct?

Correct. I expect to ship the first orders sometime tomorrow. The "in stock" flag won't be set for another few days, as I need to work through pre-orders first.

Started documentation here (with lots of todos...): http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/ACA1221

Originally Posted by GhstWlf

With a ACA500 and a A500 with 512+512 ram can the ACA1221 use the full 64MBytes of ram as fast?

If you have licensed 63MBytes, you can use these as 1MByte @$00c0.0000 and 62MBytes continuous memory in the 32-bit area.

The final one MByte of memory is reserved for Maprom. If Maprom is NOT licensed, you can "addmem" that part of memory to the freemem pool. So technically, yes, you can use the whole 64M as memory, but it's a bit of an expert's job.

Note that the ACA500 firmware does NOT know about the ACA1221 yet. We need to make a firmware update for that.

Jens

[LieutLaww]

Nice ! I have pre ordered one so hopefully I get mine before I head off on holiday