Indivision AGA A4000 or GVP EGS Spectrum 28/24

[mfletcher]

Hello all,

A while back I picked up a spare A4000 in an auction on Fleabay. I just got round to checking it out and discovered that it has an EGS Spectrum 28/24 in it.

My main A4000 has an Indivision AGA A4000 in it. I was wondering if I would be better off installing the EGS Spectrum 28/24 in it instead?

Does this card do everything the Indivision does and more besides?

Finally, anyone have a scan of the EGS Spectrum manual?

Thanks!

Mark

[rkauer]

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/egs28 have the install software. For the manual: good luck!

I think it's better to use the 28/24 inside the Indivision, so you can have the best of two worlds: a RTG Amiga (EGS) with custom AGA modes (Indy). You need to make a custom cable, but that's dead easy.

You'll find your Amiga running blazing faster when in Picasso96 or CyberGraphicsV3/V4 modes and with almost all precious CHIP RAM free.

The Indy will be come in handy for games and to hook a modern VGA or TFT/LCD screen to the Amiga.

[mfletcher]

So the Spectrum doesnt double as a scandoubler / flicker fixer?

[Zetr0]

@Fletch

The Spectrum card has a passthrough, this doesn't scan-double or flicker fick, but just "pass-through" the vga signal... normally this would be a 15Khz Native Amiga in the case of an A4000 .

But since you have an Indivision - this outputs at 31KHz + so when this is passed though it will work as thought its plugged into the monitor.

Now with the pass-through I believe like the Picasso 2 and handfull of othercards this will auto change to the active screen mode - but I would suggest you investigate to confirm that with this card.

by and large this is a reasonable RTG GFX card and one I think you will enjoy it at 800x600 24bit and 1024x768 16bit... some nice resolutions for Workbench and applications without next to no CHIP ram usage!

the combination of the the Spectrum GFX and the Indivision is indeed a great solution!

[mfletcher]

@Zetr0!

Thanks! So the setup would be something like this

Indy -> Spectrum -> Monitor?

[Zetr0]

@Fletch

Indeed - bang on...

[rkauer]

All you need is a common VGA 15-pin male socket to a multi-via (9 wires plus shield, at least) cable on the Indy output and then to a
VGA 9 pin male socket to hook it to the Spectrum. The shorter the cable, the better.

[mfletcher]

Well finally got around to cracking open the case and yanking the Spectrum, and found a couple of surprises also lurking inside the A4000.

It appears that the A4000 in my possession also has:

DataFlyer Plus:
http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showha...cgi?HARDID=544

And a GVP IO Extender:
http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showha...cgi?HARDID=601

Question is, do I take the DataFlyer Plus and the Spectrum? My main A4000 currently has a Deneb, the Indivision 4000, a network card and the final slot is taken up by a CF Card / IDE interface. I guess with the DataFlyer/SCSI combo, Id be getting faster IO than the IDE / CF card, but arent compatible SCSI drives harder to source these days?

[mfletcher]

Welp! I stand corrected. The DataFlyer is connected to a SCSI CD Rom Drive. The HD runs off IDE.

[rkauer]

Since this board have not DMA capabilities, with it installed you'll not have any other benefits over the internal IDE controller of A4000.

NOte: the NCR5380 & 53C80 chip doesn't have DMA transfer capabilities, that's it. It can only do PIO transfers.

Sack the board and use it with the CD/CD-R on an A2000, as it's where it belongs.

[Zetr0]

@mfletch

as rakuer quite rightly points out those two cards are impractical to use with your A4000, especially since you have a DENEB USB Card that does very fast DMA =)