Pre-ordered an ACA1221lc from iComp
 

I got a nice email from from iComp to extract some money from me (willingly!) this morning....qwak qwak qwak....so I just pre-ordered an ACA1221lc. It says it is available from Jan 2020 :

https://icomp.de/shop-icomp/en/shop/...aca1221lc.html

Its a little pricey, but it seems to have some great features.

The most interesting part, I hope its not a typo, but it mentions the upcoming ACA2000

"The ACA1221lc is prepared for use with our forthcoming ACA2000, where it will provide up to 11.9MBytes of fastmem. More memory configurations allow for using Zorro cards without conflicts."

Yeah, I've been eyeing it. Doesn't seem to be a very good value compared to the AMAZING ACA1221ec, but the IDE speedup is cool. I REALLY hope Jens does something for the A3000/4000 soon. One of his fast 030 designs would be fantastic for a stock-ish A3000 or perhaps he could come up with a cool lowcost (ish) 040/060 design without all the bells and whisles of the WARP and VAMPIRE for people who will use IDE or ZORRO for graphics, ethernet etc.

I've just read through the wiki page on these as a possible addition to my ACA 500+. It sounds decent enough but when you think that this is €150 and a 26MHZ ACA 1233N is €200 it kind of begs the question why on earth not to pay the extra for the full 030 with MMU and 128MB RAM?

Granted you might be able to get the ACA 1221LC to 40MHz but the wiki says you must use active cooling and not run it at that speed for more than 30 minutes. After a hard reboot it will always restart at 20MHz as well.

I guess it gets a new A1200 owner safely into WHDLoad territory comfortably running nearly all games and demos from 1992-94 for a lot less than an original accelerator. I note that even 4MB A1200 fast mem expansions often go for more than £100 on ebay.

EDIT: thinking about it that extra €50 goes a long way to an x-surf 500 which I am also thinking about, so for me maybe it is worth considering; it's not like I need all the features of a 1233n ?

Are you sure about that? I have the 1221ec set to 36mhz (without any cooling). It's stable as a rock and sets itself to that speed on each boot, warm or cold.

Yes, he is just quoting when Jens is writing. My 1221ec is also perfectly stable at 42MHz without additional cooling, but the CPU on 1221lc might be a lower grade or the perhaps he improved some memory timings which came at a cost of clock frequency?

The IDE speed is intriguing. How is this managed where other accelerators could, just by "software setting" is this some custom rom in the fastback area ?

I believe it's a software setting that activates PIO mode 4. The CF card or HDD needs to support it. You can find some info in the icomp wiki for the ACA 1233n (or ACA 500plus): http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/ACA1233n_r...l_bit_meanings

Just checking what's available on the icomp shop and all the 26MHz 1233n cards are now sold out. With them gone the new 1221LC at €149 makes sense as the 40MHz 1233n is €259. I can't find the post now, but Jen's said somewhere that the 1221LC were delayed due to a problem which meant all the boards had to be repaired/adjusted and this put the cost up; hence they are more expensive than the old 1221EC. Also, looking at the Sysinfo scores on the wiki, it does look like the LC had some optimisations as its scores are a little higher for comparable clock-speeds than the EC.

I just purchased a 1200 and I need to get an accelerator and a hard drive for whdload. This one was linked to me as a suggestion in my intro thread but I literally have no idea what I am doing at this point in time. Would appreciate some advice on this card and I guess other cards by this company. I think I would prefer to buy new than take a chance on ebay.

Well it always depends on what you intend to use you miggy for. If it's only whdload gaming, then a light Workbench 3.1 would be more than enough and an ACA1221 is a good card for this purpose (even if a little bit costly if you ask me).

If you enjoy a more "polished" OS like 3.9 and you intend to run more "demanding" stuff (demos, utilities, software) and not only games then an 030 would be the right fit but it will set you back more of course. I have an ACA1233 and I'm absolutely satisfied with what it offers but I think that in that case a good second hand card will be just fine (these boards have a really good reputation so far).

Thanks for the advice, Portarinos. I bought the only slightly more expensive Apollo Turbo 1230lc on ebay but it won't arrive until next week. Obviously it is an older card but I hope it meets my needs.

Every "old-school" card is usually reliable and an 030 is always the way to go. You won't regret it especially if you stroke a bargain.

Other than having an MMU, is there really that much difference between an 68020 and '030?

* 030 has a 256 byte data cache in addition to the 020's 256 byte instruction cache.
* 030 can operate faster on a synchronous memory bus, including burst transfers where an entire cache line (4 words) is read/written using a single address request and all subsequent bus cycles are used for data.

These two things can make the 030 significantly faster in operations that involve repeatedly processing small data sets, or lightly processing large streams of data.

In addition the 030 removes the CALLM instruction introduced in the 020, but it was a pretty esoteric instruction that wasn't meant to be used anyway.

does the ACA1221lc expose an (Easy to access) Int7 header?

I couldn't see anything listed on the icomp website, and can't zoom into the images to make anything out.