Mod Recommendations

[spacebiscuit]

Hi All - looking for some recommendation to breath some new life into my old A600 machine.

I've ordered the compact flash reader and rgb-2-hdmi mod so now turning my attention to the RAM. I believe the standard practice is to add 1mb in the expansion slot, then add fast ram which sits on top of the processor? Seems this is available in 4bm and 8mb variants, is 8mb going to offer a significant improvement over 4mb.

Are there any other suggestions or recommendations?

Thanks.

[Daedalus]

Adding fast RAM is a huge improvement in that it lets you run lots of games directly from a hard drive via WHDLoad. 4MB is generally enough for most games. Some games might not be able to fully preload in 4MB, meaning pauses in the game as it tries to access the game data, but that will only be larger games. 8MB will allow almost all games to preload, but also comes with the caveat that it isn't entirely compatible with the PCMCIA port, so if you use that for transferring files, you might need to disable part of the RAM expansion when you want to use it.

[spacebiscuit]

Noted. Is the kickstart upgrade a worthwhile addition?

[Daedalus]

It depends a lot on what you want to do with the machine. If you only want to play some classic games, it won't make much difference. If you will be spending much time doing other stuff and using the OS, upgrading the Kickstart and the OS will bring many improvements.

[Leon Besson]

A600 options to consider;

- Furia 020 (Can be a pain in the Ass)
- Plug on A630 to make the A600 a 68030 machine with FastRAM
- Vampire V2 with 128MB FastRAM 68080 FPGA (If you can find one as they aren’t made anymore)

As for the 1MB expansion, I would suggest something like the Icomp A604N so you have further options such as Flicker fixer, RTC and USB. As long as you don’t have a REv 2D board.

[Nightshft]

I added a Furia card to my A600.
It has pros and cons.
- adds fast ram, which is great
- faster cpu, which is great
- the furiatune utillity lets you configure the cards features
- on some machines it gets picky with the CF Card. Which means that the system doesn't boot from all those CF cards it would boot from without the Furia card. Personally I had two cards to try and one works well.
- it generates quite some heat. At least my 2 year old card does, so I added a fan to the cooler which was really necessary. Before, the system even got a little instable due to the generated heat after a while.
As mentioned the card is not completely troublefree, but when it runs it still is a lot of fun and accellerates the system quite well.

Note that - as with many cards - you have to limit Fastram to 4MB if you want to use the pcmcia slot.

On a sidenote: what I'd really love to see for the A600 would be a Furia that is a little bit slower, but generates less heat and runs perfectly stable.

[Leon Besson]

Originally Posted by Nightshft

I added a Furia card to my A600.
It has pros and cons.
- adds fast ram, which is great
- faster cpu, which is great
- the furiatune utillity lets you configure the cards features
- on some machines it gets picky with the CF Card. Which means that the system doesn't boot from all those CF cards it would boot from without the Furia card. Personally I had two cards to try and one works well.
- it generates quite some heat. At least my 2 year old card does, so I added a fan to the cooler which was really necessary. Before, the system even got a little instable due to the generated heat after a while.
As mentioned the card is not completely troublefree, but when it runs it still is a lot of fun and accellerates the system quite well.

Note that - as with many cards - you have to limit Fastram to 4MB if you want to use the pcmcia slot.

On a sidenote: what I'd really love to see for the A600 would be a Furia that is a little bit slower, but generates less heat and runs perfectly stable.

You also forgot about Kickstart compatibility and how hard it is to flash the firmware on one as well Bromigo!

[spacebiscuit]

So I finally found my old A600 - seems I had something already plugged into the expansion socket (don't remember adding this so perhaps it was upgraded prior to sale as an add-on which i paid extra for).



On the flip side there are 4 banks of memory - is there a way to ID this by these photos:





Generally things look quite clean inside and the caps look good I believe:







If any of the above reveals anything of note or interest please let me know.

Thanks!

[Leon Besson]

The thing plugged in will be the 1MB Chip RAM expansion (gives you 2MB chip RAM). Nothing special there Bromigo!

“SHOEI” caps and SMD ones are a ticking time bomb. May look good but still maybe leaking underneath. Any fishy smell?

[spacebiscuit]

Originally Posted by Leon Besson

“SHOEI” caps and SMD ones are a ticking time bomb. May look good but still maybe leaking underneath. Any fishy smell?

Having now set things mostly up and with the case off there is very definitely a bit of a fishy smell, very noticeable when powering up.

Any recommended action, where should I be looking?

[Bprepared]

Originally Posted by spacebiscuit

Having now set things mostly up and with the case off there is very definitely a bit of a fishy smell, very noticeable when powering up.

Any recommended action, where should I be looking?

It could be anywhere, if one has leaked it is normally visible on the Cap solder joints, they will look dull and not shiny at all.

TBH It would be prudent to get the entire set of SMD caps replaced as they are all probably on their last legs. Its not a usage thing, its an age thing with these early cheap caps.


EDIT: from the photos C214 contacts look a little dull, but that could just be lighting/angle when the photo was taken