Fixation on HEUOGE Memory Counts?

[Tchucolate]

Back in the 1990s I owned an A4000, and it only had 8mb or so on it. A couple of years later, I was using a PC + 3D Studio to do animations for a video game company. That 32mb machine was VERY high spec for 1993-95.

These days, I see many Amiga owners lusting after Amigas with 128-256mb of RAM.

The question begs, why?

Is there a practical reason to have that kind of RAM in a machine designed for the early 90s. Is it for demos scene stuff? Or something like hot-rodding, people doing it because they can, or to break records...

Just wondering, because for running 99% of software on period correct machine, that level of RAM seems like a waste of time???

Discuss

[Karlos]

My main A1200 had 256MB of RAM on the BPPC. It was overkill 9000 when I got it but I don't regret it al all.

One of the benefits of it was that I could allocate a RAD disk and I updated my cold boot process to select a preferred OS image that would be extracted into it spare the spinning rust the many reboots hacking away at dubious code would result in.

[arcanist]

I managed to exceed 512M loading in some real DEM data sets into World Construction Set. WCS pushes the limits of what's realistic outside of emulation, though. Can't imagine it was much fun on a real Amiga.

Lightwave can easily gobble up 10s of MBs with detailed textures without sacrificing much performance.

[nogginthenog]

I saw some very odd looking 72pin simms on eBay and chanced it. They worked in my CS MkII. So 128Mb+16Mb & 2Mb chip.

https://imgur.com/a/hSeHysZ

My other A4000 has a 68882 because there was an empty hole for one.

[ant512]

PiStorm 32 with a Raspberry Pi 4B gives me 1.8GB of RAM, which is insane.

[grelbfarlk]

I start to think it's time to reboot when I have less than 300MB Fast available on the Workbench bar.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by ant512

PiStorm 32 with a Raspberry Pi 4B gives me 1.8GB of RAM, which is insane.

Same. We can't get any more than that, the limit is 2GB.

[Predseda]

Originally Posted by Tchucolate

Back in the 1990s I owned an A4000, and it only had 8mb or so on it. A couple of years later, I was using a PC + 3D Studio to do animations for a video game company. That 32mb machine was VERY high spec for 1993-95.

These days, I see many Amiga owners lusting after Amigas with 128-256mb of RAM.

The question begs, why?

Is there a practical reason to have that kind of RAM in a machine designed for the early 90s. Is it for demos scene stuff? Or something like hot-rodding, people doing it because they can, or to break records...

Just wondering, because for running 99% of software on period correct machine, that level of RAM seems like a waste of time???

Discuss

No, I think it has not any practical reason. My machines are equipped with 32-256MB Fast mem and I think that 32 is enough for everything. I use it mostly for unpacking archives to RAM: disk.

[Karlos]

You always find a use for more memory. I maxed out the BPPC because it seemed like future PPC software would need it. It certainly helped.

[Daedalus]

Back in the day I used a fair chunk of RAM. I had (and still have) an A1200T with a Blizzard 1260, and back then it was my main machine. I had 32MB in it in the late '90s, and found that wasn't enough for some uses so I upped it to 128MB and then 256MB when RAM prices dropped in the early '00s.

Using it as my main computer during uni years meant having multiple large documents open at any time, lots of large images open, many screens with many programs running, sometimes large (for the time) games, Mac emulation etc., and it was nice to be able to throw massive caches at everything and know I wouldn't hit off the limits that I hit with 32MB. Specifically, games like Earth2140 needed 32MB IIRC, Mac emulation was always able to use more RAM if you had it (having a 64MB Mac running alongside your other applications was great), editing large images could use dozens of MB of RAM at a time, and one particular use was editing audio files. Being able to load an uncompressed 50MB audio file into Samplitude Opus for editing without having to use its hard drive editing mode was fantastic.

With modern accelerators however, the difference in cost between, say, 32MB and 128MB is quite small relative to the cost of the board, so it makes sense to solder enough RAM directly onto it to satisfy most users' requirements.

[Karlos]

I also used to use the system as a sampler, so having a gigantic wedge of ram was handy.

[Hedeon]

A lot of professional software works better with more memory, without cannibalizing all your memory and having to disk swap. Or so my uncle said. No joke.

[Hedeon]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Same. We can't get any more than that, the limit is 2GB.

Everything under 0x10000000 is reserved, which gets you to 1.8GB. Actually....the expansion.library also reserves 0x10000000-0x40000000...Sad...But still HEUOGE!

[alexh]

The memory requirements of applications, particularly ones ported from other platforms, means that 16MB of FastRAM doesn't always cut it.

TerribleFire products (TF1260, TF360, TF4060) seem to be limited to 128MB of FastRAM which I would wager is a good "bang-4-buck" price point beyond which there are diminishing returns for Amiga users.

Originally Posted by Daedalus

With modern accelerators however, the difference in cost between, say, 32MB and 128MB is quite small relative to the cost of the board, so it makes sense to solder enough RAM directly onto it to satisfy most users' requirements.

It can affect the performance depending on how the RAM is banked/ranked. The more ranks the slower the overall memory is.

[E-Penguin]

Because I can and I like big numbers.

[Tchucolate]

Well, thats exactly it. I can too, using my new Fastlane Z3 FastSCSI2 and Ram expansion card.

[ Show youtube player ]

Well, I could get 256mb on this card alone, and its a 1993 device. But, the question is, would I really benefit from it? For me, I do want to try out some of the old 3D apps I used back in 90-93, like Real3D.

Bear in mind, getting all the required 16mb simms to acheive this, is NOT cheap these days...

I worked in games back in the 90s, for a well known UK game developer. And produced 3D FMV for their game. And we used Pentiums with 32mb on each. And honestly, those were tricked out for their time.

So, yeah, unless I really wanted to load up an Amiga with multiple Apps, audio samples, and videos etc etc, just to show off that it CAN make use of that 256mb of RAM. Then I really would not NEED that much RAM.

For me, I think 32-65mb would be just fine for most uses. Even rocking some Lightwave scenes, with a LOT of heavy GEO+Maps.

Im using a 68040 @ 25mhz and THAT gives me a kind of ceiling as well. Its real harware, not emulated. So it kind of lives WITHIN the envolope of what was possible with that CPU tech. And thats more between 16-64m.

Just IMHO

[grelbfarlk]

What you can do with a lot of RAM, which was a pretty big limitation on Toasters back in the day is load a large animation in memory, more memory, the longer it could be. I would make a 3-4 second looping one in Lightwave for something better than a static image in the background of a text crawl. 30 seconds would would have been so much better, that's the difference between the default 16MB on an A4000 and 128MB on an accelerator.

Of course that's not the best way of doing that, with an accelerator with a DMA SCSI drive, or maybe an A4091 or Fastlane as long as it's not thrashing the CPU too much, you can stream right from the HDD. With a CV64 and a TRexx-II I could play something like a 512x384 16bpp animation movie up to the file size limit in Frogger, but not via the Toaster.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Hedeon

Everything under 0x10000000 is reserved, which gets you to 1.8GB. Actually....the expansion.library also reserves 0x10000000-0x40000000...Sad...But still HEUOGE!

Yep. But great news - the next update of Emu68 will add a further 64MB of FastRAM to our systems so yay

[kriz]

Of course you want as much ram as possible.. Newer ports and a few demos needs more and a big ram drive is just sweet to have

[RetroPassionUK]

Simple, its parts. You cant get 8,16,32 ram anymore (NEW) unless its from a old parts so to get hold of anything that can be used in the manufacture of upgrades is impossible. So hence why you see 64/128/256/512 as its modern ram readily available and at a good price.

No different to memory sticks or SD cards the cost difference between a 2GB and 4GB is pence. A 128Mb memory stick (Megabyte) is £5, a 2Gb is £6.