Blizzard 1230 Mk-IV accelerator card - anything special to do in 3.1.4?

[Loki762]

Together with my fairly recently bought Amiga 1200 I got this accelerator card included with 32MB (Fast?) RAM. I have 2MB chip memory. The Amiga came pre-installed but now I have bought AmigaOS 3.1.4 and I want to do my own installation, to understand it better :-)

I just want to make sure but I don't think (???) I need to install anything special, when having this card and a freshly installed 3.1.4.1? As far as I know, then the card has its jumper set to utilize the MAPROM feature(?) and I can see there are a couple of libraries, named "68030" and "680x0", installed when viewing SysInfo. SysInfo also see the card.

Is there anything I need to pay special attention to?

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Loki762

Together with my fairly recently bought Amiga 1200 I got this accelerator card included with 32MB (Fast?) RAM. I have 2MB chip memory. The Amiga came pre-installed but now I have bought AmigaOS 3.1.4 and I want to do my own installation, to understand it better :-)

That's a very nice setup, and I always like to do my own from-scratch installations, because if/when problems crop up, it's always easier to fix it when you know what's been added or changed. A handy approach though is to have a second bootable partition with another system installation on it - that way you can experiment with different packs and always have a backup system partition if it gets messed up.

I just want to make sure but I don't think (???) I need to install anything special, when having this card and a freshly installed 3.1.4.1? As far as I know, then the card has its jumper set to utilize the MAPROM feature(?) and I can see there are a couple of libraries, named "68030" and "680x0", installed when viewing SysInfo. SysInfo also see the card.

Is there anything I need to pay special attention to?

The MMU libs are recommended for 68030 accelerators - it sounds like you have them installed already, but the latest versions can be found here if you want to start from scratch. They're less important for the 68030 than for the higher CPUs, but you'll get a warning on boot with 3.1.4 if they're not installed.

MapROM copies the Kickstart ROM into fast RAM, which will speed up many OS operations since fast RAM on the accelerator is much faster to access than the ROMs on the motherboard. This costs you 512KB of fast RAM, but with 32MB available you have plenty.

That's about all you need to think about for the accelerator, but another tip for starting from scratch: decide on your filesystem setup at the start because changing it afterwards requires wiping the partitions concerned. If you're using the default FFS, select a larger blocksize for a significant improvement in performance, something like 16384 bytes is good, and will be noticeably faster than the default size when dealing with large files. Other filesystems don't see the same dramatic effect, so go with whatever their instructions tell you (most likely 512 bytes but might be 4096 bytes for more modern drives).

[Loki762]

I do have the MMU libs. I think it came along when installing BestWB, as far as I remember.

I am probably going to use this setup with WHDLoad the most and as far as I can see this is primarily small files, so I think 16KB sector size is too much. Maybe 512 bytes is too small but maybe I will check out 4KB. Is there a good way I can do a performance testing on read speed (I don't care too much for write)?

I am using the 32GB CF as bought from AMIGAstore with 3.1.4.1, though I have wiped it and installed it myself :-)

Anyway, as this thread was for Blizzard then I assume there is nothing else I can do to optimize this any better - thanks for info.