Upgrading a500 6a

[Secret Squirrel]

I am a new owner of an A500 and want to play such games as f1 grand prix(microprose) with full graphics and speed, I purchased a 512 trapdoor card but now realise this needs to be added to chip ram,how is this done? It seems i need to cut tracks and solder but would appreciate confirmation of this and if i add 8mb card to the 68000 CPU will this do what I am aiming for?

[trixster]

what version agnus does your A500 have?

[Secret Squirrel]

Originally Posted by trixster

what version agnus does your A500 have?

8372a

[trixster]

in which case this is the mod to do



it works, i did it to my A500 3 days ago.

No idea about the 8mb board youre talking about though, sorry.

[lesta_smsc]

Is this because game requirements are over 1MB? I cant see how the location of RAM would make a difference other than needing more RAM in general in which case any means of adding RAM would work (trapdoor, side expansion etc).

[Secret Squirrel]

Originally Posted by trixster

in which case this is the mod to do



it works, i did it to my A500 3 days ago.

No idea about the 8mb board youre talking about though, sorry.

Brilliant thank you so much for your help.

[Secret Squirrel]

Originally Posted by lesta_smsc

Is this because game requirements are over 1MB? I cant see how the location of RAM would make a difference other than needing more RAM in general in which case any means of adding RAM would work (trapdoor, side expansion etc).

So do you think the chip ram mod is sufficient and I wouldn't need any fast ram?

[Fastdruid]

More fast RAM is helpful as the chip ram is shared with the custom chips while the fast ram is CPU only.

This means that if the system only has chip RAM the CPU has to sometimes wait to access memory and hence if you have some dedicated to the CPU it can therefore help speed the system up.

That said, not many games "back in the day" for the A500 needed more than 1Mb and those that did most were fine with 1/2Mb Chip and 1/2Mb slow.

If you're looking at Microprose F1 specifically though...er might not make much difference!

https://www.amigaf1.co.uk/faq/qna.html

Unless you patch it.

https://www.amigaf1.co.uk/utils/index.html

[Secret Squirrel]

Originally Posted by Fastdruid

More fast RAM is helpful as the chip ram is shared with the custom chips while the fast ram is CPU only.

This means that if the system only has chip RAM the CPU has to sometimes wait to access memory and hence if you have some dedicated to the CPU it can therefore help speed the system up.

That said, not many games "back in the day" for the A500 needed more than 1Mb and those that did most were fine with 1/2Mb Chip and 1/2Mb slow.

If you're looking at Microprose F1 specifically though...er might not make much difference!

https://www.amigaf1.co.uk/faq/qna.html

Unless you patch it.

https://www.amigaf1.co.uk/utils/index.html

Thank you, interesting little discovery I found, in the made up team names one of the lower ranked teams name is Leclerc! What are the chances!