Fast RAM in an A600

[Marle]

Hey there folks,

I'm hopefully getting my re-capped Amiga 600 back from Amiga Kit this week (so excited to have it back!)

One thing that I think will help is some fast RAM as whilst I am wanting to code a game that will run on a 1MB 68000 Amiga, I do find that with 2MB chip RAM the RAM is quite depleted by the time Workbench is open (which is just a vanilla Workbench 2.05 install) with Dpaint open, so having some extra fast RAM would be good.

So my question is, are those PCMCIA SRAM cards any good, or is using them as RAM very slow?

I don't want to go down the Furia route as I want to stick with a fairly simple A600 (and so I can test properly that my coding is on point for the poky little 68000!)

Thanks,
Vicky

[Daedalus]

Well, the SRAM cards are pretty good indeed, and will definitely help you out when you've got DPaint, Blitz etc. all open, and fast RAM in general has the added bonus of freeing up some precious chip RAM that can then be used for other things.

However, SRAM cards are quite expensive these days, and for the money, a Furia or similar card gives you a hell of a lot more for probably a similar amount of money. For testing, most accelerators have a method for disabling them and falling back to the stock CPU, either holding down a key on bootup or running a small command line tool. I'm not sure if the Furia has this, but it might be an option worth investigating.

[Jope]

If you have a stock 68000, the sram card is just as fast as any other ram expansion.

If you install a cpu card, it's best to use the ram that is local on the cpu card.

[Marle]

Thanks guys! I just remember I used to have a Squirrel card for my Amiga 1200 back in the day and remembered how much that jammed up the computer, and I was just thinking will it be dog slow!

The reason I was sort of discounting the Furia is as far as I can tell, there is no easy way to disable the 68EC020, only the FPU apart from uninstalling it, and it's finckety apparently with some some CF cards....and I could just see me having to spend more money on the SD card based right angle adapters etc.

And I don't really need the speed (if I need that I can always jump on to FS UAE....)

That said I was surprised to see the SRAM card prices, cheaper than they were in 1992, Calculus wanted £129.99 for a 2MB SRAM card, which is apparently almost £250 in today's money!

[Amiga1992]

kipper used to make some handy 8MB RAM expansions for A600 but not anymore, sadly.
You might be able to score one used through Amibay or something though, if you keep an eye out.

[demolition]

Kipper also made slightly cheaper 4MB versions of those internal fast ram expansions, and I actually have one of those but I could never get it to work properly. Those internal A600 expansions are a bit finicky as they install upside-down on top of the CPU and I was able to improve the stability by replacing the socket with a better one, but I could never get it fully stable. It could also be the board that is faulty but it was too expensive to ship back to Kipper, so I just left it as it is.

If you can live with 2MB fast RAM (sounds like you might), then those are much cheaper than their 4MB SRAM counter-parts, so those might be worth looking for. They are also much easier to install than those upside-down socket expansions.

[Amiga1992]

Yeah I agree that the piggyback-on-68000 method of installation leaves a lot to be desired. I still don't get why they didn't put all necessary lines on the A600 expansion slot to be able to put extra RAM there. What an oversight, thanks Commodore

Anyway, another alternative I'd recommend is hunting a used ACA620. I have one and it's pure bliss, and as far as I know, you can disable all the speed via ACATUNE (turning off cache and burst) if that bothers you, and it also has a DISABLE jumper. Although I don't see why you would, unless you are trying to assert compatibility.

[Marle]

Originally Posted by Akira

kipper used to make some handy 8MB RAM expansions for A600 but not anymore, sadly.
You might be able to score one used through Amibay or something though, if you keep an eye out.

Yeah I saw those, there is someone or was someone on eBay selling them, they were going for about £80, but now they're on for something like £350...

Originally Posted by demolition

Kipper also made slightly cheaper 4MB versions of those internal fast ram expansions, and I actually have one of those but I could never get it to work properly. Those internal A600 expansions are a bit finicky as they install upside-down on top of the CPU and I was able to improve the stability by replacing the socket with a better one, but I could never get it fully stable. It could also be the board that is faulty but it was too expensive to ship back to Kipper, so I just left it as it is.

If you can live with 2MB fast RAM (sounds like you might), then those are much cheaper than their 4MB SRAM counter-parts, so those might be worth looking for. They are also much easier to install than those upside-down socket expansions.

Yeah that's what I was thinking. Back in the day I had 68030s, 040s and even a PPC, graphics card etc by the very end, but then that was for a daily driver machine and this is all about using simpler stuff and just getting enjoyment out of the basics (bar the 4meg of RAM and compact flash hard disk!)

Thanks!

[dodke]

I was thinking about this same thing for a long time. I sort of wanted to keep my a600 with stock CPU so I could test stuff at a500 speeds but in the end I decided to get the Furia. You can't disable it but luckily emulators are pretty much perfect at emulating a basic 68000 config so you always have that option. If you target any other config (020 to 060) you will need the correct hardware to be able to test properly.
The real fast ram expansions (9.5 MB, sold on ebay and sordan.ie at least) will also make the Amiga significantly quicker btw but obviously it'll still be slower than a Furia so not sure about their value for money.
The CF IDE compatibility with Furia is a bit annoying. None of my CF cards worked with the adaptor I had. Had to switch to an old 2.5" drive half outside of the case for now until I get an SD card adaptor.

[Amiga1992]

Yeah despite the CF card woes, I would highly recommend a Fúria. It's particularly good because the developer still actively supports it and that's very important.

It's a shame the ACA620 is not made anymore, it is a very good product, but sucks that it was axed not too long after its release.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by Akira

Yeah I agree that the piggyback-on-68000 method of installation leaves a lot to be desired. I still don't get why they didn't put all necessary lines on the A600 expansion slot to be able to put extra RAM there. What an oversight, thanks Commodore

It is probably not an oversight, but more of a design choice. A600 was meant to be small and cheap and making the expansion connector bigger to accomodate a full fast RAM expansion would make it bigger and more expensive. Also, it would make the machine more competitive against the A1200 which they probably rather wanted to you to buy.

Originally Posted by Akira

Anyway, another alternative I'd recommend is hunting a used ACA620. I have one and it's pure bliss, and as far as I know, you can disable all the speed via ACATUNE (turning off cache and burst) if that bothers you, and it also has a DISABLE jumper.

I agree that the ACA620 is a great little accelerator, however if you want a plain 68000 CPU that it is not the way to go since you cannot use any of the fast mem without the 020 CPU.


For a plain 68000 development machine, I would suggest an A500 with an ACA500plus, Wicher 500i or similar accelerator since they both have true 68000 CPUs on them which can be overclocked for good speed or easily clocked to stock speed for testing purposes, while still having access to fast mem, maprom etc. Afaik, no overclockable 68000 accelerators exist for the A600.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by demolition

I agree that the ACA620 is a great little accelerator, however if you want a plain 68000 CPU that it is not the way to go since you cannot use any of the fast mem without the 020 CPU.

But as I said if you turn off caches and burst, wouldn't you basically just make it the same as the plain stuff? I never tried benchmarking it so I could be talking shit.

A500+Wicher/ACA500 is a great choice of platform too, but it implies getting another computer, which the OP might understandably not be keen on.
The main problem of the A600 still remains the connection method. Perhaps someone should make an expansion adapter, where you have to modify your A600 with a CPU socket and then you can repplace it with an adapter that allows you to easily connect an expansion card and/or change the 68000. Anyway sorry, I turned into "Amiga fan-fiction" there for a minute

[demolition]

Originally Posted by Akira

But as I said if you turn off caches and burst, wouldn't you basically just make it the same as the plain stuff? I never tried benchmarking it so I could be talking shit.

With caches turned off the performance is closer to a 7MHz 68000, but even then the speed is still >2x faster due to the 16MHz clock frequency and the 020 has other features that the 68000 does not have so even if the clock speed was identical, compatibility would still not be 100%.

[Amiga1992]

I see. Understood!

However if speedier processor + Fast RAM is only needed for dev purposes, and full 68000 testbed needed for compatibility of created binaries, then the ACA620's disable jumper would work just fine.

If I understood Marle correctly, she has no need to have Fast RAM + accelerator on runtime, she just wants some extra juice for while she is developing her stuff. Her target binary platform is 68000+1MB Chip.

[Marle]

Guys very helpful discussion! I'm sure this will help someone with the right answer when they Google it one day.

For me, Akira is on the money, I just want a bit of extra free RAM so I can easily run Blitz and Dpaint at the same time so I can tweak things in Dpaint, save, re-run the code, tweak the code etc. For anything more demanding, I'll use a compact flash card to get my code and run it through FS UAE.

I've done the whole tower Amiga thing in the late 90s with a PPC, and that was great, but now I'm quite content with the boring old ECS A600. It's really important to me that the final game runs on fairly stock Amiga 500s that have an extra 512KB.

Plus as I get older, the less there is to go wrong or break down the happier I am!

[Amiga1992]

I agree with a "simpler is better" approach at Amiga, it can get complicated and problem-prone really quickly.
The ACA620 does give you more than what you want with the 68020, but it's still a good option, with the big "if": if you find one on the used market

I can see how people who have one will not normally sell one (I would never sell mine)

[indigolemon]

Anyone tried this yet? https://sordan.ie/product/563/a6095-...for-amiga-600/

[Lord Aga]

^ This might be the solution if he can't get a hold of a cheaper Kipper's 4MB card.

I have one of those Kipper's cards, and it is truly a great bang for the buck! 6 Megs is plenty for the A600, and fast RAM also gives you a nice little speed boost (about 30%).

Maybe put up 'want to buy' posts on a couple of Amiga boards?

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Lord Aga

^ This might be the solution if he can't

SHE

Anyway, that card looks very nice but if you put 20 more euros you get the Fúria which gives you quite a bit more bang for your buck, so dunno.
The other nice thing with the ACA620 is that it gives you those 9.5MB WITH compatibility with the PCMCIA port. Also Fúria via commandline can be made to have all its RAM be compatible even when you have a PCMCIA device.
This card only lets you use the full 9.5MB without PCMCIA compatibility, otherwise it's 5.5.

[Marle]

Originally Posted by Akira

SHE

Anyway, that card looks very nice but if you put 20 more euros you get the Fúria which gives you quite a bit more bang for your buck, so dunno.
The other nice thing with the ACA620 is that it gives you those 9.5MB WITH compatibility with the PCMCIA port. Also Fúria via commandline can be made to have all its RAM be compatible even when you have a PCMCIA device.
This card only lets you use the full 9.5MB without PCMCIA compatibility, otherwise it's 5.5.

Haha thanks Akira. I guess female Amiga users are rare

I think trying to find an ACA620/630 is pretty much out of the question for me, and the Kipper board if that's what it is is only really €30 cheaper than a Furia, which makes me think it's not worth the bother, might as well just get the Furia for that.

I'm pretty much sold on getting the SRAM card, as that suits what I need, as when I've been using FS UAE I have only had it set to emulate a 68020 (still faster than my A600) with 2MB fast RAM, and the 68020 mostly because the RED Debugger in Blitz crashes on anything less (I guess it must be expecting an MMU? Note: on my actual A600 I just have stock Blitz 2.1 installed from floppy disks, so the built in debugger is fine) But relatively speaking I keep FS UAE plodding along like my real A600 does, it's not quick but then that's what Mac OS in the background is for, my days of browsing the web using AMosaic are long behind me.

But for a laugh I revved up FS UAE to JIT compiling and a 68040, SysInfo said it was 361 times faster than a stock A600

So if I really need something fast on the Amiga, I'll just use that, meantime I'm content to push the original 1980s hardware for the real thing! All the speed in the world can't make up for not spending time in Dpaint creating lovely lovely pixel art!