A500 Accelerator with FPU

[Hiddenevil]

Most of the accelerators I’ve seen are pretty good, 020, 030 @20-50mhz.

But the only one I’ve seen with an FPU is a Terrible Fire with 4mb, which isn’t much when you start playing around with Lightwave.

Anyone know if there are any cards with more ram? The only one I know of is the Vampire.

[McTrinsic]

Depends if it can be an external one.

IF so, you could use the ACA500 with an accelerator for the A1200 that features an FPU.

Cheers,
McT

[Firthy2002]

Derringer supports up to 32MB. Predecessor the Mega-Midget supports up to 8MB.

[musashi5150]

There's the new Warp 560 which could be much fun indeed

[Hiddenevil]

The Warp while interesting, looks very unlikely for me @ $499 and I still have to find a REAL 060 cpu. I could be wrong, but I reckon I could spend the better part of a grand when you finish adding the price of an authentic 060 to the Warps price tag.

Derringer Looks great, however it’s an old card, probably only appears on amibay once in a blue moon and sells for a packet.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Hiddenevil

But the only one I’ve seen with an FPU is a Terrible Fire with 4mb, which isn’t much when you start playing around with Lightwave.

Anyone know if there are any cards with more ram? The only one I know of is the Vampire.

I'm not sure you know but the Vampire has an FPU, in fact its FPU is the fastest there is in the 68k world. It lacks some bits of precision internally but this doesn't affect Lightwave at all.

[Hiddenevil]

Grond, I've got my name on the waiting list for a Vampire. But it's a long list and I was looking at all my options in the mean time. I think only one Terriblefire card has an FPU, but limited by 4mb of fast ram, which is nothing your using Lightwave.

The Vampire is looking like my only option, unless I want to scrap using Lightwave on the A500.

[voyager]

You can check the TK68030 on amibay made by 8bit dreams. It has a 030@50 MHz, A FPU, 64MB and a super fast HDD controller doing 10MB/s

[Hiddenevil]

I currently have the TK68020, i've reached out to Viktor asking him for details on the 030. As I wanted to be sure my PSU and general setup would be ok for running the 030, unfortunatly I've not heard anything from him for several weeks. Not sure if he's on holiday or just REALLY busy. He does keep logging on to Amibay, just not responding to messages.

[voyager]

In general he is very busy. I have a TK68030 in my amiga 500+ If you have any questions about the card feel free to ask.

I use a MEAN WELL PT-65B and its running very happy with that.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Hiddenevil

The Warp while interesting, looks very unlikely for me @ $499 and I still have to find a REAL 060 cpu. I could be wrong, but I reckon I could spend the better part of a grand when you finish adding the price of an authentic 060 to the Warps price tag.

Derringer Looks great, however it’s an old card, probably only appears on amibay once in a blue moon and sells for a packet.

I used to render in Imagine back in the day (and some Lightwave) and one of the happiest memories was when I replaced my Blizzard 1230 50MHz with a Blizzard 1260. Rendering was like 5 times faster.. Ok, this was in early 1996, but it was worth it

[Hiddenevil]

I started using LW 3.5 in about '92 / '93 on an A1200 with a Viper 030. It was great for a while, then I started getting better and needing more umph. So ended up with a Blizzard 1260, which I used for a long time, least until '98. When the PC really did run rings around it.

[Hiddenevil]

Originally Posted by voyager

In general he is very busy. I have a TK68030 in my amiga 500+ If you have any questions about the card feel free to ask.

I use a MEAN WELL PT-65B and its running very happy with that.

Great, so ok!

Q1, have you tried running wing commander on your 030? On my 020 it's slow, not awful, but not great either.
Q2. Will one of the heavy brick A500 PSU's hack it? I also have a Goliath PSU in the closet.

[voyager]

Q1 no have not tried it yet but I can give it a go.
Q2 Its unclear how much the amiga with a 030 draws current wise, but the PT65B gives me 7 amps @ 5v and that gives me a nice stable 5v measured at the accelerator.
I think its unwise to use the heavy brick.

[Hiddenevil]

Please if you could test it out that would be really helpful!

The heavy brick PSUs Ares meant to be the better ones as far as I know.

[fxgogo]

So I got my start in 3D on an un-accelerated A500+ with 8MB of ram. I used one of the GVP products that connected to the side of the Amiga. So depending on what you want to do, you can use Lightwave on that system as is. Memory is going to be more important initially than acceleration. The program needs to store all the data when you work on the scene and rendering. You could always use a modern system with an emulator to do the rendering.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by fxgogo

So I got my start in 3D on an un-accelerated A500+ with 8MB of ram. I used one of the GVP products that connected to the side of the Amiga. So depending on what you want to do, you can use Lightwave on that system as is. Memory is going to be more important initially than acceleration. The program needs to store all the data when you work on the scene and rendering. You could always use a modern system with an emulator to do the rendering.

I got a SCSI controller for my Blizzard 1260 back in 1997, not because I needed a SCSI hard drive but because then I got an extra SIM slot for more memory, so in 1997 I had 64+16=80MB RAM in my Amiga ;-) My last big project rendered for almost 11 days on a 060 and it needed every last byte of memory.

[Hiddenevil]

So at the moment it’s either the TK030 or a Vampire.