Frontier elite 2 on Amiga500

[RetrogamerRhys]

A newbie question but I've tried Frontier elite 2 on my system and it runs quite slowly, I'm not sure if my Amiga 500 has expanded memory. If not I'd like to expand upto 1meg or do anything else I can to improve the performance of the game. I heard something about the vampire 600 as being the best in terms of performance is that a mod you can make to the 500 or a completely new system to buy?

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by RetrogamerRhys

A newbie question but I've tried Frontier elite 2 on my system and it runs quite slowly, I'm not sure if my Amiga 500 has expanded memory. If not I'd like to expand upto 1meg or do anything else I can to improve the performance of the game. I heard something about the vampire 600 as being the best in terms of performance is that a mod you can make to the 500 or a completely new system to buy?

Frontier runs nicely on a fast 40-50MHz 030 CPU which you can add as an accelerator to the A500. There a bunch of accelerators called "TerribleFire" which are quite affordable.
Go check out the threads on AmiBay
http://www.amibay.com/forumdisplay.php?24-Amiga

The Vampire is also an accelerator available for A500, A600 and now also A1200. Theres also a standalone version (That one is actually a standalone system that doesnt need an Amiga to run) (The Vampiire is based on FPGA tech as opposed to other accelerators which use old stocks of actual Motorola 68k CPUs.)

[ajk]

To run games such as Frontier faster, you need a faster processor. Since you can't just replace the existing 68000 processor with a faster one, you need what is known as an accelerator board. These can either have a faster, original Motorola CPU (such as an 68020 or 68030), or more recently an FPGA.

FPGAs are modern, programmable chips that can be used to implement a super fast version of the original 68000, and this is what the Vampire does. Accelerator boards usually also have extra memory on them.

[roondar]

Two cheap(ish) options to speed up the game would be to add a RAM expansion that slots into the side of the A500 (offering "real fast ram") or adding a fast 68000 based accelerator such as the ACA500+.

The first will boost performance by about 10-15%, the second can make the game run significantly smoother.

[RetrogamerRhys]

Thanks for the help.