Hardware Pr0n: An Amiga 2000 Story

AndyLandy

Acceleration!
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As promised, here are some shots of my Amiga 2000.

First, here she is, in her native state:
case.jpg


And here she is with her top off (Ooh er!):
motherboard.jpg

If you look closely, you can see she is a B2000 rev 6.

Next is the inevitable battery shot:
battery.jpg

No leakage is evident, and she still keeps the time, so I suspect the battery has been replaced (Or it's an awesome 20-year-old battery!)

The infamous "Apollo 2030 Lite" accelerator:
apollo.jpg

This puppy is loaded with a 20MHz 68030 and 20MHz PLCC 68882 (The cheeky so-and-so's at Apollo have overclocked these to 25MHz) and I've added 64MB of FastRAM from my pile-o-SIMMs!

Sysinfo says:
sysinfo1.jpg

4025 Dhrystones (What is a Dhrystone, anyway?) She's also credited with an ECS Agnus, with 1MB ChipRAM, but only an OCS Denise.

The manual for the card says I should run 'cpu cache burst' in my startup-sequence. I wonder what difference it makes?:
sysinfo2.jpg

4408 Dhrystones now, That's about a 10% improvement, not bad for one line of shell!

So, there we have it, as promised, my A2000 has made her way to the photo booth. :)
 
Re: Hardware pr0n: An Amiga 2000 story

Re: Hardware pr0n: An Amiga 2000 story

Very nice buddy, the 2000 is a joy to own. :D
The battery isn't too bad to get out, snips on it, then desolder, it's definitely worth it. The 030 accelerator is a nice upgrade and well worth keeping hold of. It is so expandable and can be very rewarding.
Keep it coming fella.
 
Re: Hardware pr0n: An Amiga 2000 story

Re: Hardware pr0n: An Amiga 2000 story

@ AndyLandy

RE: Dhrystones

Linkypoo via google :wink:

Also, your pics are not loading for me? :shrug:

Kin
 
Re: Hardware pr0n: An Amiga 2000 story

Re: Hardware pr0n: An Amiga 2000 story

Kin Hell said:
Also, your pics are not loading for me?
Hmm. They're being served over my broadband connection at home, so I'd expect them to be slow. I've cropped and scaled them now, so they might load in a more-reasonable time. If all else fails, you can look at them here: http://www.proggle.net/~andrew/download/A2000/
 
Re: Hardware pr0n: An Amiga 2000 story

Re: Hardware pr0n: An Amiga 2000 story

wow, you got an Apollo 2030 to work with a rev6 A2000 , that is a feat! :!:
 
Re: Hardware pr0n: An Amiga 2000 story

Re: Hardware pr0n: An Amiga 2000 story

They're loading okay for me now Andy & good stuff m8y. (y)

Just a real snipet of Nostalgia for everyone reading this thread:

The BBC used these B2000 machines in conjunction with a Genlock to give us our weather reports on the TV. Yet the Amiga was allowed to die?
Not fair eh?

Kin
 
Take another look at that accelerator card photo:

apollo.jpg


That CPU looks suspiciously like it says XC68030RC20A. That's a fully-blown 68030, not some el-cheapo LC or EC. So, why did Apollo feel the need to shove an MC68882FN20A on there, too? Answers on a postcard. :)
 
It's a 2030 Light because it's only @ 20Mhz. Base speeds for all 030 machines from C= always used 25Mhz, though they did do a 16Mhz version of the A3000 afair.

It has a 20Mhz 68882 FPU becasue the 030 did not have a built in FPU. Only the 040 & 060 Cpu's have the built in FPU.

You should have a working MMU though, because they are Relase Candidate markings. Thats the RC bit in the code on the CPU. ;)

SysInfo reports that 20Mhz 030 to be running @ 25Mhz, so in essence, it's an over-clocked 20Mhz 030 & the 25Mhz X-tal on the card proves that. (y)

Kin
 
Ahh, OK. It's a misunderstanding on my part. I thought the full '030 had an FPU and that there was an LC version without. I guess that only applies to '040s and '060s.

The card is a 2030 Light because it's 25MHz instead of the 50MHz of the full 2030. In both cases however, Apollo were cheapskates: The Light card has 20MHz parts clocked at 25MHz and the full card has 33MHz parts clocked at 50MHz. Cheeky, huh?
 
Cheeky, yes, but not cheapskate really....

....it helped keep costs down. ;)

Kin
 
More photos:

med-doubled.jpg

Workbench running in PAL Hires interlaced and OctaMED in its native screenmode, fed out through my newly-acquired MultiVision 2000 scandoubler into my Iiyama Prolite TFT!


zorroconfig.jpg

Sysinfo tells me I have seven autoconfigured Zorro II cards! (The Apollo 2030 is classed as a Z2, and the A2091 counts as two cards (SCSI and RAM)) -- I now have more Z2 cards than I have available slots for them. Probably time to buy another Amiga! ;-)
 
I'm still waiting for mine to arrive in the mail..

it should have a GVP 030 something inside..

while waiting, I can just sit here and enjoy your piccies.. (y)

I'm intending to buy an indivision ocs/ecs and perhaps the mini meg thingy that adds 1 mb chip mem.. don't know if it is worth it, and how much mem it has right now.

btw AndyLandy.. you might want to edit your topic (Age 18 and up) since it's hardcore pr0n :whistle:
 
@Tomse: I'm glad you like the piccies. :)

A scandoubler is certainly a worthwhile upgrade. The Indivision ECS is about as awesome as it gets, but there are also some pretty reasonable ones that fit in the video slot.

As for the Chip RAM, I've wondered about the 2MB upgrade thingy myself. The conclusion I reached is that it's definitely worth it if you only have 512k Chip RAM. However, if you have a 'half-ECS' 1MB Agnus, it's probably less of an issue, (but that's just my thoughts on the matter.) :)
 
well I did have in mind to get the indivision.. (still waiting for the A1200 aga version aswell)

I have a small philosophy that for the small community we are, buying something new adds to the diminishing pool of active hardware.. so it's worth it ;-)
 
As for the Chip RAM, I've wondered about the 2MB upgrade thingy myself. The conclusion I reached is that it's definitely worth it if you only have 512k Chip RAM. However, if you have a 'half-ECS' 1MB Agnus, it's probably less of an issue, (but that's just my thoughts on the matter.) :)

Well, if you have a machine with only 512k Chip Ram, there's always the certainly cheaper option to simply upgrade to a 1MB Agnus (8372A/8375):
Here's how to do that

I guess in combination with the Indivision ECS a 2MB-chip could be beneficial (e.g. for HighGfx modes), but if you're using a graphics-card for your desktop anyway it's imho negligible.
 
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After a recent discussion on 24-bit DMA and hard disks, I got a PM from matt020, asking what speeds I got out of my A2091 which allegedly does DMA transfers to the 24-bit Fast RAM. So, I've had a bit of a poke with SysInfo and grabbed a shot:

hdspeed.jpg


So, the answer is 89,808 bytes/sec. I've no idea if that's good or bad. :)
 
@Andy

I can say that my Malibu controller with the 20Meg drive attached gives around 1.1megs/sec

and the GVP card with 2 Maxtor 512MB performs with around 2.2Megs/sec.

I guess the GVP performs so well because it accesses the 32bit ram it's got attached.
I'll add some screenshots later when I finish copying through parallel (pc2am) bit of slow
 
Certainly far from good tbh Andy. What hard drive are you running off it?

Charlie
 
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