Weird tower amiga idea 030 + voodoo3?

Has anyone made a tower amiga 1200 with mediator and rtg card but only 030 accelerator?

I was thinking about what would be the most convenient setup and while a 060 or ppc tower setup is certainly tempting in its own way, I think 030 is just so compatible and idiot free that I am actually considering going back to just having a blizzard 1230... but I don´t want to lose the rtg graphics so I am thinking Voodoo 3 and mediator and 1230 mkiv. Obviously not for any 3d acceleration but just to have rtg desktop and still be able to play stunt car racer in turbo mode and flawless and just right speed in wing commander cd32 version hacked to work with A1200. Oh and my bppc and 060 also have glitches in north and south that are not there with 030 :)

Firstly, is there any reason it should just not work... secondly... someone did this already?

There's no reason you can't RTG with an '030. After all, we've been able to RTG on an unaccelerated A2000 with its sub-8MHz 68000!

I can't see any technical reason why this wouldn't work. Why not try it and find out in the name of Science™!

:thumbsup:

Hehe, okay. I think I have a project for next weekend now! :thumbsup:

It´s just that I never thought of doing something like this. You see with a desktop Amiga you are kind of forced to go BPPC to get Bvision which is the only option... and then I was always thinking: Tower must be bigger and faster than that. :)

It probably depends on what you do most with your Amiga. If you have the mediator with a Voodoo or Radeon, your monitor will be connected to its RGB/DVI connector and look great for workbench and application uses, but play any games that output in native 15KHz and they'll most likely send the picture out through the Amiga's RGB port, so you'd need some kind of switching in place.

I have wondered in the past if the Amiga's 23 pin video-out could be fed back in to a Voodoo or Radeon as a captured video signal and upscaled that way. This might have a little lag though. :unsure:

...and another thought was some way to hack the Amiga video signals on the motherboard and hot wire them to a powered PCI graphics card, not in a Mediator.


and just to add. My A1200 tower has a mediator, Radeon 256Mb and a Blizzard 030@50.

After my Apollo 1240 died I only had an 030 based accelerator (Typhoon MkII 030 @40mhz & SCSI) so I installed this in my Mediator/Voodoo machine. Surprising it ran very well, the RTG for example really speeds up Workbench and games like Doom, Emulators like SMS and Spectrum run better promoted to RTG :)

And then with WHDLoad you have the highest compatibility for WHDLoad :cool:

The only thing I will say, you might find the 030 too slow to drive the Soundcard, I never got that working till I had an 060 (YMMV) and USB can seem very slow.

Warp3D requires an 040+ so would not work on an 030 (yes I even tried a hacked version and still no go!)

But overall, it's a nice experience, RTG really brings any Amiga to life :thumbsup:

Steve.

Okay, thanks. I have a manual switch which I can use until maybe later getting the new Ratte Switch or whatever it will be called. Oh... and obviously there must be an indivision ;)

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Originally Posted by Mendel

Okay, thanks. I have a manual switch which I can use until maybe later getting the new Ratte Switch or whatever it will be called. Oh... and obviously there must be an indivision ;)

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I used RGB-Scart for Games and VGA for the Voodoo connected to my LCD TV.

You could also, if you have an IndiAGA MkII you could use DVI from the Indi and VGA from the Voodoo to a Monitor that has dual DVI/VGA iputs ;)

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You could also, if you have an IndiAGA MkII you could use DVI from the Indi and VGA from the Voodoo to a Monitor that has dual DVI/VGA iputs ;)

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I have managed to get two monitors with absolutely no inputs on either of them.

Instead, one of them has a vga cable coming from inside the monitor that cannot be swapped and the other has a dvi cable.

I guess I could have them side by side though :)

But really, prefer the 1 monitor for 1 computer solution and therefore a switch solution. The switch I do have does degrade image quality a little bit though... Here´s hoping the ratte switch will maintain iq a bit better :thumbsup:

as steve uses, a 15-19in tv would be best with vga and scart

One more question. Seeing as I wouldn´t be needing any warp3d for this... would you recommend me to use voodoo 3 or Radeon for RTG graphics?
Is there any benefit for Radeon 9200 instead of voodoo3? Workbench can use the memory of the Radeon somehow? (or so I heard from somewhere)