Your review (and some others too) helped my descision to purchase the ACA500Thanks guys, I'm glad you like the review. I must update the compatibility stuff
Review - ACA500 A500 Accelerator
- Thread starter fitzsteve
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I've just ordered an ACA500, although it will take a few weeks to arrive.
Should the lack of RAM become an issue, what's the best way to get some extra into my A500? I've got a 512K trapdoor expansion but otherwise the A500 is totally stock. My budget won't stretch as far as to buy one of the ACA1220's.
Should the lack of RAM become an issue, what's the best way to get some extra into my A500? I've got a 512K trapdoor expansion but otherwise the A500 is totally stock. My budget won't stretch as far as to buy one of the ACA1220's.
Your cheapest option for more RAM would probably be the ACA1220 unless the ACA500 works with A1200 8MB boards. The ACA500 won't work with regular A500 fastmem upgrades.
I bought 1MB chip ram.
Now A500+ has 2 fast 2 chip.
I am so mad for this though, only 2 megs?
That is the reason I won't buy another ACA for it...It will fuction just with that config forever.
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Instead of focusing on the amount of ram or lack of consider that the aca500 will put a bog standard A500 on a par with a stock A1200, 2mb ram and storage options.
If the specs of the aca500 are not enough there are other solutions out there.
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By the way sorry 8mb boards do not work with the aca500 nor will any upgrades that connect to the cpu socket to my knowledge.
The only non aca cards that work with the aca500 are the blizzard mkiv and above. Although not guaranteed.
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If the specs of the aca500 are not enough there are other solutions out there.
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---------- Post added at 23:43 ---------- Previous post was at 23:40 ----------
By the way sorry 8mb boards do not work with the aca500 nor will any upgrades that connect to the cpu socket to my knowledge.
The only non aca cards that work with the aca500 are the blizzard mkiv and above. Although not guaranteed.
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So FastRAM upgrades that connect to the Gary socket won't work either? like this one http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/alfaram502
I'm going to wait until I actually get it before worrying about buying any further upgrades, just curious as to what other options are out there.
I'm going to wait until I actually get it before worrying about buying any further upgrades, just curious as to what other options are out there.
I think what steve is saying is if you dont want the ACA500 you can get the sidecar or internal options but they are very thin on the ground.
My personal opinion of the ACA500 is that it was NOT designed for the Amiga community, if it was then it would have either/or 8mb ram and 28mhz 68000, no one , i mean NO ONE would say yes, 2mb is enough ram go ahead and build it.
Ive heard cost of the 2mb was the factor, so why does the ACA1220 have 128mb ram and ACA500 only 2mb (1.5mb after Maprom).
Again my personal opinion, but would a small 2mb ram upgrade with the "option" to add another upgrade on top be in anyway part of the reason for only 2mb ram ? I just dont see how cost was an issue when other ACA product sport 64 times the ram at the same / cost.
<<<confused.
My personal opinion of the ACA500 is that it was NOT designed for the Amiga community, if it was then it would have either/or 8mb ram and 28mhz 68000, no one , i mean NO ONE would say yes, 2mb is enough ram go ahead and build it.
Ive heard cost of the 2mb was the factor, so why does the ACA1220 have 128mb ram and ACA500 only 2mb (1.5mb after Maprom).
Again my personal opinion, but would a small 2mb ram upgrade with the "option" to add another upgrade on top be in anyway part of the reason for only 2mb ram ? I just dont see how cost was an issue when other ACA product sport 64 times the ram at the same / cost.
<<<confused.
I read somewhere that appropriate RAM chips of such small sizes are getting harder to come by, as RAM is so cheap its usually used in much larger amounts in modern hardware.
So its actually easier to get 32MB or 64MB chips than 1MB or 2MB chips. At least, in sufficient quantities from a reliable supplier, for commercial production.
The 68000 can only address 16MB of RAM at maximum, the 68020 bumps this up to 4GB.
To include a 68020 processor would dramatically increase the complexity and cost of the ACA500 - so instead they give you an expansion port and you can choose which accelerator, if any, you want to use, while keeping the cost of the base ACA500 down.
Assuming the smaller RAM chips are the largest that were available, doubling the number of RAM chips would again increase complexity and cost of the board.
Maybe they could have used the larger RAM chips with the 68000 and tied the extra address lines to ground or something, I don't know. I also remember reading somewhere that the larger size chips on the ACA1220/1230 etc are actually DDR-SDRAM as it's easier/cheaper to get nowadays than standard SDRAM, and maybe you can't just do this with DDR.
I'm not a hardware designer so this is all speculation/postulation, everything I just said could be completely false
It seems to me that the ACA500 is offered as a base, it adds a lot of cool features like kickrom and CF/IDE even without the extra memory and processor upgrade. If you want the extra RAM and processing power then that's your prerogative, and you have various options with the ACA500 to achieve that.
I'm just curious as to whether there are any cheap and nasty options out there just to increase the amount of RAM as I think the CPU speed won't be an issue for playing games and watching demos that I plan to do. If I run into any issues with the amount of RAM then I gotta save some more pennies for that either way.
So its actually easier to get 32MB or 64MB chips than 1MB or 2MB chips. At least, in sufficient quantities from a reliable supplier, for commercial production.
The 68000 can only address 16MB of RAM at maximum, the 68020 bumps this up to 4GB.
To include a 68020 processor would dramatically increase the complexity and cost of the ACA500 - so instead they give you an expansion port and you can choose which accelerator, if any, you want to use, while keeping the cost of the base ACA500 down.
Assuming the smaller RAM chips are the largest that were available, doubling the number of RAM chips would again increase complexity and cost of the board.
Maybe they could have used the larger RAM chips with the 68000 and tied the extra address lines to ground or something, I don't know. I also remember reading somewhere that the larger size chips on the ACA1220/1230 etc are actually DDR-SDRAM as it's easier/cheaper to get nowadays than standard SDRAM, and maybe you can't just do this with DDR.
I'm not a hardware designer so this is all speculation/postulation, everything I just said could be completely false
It seems to me that the ACA500 is offered as a base, it adds a lot of cool features like kickrom and CF/IDE even without the extra memory and processor upgrade. If you want the extra RAM and processing power then that's your prerogative, and you have various options with the ACA500 to achieve that.
I'm just curious as to whether there are any cheap and nasty options out there just to increase the amount of RAM as I think the CPU speed won't be an issue for playing games and watching demos that I plan to do. If I run into any issues with the amount of RAM then I gotta save some more pennies for that either way.
well there are 2 things.
i agreee 1mb / 2mb chips possible reason why and some technical reason why 32mb chip could not be used and only address 8mb of it.
1st thing, competitors kipper2k and vampire600 , mainly kipper2k home hobbyist , his price of 4mb or 8mb for a500 does not hold water for expense of 4mb on aca500 if he can do it why not a company as large as amigakit with the design and resources thay have.
2nd Vampire 600 uses more modern ram chips but with firmware cut the amount of ram available to the A600 for compatability. again home hobbyist why can amigakit not do the same, use a modern ram chip but limit the amount available ??
I still think although the ACA500 is a great piece of kit, it was designed to have a small amount of ram to "force" the user to add an ACA1220 to it. ch-ching.
i agreee 1mb / 2mb chips possible reason why and some technical reason why 32mb chip could not be used and only address 8mb of it.
1st thing, competitors kipper2k and vampire600 , mainly kipper2k home hobbyist , his price of 4mb or 8mb for a500 does not hold water for expense of 4mb on aca500 if he can do it why not a company as large as amigakit with the design and resources thay have.
2nd Vampire 600 uses more modern ram chips but with firmware cut the amount of ram available to the A600 for compatability. again home hobbyist why can amigakit not do the same, use a modern ram chip but limit the amount available ??
I still think although the ACA500 is a great piece of kit, it was designed to have a small amount of ram to "force" the user to add an ACA1220 to it. ch-ching.
I totally agree with you. It is a great piece of hardware. As I can see cpu is a used chip, propably from an A600. I don't care about that, I don't care either for the speed, I think 68000 is the best for my 500. But this kind of ram is available and costs from 1 to 5 euros... It was a bad move just to make us buy another aca.
Unfortunately guys even Jens has bills to pay and if this was the case well it makes perfect business sense.
If we want to see more hardware being developed the companies associated have to make some money to keep them in the game.
The Amiga community seem to expect everything to be cheap or for free just for the love of the name Amiga, sorry this isn't how the real world works!
No, that expansion won't work with the ACA500. Actually I think the 68000 can internally address 4GB as well, however it doesn't have the pins connected for more than 24 bits.
I thought the CPU was an 68EC000? I haven't seen that version on any 600s (I think they're newer?).
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With the Vampire 600, since that's a programmable FPGA device, it is a lot more flexible than the fixed 68k CPU on the ACA's.
I'm sure there are many technical and business reasons for the final hardware design that we aren't privy to.
well, that could be a possibility, but at the end of the day they're in it to make money, can't blame em for that. We should be happy anybody is making upgrades for our 25 year old computers at all.
On the flipside, he could have designed it without the CPU and RAM and just added the CF/IDE, clockport, and maprom functions (which you'd need an expansion to use anyway).
I'm sure there are many technical and business reasons for the final hardware design that we aren't privy to.
well, that could be a possibility, but at the end of the day they're in it to make money, can't blame em for that. We should be happy anybody is making upgrades for our 25 year old computers at all.
On the flipside, he could have designed it without the CPU and RAM and just added the CF/IDE, clockport, and maprom functions (which you'd need an expansion to use anyway).
Are you sure, I read that expansions that use the Gary adapter could/should work, I think it needs to 'Ranger' slow Ram though.
There are a couple of discussions at EAB.
By the way I have commented in Jen's thread at EAB to ask if there is the viability for a 4mb or 8mb adapter that would just upgrade the Ram on the ACA500.
You could be right. It works with 512kB slow mem upgrades, and then possibly up to 1.8MB slow mem I should think. But it won't be able to do any kind of fast mem other than what's on the ACA500 expansion connector.
I have a 1.8MB slow mem upgrade here but no ACA500 unfortunately so cannot test it together.
Might be covered before, but what can't you do with 512+512+2M of ram with the 500 and aca500 plus whdload? I also got some hardware kickstart switches so I can use that option (if the aca500 likes the hw switch that is) to keep that extra 512kB of ram for other purposes.
I would like to set up a spare a500 for a returning amiga user. So I'm curious. Since I'm not going to use it myself I'm not getting a 1220 for it.
I would like to set up a spare a500 for a returning amiga user. So I'm curious. Since I'm not going to use it myself I'm not getting a 1220 for it.
I used to run an A600 with 1mb Chip and 2mb Fast, a surprising amount of WHDLoad Games ran perfectly fine, all 1/2 Disk games without any problems at all.
4 Disk and above might have to stop for loading the game which is a little annoying, no more so then loading from floppies.
I guess there are some bigger games that might not work at all.
But most of these had their own HD installers so you could run from those (think beneath a steel sky for example)
I genuinely think you can achieve whatever you like from it within reason, some things might just take a little more effort and for sure you ave to run a very light workbench.
4 Disk and above might have to stop for loading the game which is a little annoying, no more so then loading from floppies.
I guess there are some bigger games that might not work at all.
But most of these had their own HD installers so you could run from those (think beneath a steel sky for example)
I genuinely think you can achieve whatever you like from it within reason, some things might just take a little more effort and for sure you ave to run a very light workbench.
I haven't done many tests for now but I have an A500+ with 2MB of chip Ram and a plain ACA500.
I installed on a very small 128MB CF card a CW 68K and a few WHDLoad games.
I was surprised that, even using the maprom option, SWOS 96-97 ran quite well. The play-game was perfect, I just had to wait a few seconds before starting the match for some loading but that was not an issue for me.
I think that using a 3.1 ROM on-board I should be able to play SWOS flawlessly and many other whdload games as well without adding any ACA1220 or more...
I installed on a very small 128MB CF card a CW 68K and a few WHDLoad games.
I was surprised that, even using the maprom option, SWOS 96-97 ran quite well. The play-game was perfect, I just had to wait a few seconds before starting the match for some loading but that was not an issue for me.
I think that using a 3.1 ROM on-board I should be able to play SWOS flawlessly and many other whdload games as well without adding any ACA1220 or more...
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You got me wrong, I would give 100-120 euros for the same card with 8MB.
I don't believe that the most of us demand cheap hardware as we donate many times to developers.
It is a great move and we thank him, just the ram issue is that reason I am sad.
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Yes it works, I have 1.3-3.1 and no maprom function.
I have 2MB chip free and aca 1.7 fast (from 1.2 with map) at boot now.
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