ACA1234 and WHDLoad gaming on an A500?

I don’t have a ACA1234 but with the ACA1221lc connected to the ACA500+ Frontier Elite II runs smooth. I run the 1221lc at 42MhZ, but you need a good PSU to do this.

Now I’m testing with the Blizzard 1230 IV with 32 Mb ram connected to the ACA500+, it runs faster than the 1221lc and with the 1230 IV it’s possible to use the CPU-switch in the ACA500+ menu what isn’t possible with the 1221lc. With that CPU switch you can run a stock A500 68000 CPU without disabling any cards.

Till now I didn’t find a whdload game that doesn’t run with the 1230 IV 68030 CPU, on some demo’s and games I use the ‘Cache’ tool.

I use an ACA1234 attached to an ACA500Plus for non-AGA games and its definitely a big benefit. There‘s many games that benefit from a more powerful CPU while more RAM is always a big win!

You can run „Beneath a Steel Sky“ Talkie version with 128Mb Ram and other point & click adventures such as „Indy4“ or „Cruise for a Corpse“ run much smoother, too. „Stunt Car Racer“ or „Elite II“ work like a charm, too!

An ACA1234 is a great booster and I dont want to miss it anymore!

Installing WHDload gets a great deal easier if you installed WB3.1 with the ACA500plus installer, as it also installs some bits and pieces that you'd have to gather from the internet first.

HorseDemon Can I ask, which speed did you go for? 50Mhz?

Also I note you have 2mb chipram mod, do you mean actual extra chips on the main A500 board? Or the trapdoor expansion with jumpers changed?

And how's it going? do you have your 1234 yet?

Yes I couldn't escape that irony either. Also roughly the same as an A1200 or CD32 with TF card.. but I'm still tempted! Would love to hear how you get on with it.

Here's someone showing the intro of Elite2/Frontier with ACA1234-50MHz:

Note that an A1200 has faster chip ram access, and the A500 with ACA500plus will be slower than that. However, the ACA1234 does put emphasis on chip ram access speed, and even though the difference to predecessors is marginal, it's still the fastest chip ram access that you can buy for a 68030 accelerator.

Quote from HorseDemon

I'll drop in here and give updates when I can. I just formatted and partitioned an 8GB Flash card. Trying to find info on whether or not the ACA1234 install tools automatically set the correct "maxtransfer" or not. (I can't find an HD Toolbox in the WB 3.1 that it installs.) I've REALLY been away from Amiga tinkering for very, very long and it's showing, so it's a re-learning process.

The updated OS 3.1.4 / 3.2.x HDToolBox on the Install disk has that detail on the Advanced page for each partition. It's generally safe to update Mask (on DMA controller systems) and MaxTransfer (on IDE or SCSI) from the C= safe/unsafe? values the past OS tools defaulted to. Remember to tab out of the edited field or it has a tendency to ignore the field edits.

Alternatively, the old GVP prep tool ExpertPrep on page 2 has the visible MaxTransfer value for each partition. (Don't use it to save any modern boot blocks - it's not safe to save changes over modern RDB tool's settings.)

My take on Classic Workbench is that it's what the maker considers the available/updated 3rd-party 'gotta have/wanna have' components, icons, and/or various tools that made or enhanced various parts of OS 3.1 back in the day, or the 3.5/3.9 from the 1999-2000 era - all in one place to install. Some like it applied over the more current OS 3.1.4/3.2.x releases to make up for many of the 3rd party components which are not included in the OS - as they are not licensed to be in the distribution as with the older 3.5/3.9 era.

I'm not an WHDLoad'er - I like all my stuff in hardware. I deal with the virtual compute world every day at my day job

HDToolBox will appear in the Tools folder on most newer official release Install media. Device driver name goes in the tooltype (Info on the Icon / Workbench menu) if not scsi.device (is case sensitive), or on the command line as the first parameter if via command line.

Quote from thebajaguy

Remember to tab out of the edited field or it has a tendency to ignore the field edits.

This is an Amiga - not sure if "tab" out of a field is enough. I always have to push myself to really press return to enter a value; it is NOT enough to click with the mouse into the next field. Pressing return does work, pressing tab is subject to be verified. Happy to be corrected on this one.

The code underlying HDToolBox has been described by the devs to be somewhere between spaghetti code and a Pandora's box. I believe there is an effort to rewrite it from scratch for a future offering.

That being said, I've got my hands on the GVP-m Fast/ExpertPrep code. That kind of thing is not a problem there, although one does have to use Enter to effect a partition geometry recalculation in some cases. I am working on it, to make it large-media compatible, but I've been low on time to sit down and dig into the math and GUI updates needed.

Quote from HorseDemon

Been looking for the HDToolBox in the different folders but haven't found it as of yet. (Using the WB install that's on the ACA.)

HDToolBox is supposed to be in SYS:Tools after installation with the ACA1234 installer.

I find the ACA 500+ quite capable stand-alone with no extra accelerator. When overclocked to max ( I think it's 42MHz) I find Frontier Elite II to be smooth. At least in my opinion. And when comparing to my ACA 1233 (used in my A1200) or my ACA 500 using my fully unlocked and overclocked ACA 1221 I don't see a huge difference.

Haven't tried UFO enemy unknown, but I heard the Amiga version is badly optimized and will run poorly on any Amiga.

I use TinyLauncher at startup to launch whdload games and demos. This leaves me with about 6.3MB available RAM. Which will actually pre-load Monkey Island 2 and Indiana Jones Fate of Atlantis just fine. Only Beneath of steel sky will struggle to pre-load with this amount of RAM. But that can be HD installed anyway.

Another benefit with using the ACA 500 + with no accelerator is that it's based on a 16bit CPU. So when connected to the A500 one will not get slowdown issues in various whdload games like when using 020 or higher acceleators which are 24/32bit and connected to A500s 16bit bus.

Quote from KEVIN

I was left puzzled and don't know what to do? For fear of damaging my Amiga and my ACA500+, I never connected this card.

Can I do this or is it totally forbidden?

You can attempt it, but if it doesn't work, I can't give you any support. I wouldn't expect it to cause any damage. If it does, it would also damage an A1200, and I haven't heard any story like that about TF cards before.

Quote from turrican9

my fully unlocked and overclocked ACA 1221 I don't see a huge difference.

Note that the old ACA1221 design does have some improvements over the ACA1220, but the latest ACA1221lc has significant advantages over previous 68020 designs due to memory speed.

Quote from turrican9

Another benefit with using the ACA 500 + with no accelerator is that it's based on a 16bit CPU. So when connected to the A500 one will not get slowdown issues in various whdload games like when using 020 or higher acceleators which are 24/32bit and connected to A500s 16bit bus.

Note that most of these slowdown issues are solved in WHDload if you enable cache, which is available on any 68020 or higher CPU. It won't solve it for all games, but you'll have the advantage of the faster CPU, combined with fewer bus accesses required, which does the trick for the "big titles" such as Turrican. So yes, the plain 68000 has the advantage of compatibility, but faster CPUs can work around the non-compatibility with their speed. Especially the ACA1221lc has been a surprise to a number of customers, because it's so close to a 68030 in terms of performance, but for a significantly lower price.