A500 Plus + ACA500Plus + 1221lc at 40+ MHz = so far so good!

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Don't Panic. Please wash hands.

    So I have an ACA500Plus, which I could never get to clock beyond 21 MHz and still have it boot. To that I have attached a ACA1221lc. I have that over-clocked to 40 MHz ( SysInfo claims it's running at 44 MHz ). The other thing I had to add to get this to work reliably was a CA-PSU. The Stock one I have on my 500+ just didn't work well overclocked.


    So I've ran some process intensive math programs I have in Amiga Basic and some demos. Running for a couple hours. It works fine. Doesn't even get that hot to the touch. I was thinking I might have to add a fan, but that may not even be needed.


    As a side note, AmigaBasic is slow. The math programs I also have versions for 8-bit CBM basic, and the Amiga at 40+ MHz is only around 3 times faster than a Plus/4. Which seems pretty crazy. I'll have to re-write them in C...

    Thanks for your report!

    Quote from lorddoomicus

    ( SysInfo claims it's running at 44 MHz )

    Yeah - Sysinfo has no idea how fast the Motorola CPUs can be with sufficiently-fast memory :-)


    Quote from lorddoomicus

    As a side note, AmigaBasic is slow.

    If you're talking about the Amiga Basic that was included with the first Amigas (up until release V1.3 I think), then you're talking about the worst Basic that was ever made for the Amiga. It's actually a Microsoft Basic, and I don't even know if it makes use of the fast memory that the ACA1221lc offers.


    If you can re-write it in C, that's of course the best solution.


    If you're more of a Basic language user, you could use a Basic compiler, such as ACE2.4 , Hisoft Basic, Blitzbasic or AQB, which appears to be still maintained. In terms of performance, AQB might be the fastest Basic compiler for the Amiga, and it may also be the one that is closest to C with it's module system and type declaration option, which I personally only know from Borland Turbo Pascal.


    However, I'm not a good reference, as I stopped learning about programming languages over 30 years ago. For the little code that I use to verify my hardware, I use Maxon Pascal and AsmOne :-)


    I'd be curious to know how fast your code runs with AQB.


    Jens

    The BASIC programs were just some old ones I dusted off to see how they would run. They actually started life as CBM Basic programs for the C64. But since I've recently acquired a Plus 4, figured I'd see if I could get some of them to work.


    And yes, it is the old 'crappy' AmigaBASIC. It actually runs fine on 3.1 with and '020. But move to an '030 or 3.1.4 and it breaks.


    I'm an old school UNIX and C junkie, so re-writting my programs in C will be easy. I even have a cross compiler set up on my Mac.


    I may check out the other Basics when I have time. Thanks.