A new Amiga 500 Accelerator for under £40 

I feel a bit of house keeping is required. Firstly the memory on this card is referred to as ranger ram, essentially fast memory but mapped into the slow ram address space. From conversation with the cards designer this was done to simplify the design while achieving the best performance and keeping the cost to a minimum. Secondly there has been some comment over my stated price of this card and its availability. I need to be clear and state that the card I have was genuinely listed for £35. Anyone building and selling these cards is welcome to charge whatever they feel is appropriate for the cost of materials and their labour to assemble. There are currently 2 of these cards available on eBay for £55 plus postage. I'll leave it for you lot to decide if that offers value for money.

Wow that's a nice price for such a jump. I'm not big into accelerators but this has certainly peaked my interest. I LOVED how you did a split screen comparison on Frontier. That really shows how it's an improvement in FPS without messing up the timing, as it stayed in sync. Love it! It was noticeably smoother on the left for sure (I think). The stunning thing about Dread is, it doesn't need the accelerator to be playable. It's stunning even on 7mhz. It's maaaaaaad :D Great review / comparison Glen.

Back in the 90s, I once bought a 25Mhz 68030 board for my A500. I plugged it in and saw absolutely no noticeable difference in speed. When I contacted the seller, he told me that I needed to have some Fast memory in my system to see much of a difference and that ideally, I should populate the accelerator board with RAM for the most improvement. As memory was expensive back then and I couldn't afford to buy the RAM, I arranged to send it back for a refund. Later on, I ended up buying a package deal from someone that included an 8MB ram expander. Shortly afterwards, I got a Supra Turbo 28, which was a 28Mhz 68000 chip. You could switch it on/off while the system was running and the change in framerates n games like Wing Commander made more than a few jaws drop. Best of all, it seemed to be 100% compatible even with European games. I can't recall ever having to disable it to get any game to run, or any game not running properly with it enabled.

This is what i want to see... Cheap cards. I'm really disappointed that my cards are so expensive.

Impressive little accelerator board that, especially as it literally seems to give double the frame rate at 14mhz. Can't believe I only just came across Your channel, subscribed and bookmarked. Thanks for the content.

Very interesting. I had an Amiga 500 back in the day and remember paying $300 for a 8mb memory module. Also had a 20mb hard drive. Fun times!

Really smooth with the accelerator

Nicely done! It'll be interesting to see what mods can be done to that accelerator if any.

Nice upgrade, also worth checking the Spitfire 500 for about the same price, but with 14MHz/8MB/IDE port😊

you could do the jumper mod so the amiga sees the trap door ram as chip ram, 1MB chip ram makes a bit of improvement in rendering graphics

Love your Amiga collection. Those 2x A1200's ( on your shelves ) look brand new

Awesome review! Just wish I still had an Amiga

Great video....i have used a TF534/536 on my A500+......awesome cards.....i now run a PiStorm.....25 mips with RTG....😁

For this price i'm certainly interested...

My 1st 512k expansion cost $150 in 1987. Near the end Around ‘93 I found a 68040 33mhz expansion for around $500 on Clearance. My A500 was up to 8MB of memory. Worked well for Vista Pro scenery generator. Loved that computer. Will always love the Amiga.

This card is surprising in terms of the performance boost. Going from its performance in Frontier it was getting pretty close to that of the stock A1200 that I played that game on back in the day. Dread was pretty impressive too. It is a title I had not heard about before but it looks and runs like Doom on a high end 486 PC (albeit without any background music an less verticality in the level design).

I remember from my old 286 upgrades to 386 and better, you would put the upgrade board on top of the old processor. The processors had a pin that disabled them when another was stacked on top. Perhaps this works the same?

Back in the day, a buddy of mine purchased a 68000 accelerated with a cache that brought his A1000 to 14mhz. He paid $350 for such an upgrade, which was a steal in the late 80s, early 90s.

The spitfire open source expansion is pretty nice, 8mb fast, ide, and a 14mhz switch

Great video! I wrongly thought things should play faster rather than having smoother frame rates.

Would it also be wise to put a bit of tape over the socket soldering on the back of the expansion card?

I wouldn't expect "Golf" to push any limits on any hardware lol. Great video!

How would the Trapdoor expansion go if the a500 was configured to use it as Chip Ram?

hi, great video! are there any accelerators around the same price range for the 1200?

I remember people trying to drop a 68010 in the socket. While electrically compatible, it didn't offer much of a speed increase, and it DID introduce some miserable side effects (usually software not working). Something like this is PERFECT as a drop-in accelerator while maintaining a high degree of compatibility. Wish this was available back in the 80's!

What would happen if this was put into an Atari ST? (or at least the version with no extra RAM on it).

I still have an MTec 68020i accelerator in my Amiga. The main effect of such an accelerator like yours is the 1MB of slow RAM added, which frees up the AGNUS RAM. The game code gets loaded into the slow RAM and the AGNUS can freely access the video RAM without interruptions by the CPU.

I know I really should have stuck more to the improvements you made but I'm still stuck on you picking the 8 iron for your second shot. If you set it way out to the left using perhaps a 3 iron then brought it back with massive slice, you could have reached the green in two.

It's probably the use of the on-board "Slow RAM" which is making it a lot faster as it won't be being accessed by the graphics sub-system and hence fewer wait states.

I prefer an 50mhz 68030, but appreciate the easy install and the price is amazing. Imagine such an Affordable upgrade in 1988? Priceless! This is a great pairing with a gotek.

With a 1MB Agnus you should be able to use the trapdoor memory. Kinda cool that it has Ranger mem like the A1000 addons originally had (real fast ram), and since it isn't slowmem then I'd go for a 68010 so you get the VBR and can move the interrupt tables out of chipmem.

What did you do with the demo disk cleaning session?

If you want a ready made one where can you get from?

good review 👍👍👍👍👍👍

I built me a couple of these, parts cost is about $35 each I'd say. Did you have any luck stacking this accelerator with ide68k or any other addons? When I tried it with my ide68k+mem68k combo at first it was a white screen, then there were flashing black bars, then colors, then solid black and I switched it off. I built the 2nd one with a different PLL and it has better clock duty cycle but also frequent guru meditation, I think the problem is the clock phase which I can play with using the variable delay line chip I have. As-is that one only produced a black screen with ide68k+mem68k, so I'm thinking clock phase is worth looking into. Too bad I don't have separate ide68k or mem68k to test with.

Have you tried the accelerator in a late-model A500 that supported 1MB Chipram?

Very interesting card. Perfect to add some more speed for minimum cost. I would pay a little more to add 8Mb RAM as 1Mb Fast-RAM is really too few if you're using a HDD with Workbench. But for gaming, I suppose a player don't need more 😅. Sadly, I think this card wouldn't fit in my CDTV, even if I disconnect the RAM to use my current 8Mb Fast-RAM expansion board plugged in the diagnostic port.

the slow ram is a great no-no. I'm wondering why this memory is not mapped as fast-ram being mounted near the bus of the CPU and not thru the Agnus.

Neat. I wonder how hard it would be to adapt this accelerator for the ST, maybe without the ram.

Could this work with a 8mb fast ram board between motherboard and the accelerator?

How it is compared with Vampire extension which allows to run doom on amigas?

Someone has produced a small board that plugs into the 68000 socket and a raspberry Pi zero plugs into it which software emulates the 68000. I'm wondering how the Pi solution compares with accelerators such as this one?

I always wanted to convert my A500 or 1200 in to a case similar to my 3000, I cant find any 3d Print files for this apart from a keyboard case, are you aware of any available cases for this mod?

It looks like you already have 1mb of chip ram installed - have you tried cutting the trace between pins 2 and 3 of JP2 and short 1 to 2?

where can it be bought?

Can you get this card with just 1 MB of fast ram in place of the 1mb slow?

Nice Kruschev sweater. I'm jealous.

I heard this accelerator was incompatible with the Amiga 2000 due to timing issues which is a bit of a bummer for me. can anyone confirm this?

What about the 1meg chipram mod for the 500? Would this work alongside the trapdoor ram working as chipram?

A bit odd that you had to use a riser to get the accelerator to fit correctly in the machine it was designed for. Was this a beta?

Hey CRG! Do you know if this card is being sold anywhere in 2023?

You should try Rorke's Drift with it. It may turn out to be playable.

try some phosphoric acid with a brush we get it here as rust remover at Bunnings in Aussie land minute amounts tho eats your face off like alien egg trying dissemble legs :P, nice work with Gary legs i would done same :) and keep that amiga content coming or retro shiz stuff mate, love your Chan bud keep its coming like i said to Chris(gadgetuk) we love your bro keep it coming bro

Time to check out the new Pistorm update!

That is so cool! I'm glad they are people with passion for old computers such as Amiga and Atari. Where can I get that accelerator?

where i'm buy it ?

Would love to see that compared to a pistorm.

I found it a bit confusing as it appears to me that the card puts the memory in to the slow ram address space. Seemed very odd to put the trap door one in too. The one on the accelerator would be much faster but if the trapdoor mem gets used first very little improvement.

In many ways I wish there had been a lot more games for the Amiga which specifically required more than a stock 68000 @ 7mhz. It might have encouraged many more people to upgrade but it was compounded by Commodore still selling things like the A600 longer after it shouldn't have even been a thing. There were many contemporary games that could run on an Amiga, but the market of say 060 and 040 Amiga owners was so tiny the R&D couldn't justify it.

Man, that's pretty mental seeing that Doom clone running on a 1mb A500. On my A1200, I had to fit a 68030, a FPU AND 8mb of fast RAM just to get Doom to run at that speed. As for the accelerator itself, you could see the difference before you even hit the ball. The speed at which the pre-shot map drew in was already at least twice as fast. Great value if you can get it.

That Accelerator has made a big difference. And Yes if Dread had of been out in the 90`s it would of held back the huge up take of the Pc`s . I remember playing Gloom on my A1200 and was not impressed at all. Dread would of kept me away from buying a Pc for a bit longer for sure.

Nice !

- This has Fast Ram (fast ram is ram not sitting behind Agnus), but its mapped in the slow/ranger region? Is this because mapping it otherwise would require some logic for autoconfig? Are there any Amiga benchmarks letting you test memory speed by manually selecting address range? This will show 2x speed difference. - This design could be cheaply boosted to 8MB with 245 buffer and $25 AS6C6416 8MB SRAM. Like Amiga 1000 Parceiro, but with care not to run 3.3V part on 5V bus like a crazy person. - You should be able to use your trap door ram if you set it to Chip memory and Agnus is able to handle the size. - There used to be A500 mod to double CPU clock to 14MHz (14MhzA500.lha), but without fast ram or cache speed gains were minimal. Makes me think second 68000 on this card is redundant.

Ciao, dove lo compro ?

Does it work with the A570?

how the A500+ should have been?

have you happen to had the pleasure of trying the Pistorm as of late?

This was the kind of kit i was looking for around the time I built a PiStorm. While i like the PiStorm, it's a bit of a "kludge fix" compared to real hardware.

oops. i just noticed something that really confuses me. I have tested a 68000 and a 68010 in an A500, and I got 528 and 547 dhrystones, respectively. how do you get 549 dhrystones with a 68000...?

Where could I buy one of these?

Formula one Grand Prix and Wing Commander will become playable with this Card. Very Cool!

Can't the address space of the trapdoor expansion be changed by cutting a trace on the mother board and jumping two solder pads? That may give you 1MB Chip + 1 MB Slow in total if you have an Agnus chip that supports 1MB or more of Chip RAM. Depends on Your board revision and the custom chip revision(s), but it could be worth checking out.

what are ge-ums?

I think it's actually faster than a stock A1200. If I recall correctly, I got 1.34 MIPS in Sysinfo. Not sure, it's been a while. I still have my souped up A1200, but it's out of commission atm.

Why is it shown as slow-RAM, despite being attached directly to the CPU? Is it an intentional 'feature' for maintaining compatibility with those older games, which demand the 2nd 512K chunk to be in ChipRAM range? Or is it just by design? But then the speedtest looks like if it was Fast-RAM?! Edit: OK, just found the explanation by the creator on abime: "the ram on this accelerator is actually fast ram. However, I mapped it to the address range of the slow/ranger ram @$C00000 so it gets autodetected without doing the whole zorro/autoconfig stuff. (I had to keep things simple as I only used standard logic.) Any real slow ram installed in the trapdoor gets overruled. When the accelerator ram is disabled then the trapdoor slow ram appears again. "

Wow, definitely an improvement - agreed that it's got to be worth the investment. Although personally I think Dread looks better on the ST 😉 *runs away*

is that a 60-pin socket?

Would this fit an a600?

Would it work in a CDTV?

I wonder how it compares to a 7Mhz MC68010 :)

Interesting how this system is faster than the the A1200 with a 020 at the same frequency.

why we still need yet another same. we got many accelerators alleady and fully working emulator even on pi

So they just remade an ICD AdSpeed with some RAM on it. They didn't even bother putting the RAM on the CPU's bus (which they could have done). Making me think that if you dropped in a 2mb Agnus.. it might very well turn into CHIP Ram by default (usually Slow RAM under the 2mb belt can become CHIP RAM). The socket problem is an issue of poor planning. I guess they didn't bother taking any measurements eh?

The best A500 is A500 with a hard drive (CF) and bit faster CPU and more memory. Turning it into superfast A1200-like may break the compatibility with plenty of original software. Running games from HDD with more memory solves all the problems we had with this machine in the past which was disk swapping. Most of games won't even use the accelerator and it's unlikely that you'll going to use sophisticated software that takes advantage of fast CPU. Keep it minimal and close to the original as possible.

This might work with GPV Impact II Scsi controller + 8mb ram

Showing just 2.08 times faster than a bog standard 7mhz Amiga 2000. Not sure what the problem with the A600 speed is there.

without an SD cart interface? Missed chance.

is anyone making this card. would be nice to just pick one up off ebay. or even the complete set of parts for self assembly. saves us ordering wrong parts by mistake. thanks for the video.

I'm surprised the accelerators memory couldn't be configured as fast mem

Why didn’t it add fast RAM instead of slow? Is it a compatibility thing? And why just 1 MB? Memory is very cheap now a days…

All that ever gets tested is games. I would like to see wordsworth 7

The SBS demonstration of Elite was a bit poor. Should of had SBS showing both running full screen to see the difference.

I expected to see 'please test stunt car racer' or 10 other titles. In Canada &America, the Amiga was too costly. People bought Atari ST's knowing that the greatest system was the Amiga (even with lazy ST ports). In the late 80s such a boost might be $300-600.

Funny you say about no point testing Lemmings. Detonating loads of Lemmings all at once would cripple my Amiga500 😂

Wow, if I had an A500 that wasn't accelerated I'd be getting one of those - but all three of mine are already pimped in some way. Two of those using stacked sockets like you did, BTW. -Dx

The only way I could see this being worthwhile is if you have a 512k machine and want the extra RAM. Because there really isn't any other use case for it. This isn't the 1980s where your general computing needs will be faster. There are probably very few if any games that will both run on an a500 and benefit from the faster CPU. In the worst case, there will be some games that run slow, only faster. It will still run at 10fps, but the seconds go by quicker. It's hard to explain what I mean, but this happens on certain very early PC games that ran slow. When you get a faster PC, the clock of the game runs faster, but not the FPS compared to a real clock in the real world.

A zipstick! Clearly a man of taste.

I guess the blitter becomes the bottleneck. Still have to wait for blits to complete. Besides, blitter, copper and audio steals valuable cycles. Increase in stuff like z plane sorting and all other cpu related tasks in between blits would of course be better, but only just slightly taking all things together.

you could convert trapdoor ram to chip, its an easy hack.

This accelerator is using a 20Mhz motorola chip worth only $3-4 USD that he weirdly decided to clock down, instead of using a triple-clocking method and run it at a slight bump of 21Mhz. Also, why add a measly 1MB in 2X512Kb chips when he could add a single 16MB chip that could make a difference for WHDLOAD and desktop apps? Whoever designed this, completely missed the opportunity to make it much better than it is, for the SAME amount of money and soldering if not less!