Commodore Amiga 500 - ACA500+ Accelerator Card - FULL REVIEW 

Vampire kicking ass in any way ...

Modern Vintage Gamer I think I would prefer Vampire - any chance you could do a video on the new Gold 2 Core?

working on it - stay tuned :)

Huh - The ACA1221 @ 28 mhz only offers ~ 4926 Drhystones, so only ~ 50% faster than the 68000 @ 42 mhz.. still an upgrade but not as big as it used to be :)

looking forward to seeing this!

theres a 68k in there :)

@GadgetUK164, I think what they are doing is creating a signal from the FPGA like you would achieve from a function generator. If you have more than one CPU (if you match the right ones) you can "oscillate them together" (although you must avoid harmonic distortion) so as to achieve a frequency greater than the usual 7MHz. Of course there is not more than one physical CPU on their, however, a FGPA could emulate a second CPU simply for the purpose of behaving like the aformentioned function generator (so as to have the second emulated CPU simply be there to osciallate together with the actual 68k CPU in there). This way the CPU you are actually using is the legitimate CPU but you get higher frequency (MHz) from it. So that means you are not "cheating" because you are not getting the FPGA to emulate a CPU being used. In the past (decades ago), when this was achieved by using two real CPUS ("osciallting together" - think Fourier) and the old RAM you got in an Amiga, this would eventually destroy the RAM. They did that attempt to save them from having to use more costly CPUs and also so as to maintain the instruction set compatability. However, these days the RAM is modern enough that this side-effect problem need not occur. Perhaps by using a EC versoin of 68k on this expansion, there is one less aspect of the architecture to break from doing this, hence the higher frequency is achieved. Of course, the instruction set is maintained for compatability rather than opting for some other (motorola or toshiba) CPU.

yes it does!

Hi vincent GR i have the aca 500 and was tempted to plug my blizzard 030 @50mhz accelerator card on but was advised not to by amigakit ???? So can i go ahead and use the 030 @50mhz on the aca 500 ? I was told to stick to the aca accelerator cards for the aca 500 ?????

back2skooldaze Did work for me 100%, you have my word. Was this a marketing trick?

jrherita I have NTSC rev5 and the aca500plus works great with it. I emailed them first to confirm that before buying

The Obsolete Geek it's on the underside of the board and yep one if the smaller ones

yes there are options to switch it in the menu. you can also use the early boot sequence to switch to PAL. Theres also a hardware mod you can before to default an NTSC Amiga to boot in PAL mode

Thanks man. Mine is on its way from Germany. Looking forward to getting it all set up!

I'd love to take a look at the action replay, however I'd really want an hex editor that would give me months worth of codes to provide for Amiga games.

Boojakascha Just cut ur original cable off the old supply and wire it to just about any PC Supply! Been poweri,g mine like that for years...

yep - gotta give him credit on this one. he definitely listened to the criticisms of the first card

my 1260 is stock @ 50mhz. its interesting though because it doesnt seem to get enough power to boot it. I even tried removing the SIMM RAM also but to no avail. i have a Phase 5 1260 rather than a DCE so im not sure if theres a high power requirements for those

standard - if you had to pay that would be a deal breaker for me. I am not a fan of the ACA1221 for that exact reason

I wondered this myself. I've seen an ACA500 working on an A1000; the video is here on RU-vid somewhere. The slot is the same; the orientation of the card would be different, but it could work. I only have an A1000, and I don't really want to replace it with an A500, so it would be great if it works.

Thanks to VincentGR for answering my query I'll go try it out ;) +back2skooldaze Did work for me 100%, you have my word. Was this a marketing trick?

i can only go on my experience. I own a Blizzard 1260 Card and it does not work with it.

MrGasS27 yes I use one and it works fine

Modern Vintage Gamer Also with CPU set on 42 MhZ?

Yes

Modern Vintage Gamer My ACA500plus arrived today, It's veeery great, I love it, but in Expert Options I can only switch 7 and 14 MhZ on CPU speed and Freezer Speed, how can set CPU on 21, 28 or 42? Thank you :)

yes its available now (as of me posting this) on icomp.de

hand picked cpus?

triax1972 You have to set it up in global settings: Max speed 42MHz

Guessing some kinda scaler, like an XRGB Framemeister.

So you can use to A500 as a storage device? Which means one only needs a floopy drive.

icomp.de/shop-icomp/en/news.html

Australian native but born to Greek parents. I can speak fluent greek

Gloom with A500plus

i dont believe it will run as it needs a 32bit CPU to launch, but ill try it outsometime. Maybe Wolf3d might work :)

Stephen Jones Not upside down! Back to front. Up is the same way as on the A500.

Ville Jouppi ok, but would it work reversed.

Ville Jouppi actually I checked and answer is no.

Stephen Jones apparently some timings are a bit off and it works like once every five powerups or something, so it's probably not a good idea to get one for the A1000 just now. :-)