🚀 go-pugleaf

Brett Maraldo asks:

>          What can you tell me about 16Mhz 68k retrofits for the ST?
>What is the best board in your opinion and what will it cost?  What
>are the pros and cons of buying and installing a 16Mhz board?

We are running the Hypercache board by the German company pro_VME on 3
machines for more than a year. Initially we had severe problems when the
Atari 68881 board was installed; there were also a few bugs in the cache
logic. The company has continously improved their product and, luckily,
even the most problematic machine of the three now runs very stable when
the cache is switched on. The present Hypercache boards seem to be very
reliable products; the only program i know which *sometimes* gives rise to
problems is ICD's ratehd (only in connection with a seagate st296n, so
this seems to be more a timing problem of this problematic drive). The
board is not cheap (600 DM) but this price is in good ratio to quality
and company support.

Speed improvement: roughly 40 % on output intensitive operation, such as
compilations; 70-85 % in average. '881 library functions run typically
40-50 % faster, which is a remarkable result since in these
applications the 68000 is used merely as a "controller" of the 68881,
which does the real work.

I'm not affiliated with pro_VME.

Michael Ritzert
mjr@dmzrzu71.bitnet