🚀 go-pugleaf

Some of you may recall that a few weeks ago I asked for comments on
A1200 accelerators from anyone who had a board fitted to their machine.
I received a fairly good response and having since found the time to
read through them all I am now posting a summary of the responses, as
promised.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

                  RESULTS OF A1200 ACCELERATOR SURVEY
                  ===================================

Firstly let me say that my request was prompted by my desire to obtain
a 50MHz '030 board for my machine. I was mainly considering the Blizzard
III or Viper II boards, but also asked for owners of other boards to reply.
I received replies from owners of the following boards:

   Blizzard II and III
   DKB Cobra and Mongoose
   GVP A1230 I and II
   MBX (Microbotics/Paravision) 1230XA
   Viper I and II
   Hawk

Of these, the Blizzards and Vipers were by far the most popular, with
slightly more replies received from Blizzard owners. The DKB and
Microbotics boards were more popular in the USA, hardly surprising as
they are American manufactured.

I received a few responses from owners of GVP boards, who were all very
happy with their boards and who reported no hardware or software
compatibility problems. Both however complained about the high cost of
the special GVP simms required by the board. The GVP board is no longer
being manufactured owing to the demise of the company, although I
understand that their assets have been bought by Power Computing.
Whether the boards will reappear only time will tell.

I also received one response from the happy owner of a Hawk board. This
is not actually an accelerator board although it is advertised as such.
It is basically a Ram expansion card which "accelerates" the Amiga due
to the presence of fast ram. I will just mention that the owner was
very pleased with the board, had no compatibility problems whatsoever
and stated that it was completely transparent in use.

I will try and describe the features of the other boards, which I
believe are all currently available. Although I have taken considerable
care to ensure that the information regarding these boards is accurate,
some of the information is as reported to me by owners and I therefore
take no responsibility for errors or omissions. Please check with
your distributor before making any decisions based on this article!

                          BLIZZARD 1230 III
                          =================

The Blizzard boards are manufactured by Phase 5 Products in Germany.
The A1230 II has been superseded by the Mk III and is no longer widely
available. The main difference between the two boards is that the Mk III
has only one SIMM socket and a PGA type FPU socket, whereas the Mk II
was fitted with two SIMM sockets and sockets for both PGA and PLCC type
FPU's. Both use standard SIMMs. The board has a connector for an optional
SCSI-2 interface and is fitted with a real time clock. The Ram is
autoconfiguring, and the board has automatic kickstart remapping, which
can be disabled. It is available in a 40MHz 68EC030 version, or a 50MHz
full 68030 version with built in MMU.

                          VIPER Mk I and II
                          =================

The Viper boards are distributed by Power Computing, and are available
in Mk I and Mk II versions. Whilst both boards are badged as "Viper" by
Power Computing, I understand that the Mk I board is manufactured in
Germany and that the Mk II boards are manufactured by DKB, being
essentially the DKB 1240 Cobra and Mongoose accelerators.

The Viper Mk I is available in 28, 33 and 42MHz versions, all with full
68030's. It has a single standard SIMM socket capable of accepting up to
8MB Ram, and sockets for both PGA and PLCC type co-processors (FPU's).

The Mk II is available in several versions, all with single standard
SIMM sockets capable of accepting up to 128MB of Ram, and a PLCC only
FPU socket. There is a 28MHz version with full '030, and a 40MHz version
with 68EC030. These are I believe equivalent to the DKB Cobras. Also
available are 40 and 50MHz versions with full 030's and PGA FPU sockets.

All of the Vipers have real time clocks and connectors for an optional
SCSI-2 interface. I believe that the Ram on all Vipers is autoconfig.
The Mk I apparently conflicts with the A1200's PCMCIA port with more
than 4MB of Ram fitted but the Mk II's do not have this problem.

                      DKB 1240 COBRA and MONGOOSE
                      ===========================

The description of the Viper Mk II also applies as far as I can tell to
the DKB boards. The Cobra being equivalent to the 28 and 40MHz versions.
The Mongoose is a 50MHz full 030 board.

                        MICROBOTICS MBX 1230XA
                        ======================

The Microbotics/Paravision MBX 1230XA is available in 33, 40 and 50MHz
versions. I did not get any responses from owners of the 33 or 40MHz
boards and so cannot say much about these. The 50MHz board has a full
030 and a single standard SIMM socket capable of accepting up to 128MB
of Ram. It has a real time clock and a socket for an FPU. There is
apparently no expansion connector on this board (for SCSI or similar).
The memory does not conflict with the PCMCIA port. Although the memory
autoconfigs under Workbench 3.1, it has to be configured by software
under Workbench 3.0 or below. This is achieved by adding a small program
to the WBStartup drawer.

                            SURVEY RESULTS
                            ==============

None of the owners who responded reported any serious software
compatibility problems with any of the boards. The majority had
encountered no problems at all. Those that had experienced problems
said that they were all with games and PD demos. One owner told me that
whenever he had experienced problems with a particular piece of
software he had pulled out his board to check whether it would run on
his unexpanded machine. In every case the problem appeared to be with
the software. A Blizzard board owner complained that he had been unable
to get Frontier to run since installing the board, but another
respondent, also with a Blizzard, mentioned that Frontier was much
more playable with the board installed.

Hardware compatibility was a different matter. It would seem that
nearly all of the boards can be rather fussy about co-existing with
other hardware devices including hard disks. A number of owners had
again experienced no problems, but many had found their boards
incompatible with particular makes or models of hard disks, and had
replaced the drives to get the boards to work.

Unfortunately the types of boards and disks which caused problems were
too varied, and the number of responses too small for me to really make
any accurate statements here as to which boards and hard disks refuse to
work together. I would add though, that from enquiries I have made with
distributors, most of them now seem aware of this problem and have a
good idea which combinations will or will not work.

                               EPILOGUE
                               ========

And now the question which I'm sure is on everybody's lips - what did
I decide? Well, I originally plumped for the Blizzard III, but on
making enquiries with the main UK distributor I was told that it would
not work with my "old" [their description] Conner 2.5 inch drive.

I decided to entrust myself to Brian Fowler of Brian Fowler Computers
Ltd., whose reputation will be well known to readers of Just Amiga
Monthly. I made this decision after Brian replied to my email enquiry
and told me that he would guarantee any accelerator he supplied to
work with my machine configuration as reported to him. A number of
phone calls later, after which we had established that the make, model
and revision numbers of my hard drive were on C='s approved list, I am
currently awaiting delivery of a Viper II 50MHz 68030.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks to everyone who helped with this survey - you know who you are :-)

Phil.
-- 
Philip Stokes                                    phil@stokes.demon.co.uk
Hertfordshire
England                              PGP Public Key available on request