Path: menudo.uh.edu!menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: chinaski@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Dean Paul Karpowicz) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: MINI-REVIEW: Derringer accelerator board for A500 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.hardware Date: 26 Jan 1993 17:55:33 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 86 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <1k3tulINN86j@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: chinaski@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Dean Paul Karpowicz) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: accelerator, 68030, hardware, A500, commercial PRODUCT NAME Derringer accelerator board BRIEF DESCRIPTION This is a 68030 accelerator board for the Amiga 500. This mini-review concentrates on the board installation and briefly describes the performance. COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Computer Systems Associates (CSA) Address: 7564 Trade St. San Diego, CA 92121 USA Telephone: (619) 566-3911 Tech Hotline: (619) 566-3923 MINI-REVIEW I bought the Derringer 030 in the first week of January 1993, and installed it. The installation manual is poorly written. It's three pages photocopied double-sided with no photos. I installed it on the Amiga 500 Rev. 6a. The first part of the installation manual has you opening the case of the A500 and removing the 68000 chip. After you put the chip into the Derringer 030, the manual has some faults. It tells you to seat the board with "moderate" pressure into the 68000 socket on the motherboard. However, I needed to use extreme pressure. I had to lean on the butt of a screwdriver to push it all the way down. The small plastic pins that they give you to put under the far end of the board are about half as long as they are supposed to be. Therefore the board wants to rock out of the socket from its own weight. I used the rubber plugs from the ends of a bicycle handlebar. After I used those, I found the right size spacer at work. I also used a SMALL drop of superglue at the corners of where the socket and header come together. I figured this will keep the board from coming out of the socket and can be easily broken apart if it needs to be. The instructions then say to replace the shielding (ha ha hee hee, nice try). The shielding will fit, but it is tight, and the Derringer 030 will short to the shield. I tried several pieces of electrical tape, but the pressure of squeezing the shield back on broke through the tape. I ended up using a small piece of black plastic sheeting that I taped to the underside of the shield. Leaving the shield off will not alleviate this problem, for the back of the keyboard has metal shielding as well. Enough about the installation. Let's get to the performance. I purchased the Derringer 030 with the optional 50Mhz 68882, and it came with 4 MB of 32bit RAM. There is a software program included to remap the Kickstart ROM, add the 32-bit RAM to the system, and move the exception vectors and supervisor stack to 32-bit RAM. The "-res" part of the command unfortunately doesn't work with my hard drive. It's supposed to make the 32-bit RAM available early in a warm boot, speeding things up even more. The performance stats from AIBB are very close to an A3000. Some tests are faster, but some are slower. The results are generally 6 to 100 times faster than a stock A500 depending on the tests being run. I use Pagestream a lot, and the performance gain there is incredible. Pages that took seemingly forever to print now are printing almost immediately. Using POVRay to render a scene before took 24-28 hours; the same scene now takes less than 10 minutes. My system is an A500 Rev 6a, GVP A500-HD+ w/ 52meg Quantum and 4 MB RAM, AmigaDOS 2.1, standard Denise, and 1 MB Agnus (board hacked). I haven't seen the problems that have been stated here on netland (video shifted, black screens, etc.). So far the system has been rock solid, and I am very excited about using my new toy. Dean Paul Karpowicz chinaski@csd4.csd.uwm.edu --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu