CompuServe Messages

Lee, The economy version doesn't have an MMU, and one cannot ever be added to the board. That's why it's cheaper, the CPU used is a special version of the 68030 which doesn't have an MMU in the chip. You don't need an MMU for anything, really. If you install a 32 bit RAM card the 68030 will use the 32 bit RAM and it will also use any 16 bit RAM you already have installed. That is independent of whether you have an MMU or not. What you cannot do without the MMU is map the AmigaDos ROMs into 32 bit RAM, which makes the Amiga's graphic primitives run much faster. If you do a lot of graphic processing, then you might prefer to get an accelerator with an MMU to take advantage of the speed increase the ROM mapping will provide. Perhaps in future versions of AmigaDos the MMU might be employed for virtual memory or to enable applications to protect portions of memory using the MMU, but right now only ROM mapping is available, so far as I know, which needs the MMU.