CompuServe Thread

Gee… "omnipotent wisdom"… that is omniscience I believe but considering how things went this weekend, I can assure you that omniscience is not one of my "strong suits!!" -bill

Rich, No, I don't have an A500. I've never been that low. 🙂 I started in 1985 with the 1000 and progressed upwards, 2000-2500-3000-4000. I have, however, performed surgery on two A500's to bring them up to one meg CHIP Ram specification. Two traces have to be cut and a link soldered in, If I remember correctly. I can look it up for you, if you like. A qualification on what I said about replacing the Agnus, I think that was only necessary on some early models, and that the later ones had the one meg Agnus already installed. I am sure someone on the Forum will be able to confirm this. Totally changing the subject, and getting on to another of my interests, mayI ask you how far back are your Frisian ancestors? Or am I totally misreading your name? Pete Jones, flying on AutoPilot from Brussels, Belgium

Rich, Typing 'avail' at any CLI prompt will tell you how much chip and fast ram you have. All your displays and sound use chip ram everything else can use either. So if you find yourself running out of chip ram you'll start having problems opening new windows and such. I hope nobody takes offence at my lack of precision in verbage. <g> -Sean

>What do you mean, same resolution but no flicker? Changing Agnus will >not change the display mode or scan rate. I was speaking of Flicker Free Video, or something like it. -bill Bob Comer — Flying high and fast with my A1200HD'030 on Autopilot! From Cheyenne, Wyoming U.S.A.

About your "not using what you have" Just one of Murphy's laws of computing… No matter how fast your computer is, and no matter how much storage you have, you'll find a way to need more. 🙂 FFV II's a good product, and yes it does work in a 500. I don't believe you need the 1M Agnus to use the FFV, but I'm not real sure on this. Megachip is a 2M Agnus board that plugs into the Agnus socket in a 500, or 2000. It gives you 2M of chip ram. I've never owned one, so don't know the specifics, but I've owned other DKB products, and I've had no problems… (Good technical support, and they're even on CIS.) No shame in knowing about PC's, I work with them too, I just don't like them as much. Bob Comer — Flying high and fast with my A1200HD'030 on Autopilot! From Cheyenne, Wyoming U.S.A.

Richard; I have never used an A500 (did own one for a few weeks… actually I suppose that technically I still own one but I have not seen it in over a year but I digress…). I did not know that the MegAChip was available for the A500 (I have two, one in an A2000 and another in an A2500 with GVP G-Force 040). Both devices have worked flawlessly. Most importantly, if you are trying to make serious use of your machines (particularly for graphics) this is probably the single most important enhancement to your system short of OS 2.x and maybe a hard drive. The system will be considerably faster for most use with a MegAChip installed as well as considerably most stable. -bill

Richard, You have a misconception about Agnus. Agnus has 0 ram. Depending on what version of Agnus it can address x amount of ram, known as chip ram. In your 500, you've got 512k of ram on the motherboard of your computer that is set aside specifically as chip ram (the ram that Agnus can address). If you get a 1M Agnus, make small modifications to your motherboard, you will then be able to use the 512k on the belly card as chip ram. If you want to eliminate hires flicker you will need a scan doubler of some sort (2 or 3 have already been recommended to you) and a monitor that is capable of supporting a 31.5KHz scan rate. Had you decided to go with the 1200 you'd have gotten 2M chip ram and a flickerless hires display as part of the AGA chipset (and all the other color resolution and display mode enhancements of AGA). Add some fast ram to the 1200 and it's nearly as fast as an A3000 (A1200 uses an EC020, no MMU, so no added wait state for the MMU that the 3000's 030 has). -sja

Ok, the Agnus chip only controls access to RAM, it has NO RAM inside it. The 512K of RAM that the OCS Agnus uses is the 512K on the motherboard. The ECS Agnus controls access to the 512K of RAM on the motherboard, and has the OPTION of controling access to the 512K in the belly slot for a total of 1024K RAM. To activate the 1-meg OPTION, you must "flip" a solder trace near the ECS Agnus socket to put Agnus into "1-meg mode", THEN you must cut other trace near the belly slot. The second trace tells the GARY chip to configure the A501 RAM as "FAST" if the trace is closed; if the trace is open (cut) the GARY configures the A501 as CHIP RAM and gives it to Agnus. Some Amiga's already have the ECS Agnus (#8372a), but it is running in 512K mode. The "1-meg mode" REQUIRES 1-meg of CHIP memory to be present AND configured as CHIP, or the system will crash. The A501 card can't be removed while the Agnus is configured to access 1-meg of CHIP. The Flicker-Free Video II, plugs under the Denise chip, with the Denise chip plugged into the FFV-II. No soldering or hacking to the motherboard. I haven't purchased a Flicker fixer yet, but the FFV is suppose to be quite good. As for the ECS Agnus and flicker… the Agnus has no effect on flicker, but the ECS Denise (requires ECS Agnus) offers a limited 4-color VGA screenmode that requires a VGA/multiscan and is flickerfree. The FFV-II would be a better choice over the ECS Denise, since it removes the flicker from all modes, and is "transparent" to programs. The ECS Agnus (in 1-meg mode) is a desirable option since it doubles the amount of memory used for graphics and sound. Both the ECS chips and FFV-II can be used together. Ron. – ap'ing with AP. (Eagles may fly, but weasels aren't sucked into jet engines.)