ACA1234

ACA1234 (50MHz)

General

This accelerator comes with different flavours of the 68030 processor (with/without MMU and different speeds) and 128MBytes physical memory. 1MByte of this memory is reserved for Kickstart re-mapping.

The ACA1234 comes with a number of improvements over it's predecessors, but also cuts cost in order to deal with the 2021 chip shortage and the ever-rising prices of Motorola CPUs.

The ACA1234 boards have much faster memory performance than any other accelerator before - especially with cache and burst enabled. That's because the burst sequence is the fastest-possible sequence that the 68030 can perform: It's a sequence of four 32-bit transfers in four CPU cycles, which has not been shown before we first introduced the ACA1230 in 2010. The result is outstanding performance, even in comparison with other 68030-based accelerators at higher clock rates.

The ACA1234 re-defines PCMCIA-friendly: It will not only keep the PCMCIA slot operational, but also provide all software required for operating the most common cards in the PCMCIA slot in the card's flash ROM: CF card readers are supported out of the box without further software installation, and networking is supported with our AmiTCP network install disk, which includes a GUI, and of course a full license to the popular AmiTCP stack.

Features

Memory auto-configuration
selectable clock speed
card enable/disable in software
faster clockport gives 55% speed increase
local high-speed CF card controller
IDE speeder for increasing speed of the A1200 internal IDE
built-in support for PCMCIA CF card readers
Kickstart and OS3.1 included
Network installation for PCMCIA networking cards with GUI, DHCP client and AmiTCP license included
FPU preparation for PGA FPU (not officially supported)

Clock port details

The primary use of the clock port is for our RTC module, but you can also connect other clock port devices, provided that the drivers support the accelerated address. Please install like this:

RTC module on ACA1234
Cable orientation for iComp devices (e.g. RapidRoad)
Cable orientation for E3B's Subway USB

Please note that we do not recommend using cables for a clockport device at all, as these cables generally provide poor ground connection. If you decide to use such a cable, please add separate grounding to the device you're connecting, and also tie the shield of any connectors (such as USB connectors) to the A1200's shield.

The fast Clock port of the ACA1234 uses a different address than the internal clock port of the A1200. You may therefore need updated drivers for operating your device on the fast clock port of the ACA1234. Current drivers for Subway USB and RapidRoad USB also look for a controller on this port. Other drivers will have to be patched to work with address 0xd9.0001.

Jumpers

The jumpers are only required for rare emergency cases. For most use cases, you will not need them, so we recommend to keep the jumper in "park position" (factory default) at all times. Before you fiddle with the jumpers (and move your precious hardware around, which surely doesn't improve it), please explore all software-based possibilities first.

Jumper in "park" position (factory default)
Jumper JP0 set: safe launch @25MHz and EEPROM settings reset
Jumper JP1 set: Force "Mount Installdisk", Map KS3.1.

One possible reason why you may need to set a jumper is that you have un-ticked the box "Mount Installdisk" in ACAtool, did not make a copy of ACAtool on your boot medium, and also don't have any means of transferring the downloaded file to your Amiga. In that case, you can set jumper JP1, which will force mounting the Install disk, raise it's boot priority and map Kickstart 3.1. JP1 will leave the local CF clot in a working condition.

In case something went wrong with flashing, a setup has been saved that crashes the machine on startup, or if you just want to make sure that no trial runs are used on the next power-up, you can set jumper JP0. This will launch the system at a safe 25MHz without IDE speeder enabled, and also reset all EEPROM settings that you may have made with the ACAtool. The internal Kickstart ROM of the host machine will be used. Further, the Autoconfig ROM of the ACA1234 will not be executed, which lets you perform an emergency/recovery-flash operation even if the Autoconfig ROM is garbled. It is recommended to remove jumper JP0 for the next power-up.

ACAtool

Download

ACAtool - ACATool for all recent cards, including the ACA1234

You can also update acatool using the firmware update procedure (see below).

General

You can find this tool on the virtual install disk. Start it by double-clicking the ACAtool symbol. Depending on the machine you're running it on, it will come up with different available options.

On the ACA500plus, most functions are disabled in order not to interfere with the menu system of the ACA500plus.

The "Info" line displays the version information about your ACA1234, along with it's warranty ID, which you may need for purchasing a license code. "Status" will show the status of MapROM, the selected CPU and the highest-speed license. The third line on screen is for licensing operations:

Licensing operations

entering a license code into the text field
Response from the ACA1234
successful licensing: Display of new max. speed

If you want to upgrade the speed of your ACA1234 permanently, you need to purchase a license code. Select from the pulldown menu "Licensing Options..." or press the 'l' key to open the license code options in the GUI. Enter that license code into the text field and press enter. The code has an inherent checksum and won't be sent to the ACA1234 if that checksum is not corrrect - in that case, ACAtool will let you know that you've had a typo by responding with "Error in code". Note that the license code is case-sensitive, which means that capital letters and lower-case letters must be correctly copied from the eMail you've gotten from our shop system. ACAtool will display the response of the card in a separate window and and update the "Info" line accordingly.

Before you buy a license, you have the chance to run your card at a higher speed for 20 times: Just save the desired speed to your card, and you will be able to run at that speed for up to 20 trial runs. A trial run is counted at the actual change, on power-up and a CPU switch, but not on a reset. Make sure that the card is really stable by running CPU-heavy operations like compiling, benchmarks, archive packing/testing/unpacking in RAM: with caches, burst and MapROM enabled for many hours. Please remember to go back to your standard speed if you find that the card is either not stable at your desired speed, or that the performance you've observed is not worth the money. If trial runs are used up, the card will only run at it's licensed speed with no further drawbacks. A license can always be added, even if trial runs have all been used.

A Higher-speed license always includes all the lower-speed licenses, so if you've upgraded from 25MHz to 40MHz, you can use 25, 33 and 40MHz.

refund procedure

In case you find that a newly-purchased license doesn't work as expected (for example crashes at higher speeds that can't be reproduced at lower speeds) despite the recommended testing with trial runs, we offer a refund procedure within a 14-day period. In that case, reply to the eMail that you got from our shop system and let us know that you want to refund that license. We will send you a code that you can enter to disable the previously purchased license.

Click on the cycle gadget next to the entry field for the license code until you see "Refund". Enter the refund code that we've sent you and press enter. The card will reply with a confirmation code that you need to return to us, for example by taking a snapshot with your mobile phone of the window that opens after entering the refund code. Once we have verified that confirmation code, we can refund the money that you've paid for the license. Once a certain speed has been refunded, it cannot be licensed again. However, purchasing a higher speed will still also enable any speed below that, even if it has been refunded before.

Switch CPU

Clicking on "Apply" in the "Switch CPU" line will open a window that warns you about the consequences of switching the 68030 CPU off: Please save all your work and wait for disk activity to finish (all activity LEDs should be off for a few seconds). Note that the ACA1234 will be in complete "stealth mode" when it's been switched off: No additional fastmem, no access to the local CF card, and the Install disk won't be mounted. This means that if you click on "Okay", you should have a copy of ACAtool available on some other boot medium (such as the internal IDE port) to be able to execute the command line "ACAtool CPUON". The CPU switch setting cannot be saved. It will always be applied instantly, but on power-up, the card always comes up with the 68030 CPU. So if you haven't made a copy of ACAtool just yet, you can always do it after the next power cycle :-)

MapROM

Check the MapROM gadget to transfer the operating system's ROM into fast memory. This will improve performance on ROM operations. You can map the computer's built-in ROM, or a user ROM file from the ACA1234's flash memory. There are four ROM slots of 512KiB size each, of which the first is occupied with Kickstart 3.1. Use the cycle gadget to cycle through 'IntROM' (internal ROM), 'ROM#0' (Kick3.1), and further to user slots 'ROM#1', 'ROM#2', 'ROM#3'. Use the 'Select' gadget to open a file requester for choosing a ROM file. The ROM files remain stored in their respective slots. Remember that you also have to check the MapROM gadget to activate mapping.

Mount install disk

Tick this box if you want the virtual ACA1234Install disk to be mounted on every power-up. We recommend to keep this activated, as it only requires a small bit of memory. Some OS versions and/or commodities allow you to make the icon invisible on the desktop. However, if you don't want the ACA1234Install disk to be mounted at all, you can un-tick this box. Be sure to make a copy of ACAtool on your boot medium so that you won't lock yourself out from ACAtool.

Keep internal IDE

This box is not available on ACA500plus. The internal IDE of the A1200 is much slower than the CF card controller of the ACA1234. This means that there will be a considerable amount of users who will migrate their CF card from the internal IDE to the CF card slot of the ACA1234, leaving the internal IDE port empty. If you have Kickstart 3.1, this will result in a 30-second wait time on every reset and power-up. For that case, you can un-tick the box "Keep internal IDE". This will skip the wait for a possible harddisk to spin up, and keep scsi.device out of the system. Note that this is a software setting that will only be minded when the 68030 CPU is active. If the ACA1234 is in stealth mode, the internal IDE will always be enabled. This lets you run two completely separate systems without the need to change boot media: One minimal 68ec020 system (geared towards running without fastmem) on the internal IDE port, and a fully-fledged system on the card in the ACA1234's CF slot.

Mount PCMCIA CF Cards

This box is not available on ACA500plus. Your A1200 has a PCMCIA slot that can be utilized with the built-in software of the ACA1234. If you tick this box, you can use a CF card in a PCMCIA CF card reader, available separately in our shop. This will make transferring files from a different computer system to your Amiga much easier. CF cards that are formatted with the FAT file system can be hot-plugged. This means that you may insert or remove the card or the card reader at any time, given that there is no program accessing a file. If you want to access an Amiga-formatted card, it must be inserted at power-up already, and it may not be removed while the system is in operation, because there is no proper way to un-mount an RDB-based medium on the Amiga. If such a medium is found at boot time, the software that mounts a FAT-formatted card will not be launched.

The device name for an RDB-formatted Amiga card will be taken from the partition table in the RDB (Rigid disk block), and all partitions will be mounted. If one of the partitions is bootable and it's boot priority is higher than all other boot media, you can even boot from a CF card that's in the PCMCIA CF card reader.

The device name for a FAT-formatted card will always be "CFAUX:". The underlying block device is called "compactflash.device", written by Torsten Jager, available under LGPL on Aminet as well. If you have an installation of this device on your existing boot media already, we recommend to remove it completely, so there won't be any clashes with the software that is provided by the ACA1234.

IDE accelerator

The internal IDE of the A1200 can be accelerated to PIO mode 4 with the ACA1234. This will result in about a doubling of the speed that you're normally getting. IDE modes other than the default can cause I/O errors. This depends on various factors, such as solid state/flash vs. hard disk, PSU stability, and cable length. Please backup your data and make sure to test it thoroughly before activating it permanently. We recommend to use a buffered IDE adapter with any device that you want to accelerate (TODO: insert link to buffered CF interface for A1200).

FPU preparation

Here's where product support ends - please understand that we cannot give any further support beyond the information provided in this chapter. If you experience difficulties with your accelerator after installing an FPU, our general recommendation is to remove the FPU again. As an intermediate measure, you can try to switch off burst and see if any instability is going away - depending on the year that the FPU was made, it may add lots of capacitive load to the data bus, which may interfere with the high memory speed. As a result, our warmest recommendation is to use a socket for installing the FPU, as this makes it easy to remove it. After all, only a fraction of Amiga programs really requires an FPU, most programs are available as non-FPU versions and therefore the presence of an FPU is most likely only good for bragging rights. We have to emphasize that any soldering on the card will void your warranty. Installing an FPU is not possible without soldering. Further, there are a lot of fake FPUs on the market that are really hard to identify. Especially if you're after a higher-frequency version, you are very likely to get a re-labelled part if you're buying from a random China seller on eBay. Most of the problems that we've experienced while testing certain FPUs that were offered to us were caused by FPUs that either caused crashes, or that just produced wrong results when clocked at the high speed that it was advertised for. In some cases, reducing the clock rate has helped, in other cases a fake part was only obvious after launching the system: We've had quite a few 68881 parts that were re-labelled as 68882-50.

If all the above warnings didn't put you off, you're three steps away from an FPU:

1) solder in the 68-pin PGA socket

2) choose a clock source by soldering a 33R 0603-sized resistor to one of the resistor places. This will choose a static 25 or 50 MHz clock, or the CPU clock as your main clock source. If you select the CPU clock as your clock source, the FPU clock will vary depending on the CPU speed you set in ACAtool. It may be the only chance you have for getting a 33MHz or 40MHz clock, though.

3) choose a divider by placing a 33R 0402-sized resistor to either the middle-bottom or the middle-up position. The example picture below shows the "divide by two" position. The opposite position means "no divider". In the example of the below pictures, a clock of 12.5MHz is chosen by selecting 25MHz clock source and "divide by two".

68-pin PGA socket soldered in place
68881 FPU inserted - mind the correct orientation!
25MHz clock source divide by two

Firmware updates

The latest update is sufficient, unless otherwise noted.

Download: Media:ACA1234upd230124.lha

20230124: Corrected to support 1mb ROM files. acatool updated to version 3.4 to correctly support 1mb ROM files.

20220625: Installer updated to version 1.5 with OS 3.2 support added, acatool updated to version 3.1. With this update, it's also possible to use the ACA1234 with Kickstart 1.3 on the ACA500plus.

20220228: acatool updated to version 3.0.1.

20211223: All CPLD versions covered in this update, including new ACAtool V2.9, supporting the extra wire-link for switching on instruction cache in chip ram. Makes many demos run considerably better with the accelerator activated.

20211117: Due to a CPLD bug, memory in the trapdoor area could be overwritten by memory in the main fastmem area. This is a software-side hotfix at the cost of 1MiB of memory, but only if your card is affected.

20211104: Changing the CPU speed required a power-off/on on an ACA500+. Fixed with this firmware update

CPLD update

We recommend to update the CPLD for all cards that were shipped before Xmas 2021. Cards shipped on or after December 27th, 2021, have the latest CPLD already installed and will not require this update to V3.

We have an experimental version of a boot disk that will let you perform the update without using the keyboard on an A1200. Not tested on ACA500plus. Media:ACA1234CPLDupdateV3.lha Please report back if this worked for you - it's considerably simpler than the procedures described below.

Install the update on an A500 with ACA500plus

update the ACA500plus with the latest firmware, which supports ACA1234 CPU switching: Menu system V0.140
Download the archive with the required software: Media:ACA1234-CPLD-UpdateV3.lha
Unpack the archive to your mass storage device
switch off the computer, plug in the cable to the parallel port of the Amiga, and to the JTAG port of the card in this orientation:

JTAG connector goes in from the solder side!
Tilt the connector to the side and hold it there while updating

switch it back on, press F3, then X to go to 68000 mode, then ESC to go back to main menu, then F1 to boot
open the drawer "ACA1234-CPLD-Update"
double-click the icon "ACA1234-CPLD-Update"
push the 10-pin JTAG connector sideways and hold it in place. The screen will start flashing for about 45 seconds
if you see an error message, DO NOT SWITCH OFF THE COMPUTER! Just continue to hold the JTAG connector in place. The tool will automatically start over.
After you see the message "played successfully", power cycle your Amiga - the CPLD update is now complete.

Install the update on A1200

Download the archive with the required software: Media:ACA1234-CPLD-UpdateV3.lha
Unpack the archive to your mass storage device
switch off the computer, remove the top and the keyboard to gain access to the ACA1234
plug in the cable to the parallel port of the Amiga, and to the JTAG port of the card in this orientation:

Tilt the connector to the side and hold it there while updating

switch the computer back on
open the drawer "ACA1234-CPLD-Update"
double-click on the icon "ACA1234-CPUoff", then confirm the reboot
After reboot, double-click the icon "ACA1234-CPLD-Update"
push the 10-pin JTAG connector sideways and hold it in place. The screen will start flashing for about 35 seconds
if you see an error message, DO NOT SWITCH OFF THE COMPUTER! Just continue to hold the JTAG connector in place. The tool will automatically start over.
After you see the message "played successfully", power cycle your Amiga - the CPLD update is now complete.

Install the update with two computers

Note: This may only be required if your host computer has a defective parallel port or if there was a power outage during the CPLD update, resulting in a bricked ACA1234.

Download the archive with the required software: Media:ACA1234-CPLD-UpdateV3.lha
Unpack the archive to a mass storage device of your first Amiga
plug in the cable to the parallel port of the first Amiga, and to the JTAG port of the card. Please refer to one of the pictures above for the correct orientation.
power on the second Amiga to provide power to the ACA1234
open the drawer "ACA1234-CPLD-Update" on Amiga#1
double-click the icon "ACA1234-CPLD-Update" on Amiga#1
push the 10-pin JTAG connector sideways and hold it in place. The screen will start flashing for up to 45 seconds.
if you see an error message, don't panic. Just continue to hold the JTAG connector in place. The tool will automatically start over.
After you see the message "played successfully", power cycle the second Amiga - the CPLD update is now complete.

Optional wire link after CPLD V3 update

The new CPLD V3 sports a smaller, yet more accurate SD-Ram controller. The space we've gained inside the chip has been put to good use: The "FPU sense" pin is not requried any more and can therefore be used for something else. CPLD V3 will auto.detect if you have installed this wire link or not, and ACAtool V2.9 will show the "iCache in chip ram" option enabled only if the wire link has been found.

All previous accelerators all the way back to the ACA1230 have had all caches disabled in chip ram. However, recent fuzz about demos supposedly not working properly on ACA12xx accelerators has brought up the question: Is cache in chip ram actually allowed? We don't think so, as there's an easy way to break cache coherence. However, most Commodore machines do allow instruction cache (not data cache) in chip ram. Technically, this is not correct, and the latest updates to the OS (starting with OS 3.1.4) will setup the MMU in a way that even iCache in chip ram is not allowed. However, some demos do depend on instruction cache, as they need to squeeze every available cycle out of chip ram. So the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, and we decided to make the feature switchable with the ACAtool. Switch it on, and you'll see that Nexus7 and others are running just fine.

The wire link goes from CPU pin D2 (signal FC0) to FPU pin B4 (the "FPUsense" pin). Note that if you have an FPU socket installed, you should remove the pin, so there is no more connection to the FPU. CPLD V3 does not need the pin any more, as it will auto-detect the FPU in a different way.

wire link allowing iCache in chip ram.

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ACA1234

Contents

General

Features

Clock port details

Jumpers

ACAtool

Download

General

Licensing operations

refund procedure

Switch CPU

MapROM

Mount install disk

Keep internal IDE

Mount PCMCIA CF Cards

IDE accelerator

FPU preparation

Firmware updates

CPLD update

Install the update on an A500 with ACA500plus

Install the update on A1200

Install the update with two computers

Optional wire link after CPLD V3 update

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