ACA630
ACA630 is an accelerator for the A600 computer. It is not compatible with the A300 board, which uses Gayle revision -01. ACA630 will only work with Gayle Revision -02.
The ACA630-25 is a lot faster than you might think, judging by it's moderate clock frequency. The cause for the outstanding performance is the high-speed memory that comes pre-assembled on the card: 32 MByte SD-Ram are connected to the 68030 with top speed. As a result, our ACA630-25 is about 24% faster than an Amiga 3000 that's clocked at the same frequency. To reach this high performance, we've clocked the memory twice as fast as the processor, and we skipped on an FPU (floating-point unit). We think that this gives more benefits than drawbacks, because the ACA630-25 is made for everyday use, for games and simple applications on the workbench. You need Integer performance for this, and this is where the ACA630-25 scores.
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Processor
ACA630 cards are based on the Motorola 68030 processor. There are two versions, one clocked at 25MHz and another clocked at 30MHz.
Memory
ACA630 cards come with fastmem pre-installed. The 25MHz version was equipped with 32MBytes and the 30MHz version was equipped with 64MBytes physical memory. Memory is added to the freemem pool using Zorro III autoconfig, making it available by default on all OS 2.x and 3.x versions. Since the Z2 memory area remains unused, the cards are 100% PCMCIA compatible.
Mounting
The ACA630 strikes a new path for mounting and cooling: Two small screws keep the card in place, and an anodized aluminium cooler serves as a replacement for the harddrive cradle, which must be removed. We recommend a flash-based mass-storage solution, as a real harddrive would cause too much heat and also would not fit under the keyboard.
The ACA630 is designed to fit with our other products. Even with the limited space inside the A600 case, the A603 memory expansion and Indivision ECS fit nicely with the ACA630.
If you have removed your internal floppy drive in favour of an Indivision ECS, the ACA630 can assist in two ways to get around the long wait that's caused by the missing drive: You can either build a completely floppy-less system by setting the "noDisk" jumper, or you can turn an external floppy drive into the "df0:"-drive, which lets you boot games and other track-loading programs.
available ACAtune options
ACA630 supports all ACAtune options, even the ones that will make the system instable. One of the reasons why the board is not made any more is the huge amount of support cases where users have activated tuning options, expecting them to work on their machines. Please note that anything beyond Maprom, cache and fastmem is considered "depreciated" and should not be used.
- The MapRom function allows copying the kickstart-rom (256k, 512k or 1MB) to fastmem and use it like a normal ROM there. This speeds up most operations significantly, because large parts of the operating system are located in the kickstart ROM. The MapRom function is similar to the Fastrom-option that the Amiga OS CPU command offers. However, the ACA630 does not requrie the MMU for that. If you require the MMU for a different use, there will be no conflict.
- Re-Kick: Similar to MapRom, a Kickstart image is stored in Fastmem where it will apear just like a ream ROM chip to the user. The different is that the Re-Kick option does not use the Kickstart ROM as a source, but a file from your harddisk. After a re-boot, the new Kickstart is available, and it stays active until the next power cycle. The ACA acceperators are the first commercially available products that support true 1MB kickstarts!
- c0mem: This will simulate an Amiga 500 memory expansion of 1MByte or 512k. Some games and programs require this exact memory configuration and would not work at all, despite the large amount of memory in the system: They just don't support 32-bit memory. The A500 memory expansion is within 24-bit boundaries, so this special software can run on an ACA630-equipped A600, but it would not work at all without it.
- Fastchip: This option allows faster access to Chipmem (graphics mem) of the accelerated Amiga. Please note that this is a tuning option that may or may not work with all Amigas or Chipmem expansions. You'll have to verify this for your particular Amiga. It should work with all kinds of memory chips being used on the A600 mainboard. However, the memory chips being used on some 1MB Chip-Ram expansions might be too slow, causing data corruption. The Individual Computers A602, A603 and A604 Chip-Ram expansions can be safely used in conjunction with this option. All Zorro II options refer to the PCMCIA port, especially SRAM cards.
- FastZ2: This option speeds up PCMCIA memory expansions. Just like with the FastChip option, there may be setups that cannot handle this kind of acceleration. This tuning-option must be verified for your individual setup. If in doubt, you should switch it off!
- Chipcache: Typically, the CPU caches are switched off for Chipmem, otherwise certain actions may cause crashes. However, there are certain configurations where you may want to allow caches for Chipmem. Consider this a tuning-option for experts who truly know what they're doing!
- z2cache: This will activate CPU caches for PCMCIA memory cards.
- noFastMem: Allows to switch off 32-bit fast memory. This will slow down the system significantly, so software that doesn't run well on an accelerated Amiga can be used again.
As a final downgrade option, you can limit the amount of available Chipmem: Games or programs that cannot cope with larger amounts of Chipmem can be made compatible by reduciong the Chipmem size to 1MB or even 512k.The MapRom function allows copying the kickstart-rom (256k, 512k or 1MB) to fastmem and use it like a normal ROM there. This speeds up most operations significantly, because large parts of the operating system are located in the kickstart ROM. The MapRom function is similar to the Fastrom-option that the Amiga OS CPU command offers. However, the ACA630 does not requrie the MMU for that. If you require the MMU for a different use, there will be no conflict.
