Accellerating an Amiga 500 (From Backup 20-November-2014)

The Amiga 500 was one of the most popular Amiga...

Powered by a 68000 processor running at 7mhz and 512k of ram.

It was enough for most gaming needs of that time, 

but there were lot of expansions around too,

the most common one was the 512k ram trap door expansion, to get a full mb of memory.

 Then there were those expansive solution, the CPU accelerators.

The HardItal BigBang is a 68030 CPU + 68882 MMU accellerator with 68000 mode and memory expansion capability up to 8mb.

The price of this board in 1991 was 990$, not so affordable, but ensured a faster experience thank even to its faster clock speed, 25mhz.

I was too young back then, but two days ago, 23 years after its release, 

I had the luck to get one,

and this is what i did to my Amiga before installing the accelerator.

One of todays goodies of using an Amiga its WhdLoad, this software enables the installation of most amiga games, btw it requires at least 1mb of chip memory and some games needs a new "super denise" chip too.

So I did a "Full-ECS" mod, swapping the old denise with the new one and "tricking" the amiga to use trapdoor slow ram as extra chip mem.

(this can be done only on rev. 6a since it got a 8372a Agnus 1mb capable)

Then, after fixing some broken pins in the accelerator, i plugged it...

It simply works!

the left switch is to enable the 2mb of board ram

the right switch is to enable the 68030 mode.

This is what i understood about the pin on top of the board:

_ _  <- must be placed to enable the board.

_ _ <- enables the 60830 

_ _ <- ?!?!?!

_ _ <- enables the onboard extra memory

_ _ <- ?!?!?! (found the right pin connected to the left one of the connectors above) 

And this is what i understoon about the ram dipswitches:

(on stands for pressed on the left side)

2mb zip rams:

9 on

8 off

7 off

6 off

5 on

4 on

3 off

2 on

1 on

4mb zip rams:

9 on

8 off

7 off

6 on

5 off

4 off

3 on

2 off

1 off

Hope this could be helpful to someone else :D