I think this is the first time I see PCMCIA RAM to speed up a Amiga.
Benchmarks would be interesting.

(IIRC, PCMCIA bus is only 16bit...)

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

Screenshot from SysInfo (bare A1200, just our prototype SRAM plugged in):

http://c0ff33.net/drop/pcmcia-sram-sysinfo2.jpg

When I have more time I'll do some more benchmarks.

Also, not very surprisingly even 16-bit PCMCIA SRAM can be faster than 32-bit Chip RAM, where Amiga chipset is the bottleneck. Of course that is only true is the card is fast enough and properly configured during boot up (appropriate Gayle registers are set according to speed settings in card's CIS).

Last edited by strim on 26-May-2014 at 07:16 AM.

It's slower than true 32-bit fast RAM, but still speeds things up over a machine with just chip RAM available, as in those machines the CPU sits there doing nothing a lot of the time.

Very interesting project! Would also be a good thing to use as a bootable drive - I have an old one I used for that - had a custom setup that I could use to boot a couple of different machines with for testing purposes.

_________________
RobTheNerd.com | InstallerGen | SMBMounter | Atoms-X

Keep in mind this card is a very low cost design and does not have a battery, so anything you put in SRAM will vanish once you turn off Amiga.

CPU speed seems a bit slow. What does SysInfo return for a bare A1200? Didn't know it couldn't compute speed to the clock.

Aww, that's a pity... Maybe there's a market for a more expensive version with a battery?

_________________
RobTheNerd.com | InstallerGen | SMBMounter | Atoms-X

Quote:

CPU speed seems a bit slow. What does SysInfo return for a bare A1200?

1.37, so 1.67 is definitely faster...

Quote:

Aww, that's a pity... Maybe there's a market for a more expensive version with a battery?

Maybe, but we couldn't afford two different versions and we wanted to keep the price as low as possible.

Nice!

is it possible to have your pcmcia ram and at the same til using an 030 card with 128mb. what would happen?

and why only 4mb ram? is it at maximum

Last edited by noXLar on 26-May-2014 at 04:05 PM.

_________________
nox's in the house!

Quote:

is it possible to have your pcmcia ram and at the same til using an 030 card with 128mb. what would happen?

You'd have 132MB Fast RAM. If you really need that .

Quote:

and why only 4mb ram? is it at maximum

It's the maximum amount Gayle chip can handle.

I get a slightly faster benchmark result using my 2MB PCMCIA SRAM card on the A600.

_________________
Amiga A1200, 3.1 ROMs, Blizzard 1230 MKIV 64MB & FPU, 4GB DoM SSD, Workbench 3.1

Just visited the website. Does the finished product have an enclosure or is it a bare PCB?

_________________
Amiga A1200, 3.1 ROMs, Blizzard 1230 MKIV 64MB & FPU, 4GB DoM SSD, Workbench 3.1

Quote:

I get a slightly faster benchmark result using my 2MB PCMCIA SRAM card on the A600.

I've got a bit better result recently too on my A1200 (1.92 MIPS), but we don't want to advertise the card as being this fast, before all tests are completed and it is proven that the card works 100% stable at this speed.

Quote:

Just visited the website. Does the finished product have an enclosure or is it a bare PCB?

We sell only bare card, as we wanted to keep the price as low as possible. The card is much shorter than normal PCMCIA card, so does not stick out of Amiga that much. Anyway, 3rd party vendor contacted us with the idea of making a case for it. So the case might be available in the future.

Sidestepping perhaps... but what is the cheapest 32bit RAM expansion for A1200?

(IIRC, 32bit fast RAM almost doubles A1200 computing speed, especially when chip RAM is saturated by AGA graphics operations)

Last edited by KimmoK on 27-May-2014 at 07:23 AM.

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

If you are asking about currently produced cards, then ACA1220, which is almost double the price of our PCMCIA card.

Last edited by strim on 27-May-2014 at 08:10 AM.
Last edited by strim on 27-May-2014 at 08:08 AM.

User's Manual (preliminary version)