Two days ago I received my very own "FuriaEC020" accelerator that was made in Slovakia by Boris Krizma (the guy who built the other accelerator that I own Furia S628).
The accelerator is a beast having:
An MC68EC020 CPU overclocked @ 33.33MHz
An 68882 FPU
9.5MB of total Fast RAM
32bit access
Features that can be enabled/disabled via software tool like ACA's ACATune named FuriaTune
This is how the accelerator looks
As the previous time, I also supported Boris with this accelerator and he again kindly put my name as well in the PCB :O
The accelerator is really well made and as you see it has a nice screws with base that prevents it from getting bent from weight. It also has a really firm socket that clips on the 68k CPU and also has lovely heatsinks both for the CPLD and the 68EC020 CPU.
To follow the whole original thread on AmigaPortal.cz follow this link.
Also you can download FuriaTune plus check more informational info in the dedicated webpage located in the following link.
Enough for the long talk... Time for some pr0n :)
And ofc no review can be made without the appropriate screenshots from SysInfo.
This is the ShowConfig output from OS3.9
And one last output but this time from ShowBoard of the new Boards.library that is also updated with Boboo's hardware ID for FuriaEC020.
Last but not least, I'm putting a YouTube link of a quick video that I made just some hours ago that shows a bit of the accelerator working on my spare A600.
You can download my SysSpeed modules from here if you want to make a comparison with your own accelerators:
As I said in previous articles, my ACA630 was unable to operate stable @ 40MHz alas I putted an oscillator of 72MHz to have a speed of 36MHz. I always wanted to try an 75MHz so I bought one from a fellow Amigan (altcomputing) which arrived yesterday :)
After replacing my former 72MHz oscillator and putting the new 75MHz one... Amiga booted just fine so I tried first some benchmarks via latest version of SysInfo...
Then I also checked the Disk speed which was rather nice!!! 2.6MB/s is not bad for native mode.
Last but not least... I had to enabled MMU in order to run WhichAmiga which you can see bellow
I was really glad with the results but now I had to test if this was going to be stable as the 72MHz oscillator. After 3 hours of keeping the Amiga running Modules, MP3s, putting it online and Send/receiving emails from YAM, taking screenshots as PNG etc... SYSTEM is stable and running smoothly!
So... I didn't get the full 40MHz clockage but 37.5MHz is rather fine :D
Since I saw that the default heatsink of ACA was getting rather hot... I decided to re-attach the 40x40x10 ultrasilent FAN but with the minor alteration of raising it a bit for better airflow.
I used some small nuts that I glued with thermal gluing paste (like the ones that use on the Voodoo's Heatsink) and after that, I glued the nuts with thermal gluing paste on ACA as well :)
As always I take a full picture of the whole setup just for reference along with the old Eizo F35 CRT monitor that works awesomely well :)
Well that's it for now. Soon I'll make some more videos testing some neat Internet applications like VNC, FTP etc so stay tuned :)
I've been tinkering a lot my A600's environment all this time plus making some efforts for my GREX 4000 but that will come in a different article in the following weeks.
So... hardware-wise I ordered an full ceramic MC68030@50MHz CPU from Amibay having the latest mask in order to replace my ACA's plastic MC68030@33MHz.
Not a big deal but I had to try :)
I removed the old CPU, putted the new one and this is how it looked without the heatsink on.
I used the 80MHz oscillator that I had, in case I managed to use it @ 40MHz and system booted just fine.
I also made some nice benchmarks etc... but after 3-4 minutes system crashed so I can say with certainty that on my accelerator 40MHz overclocking is not an option.
I changed the oscillator to an 72MHz one (thanks to Fitzsteve who send me one spare of his) and it worked like a charm! After hours of keeping my A600 on... I NEVER had a single crash or Guru!!! \o/
Not bad having an 15% speed increase by all means :)
If in the future I manage to find an 75MHz oscillator I will try that as well in case it works and that's it.
Btw... EVEN after many hours... the original heatsink (that I re-attached with a new thermal pad) gets only a bit warm. With the previous CPU even @ 30MHz the heatsink was very hot alas I had put a fan for safety. Now @ 36MHz hot is not an issue and ofc I removed the fan as it had no meaning :)
Some of the new stuff I tinkered on my Workbench installation was to install PeterK's 46.4.279 icon.library which give a nice 15-20% speed increase from what I can tell. Really shows nicely when I open PNG etc icons but I will let you be the judge of that :)
I also made some changes in the VisualPrefs skins and settings plus I also installed X-bEnCH and made some nice changes in scripts/startup-scripts and custom BMenu entries to support it.
To conclude this article...this is a new video that I put today on YouTube that has a small revision of what my system boots and acts like. I hope you like it :)
(I suggest you to see it on YouTube's website and change the resolution to 720p as I uploaded it in HD for better viewing).
After spending some time fiddling around with my A600's custom ClassicWB that it took quite an effort to make it good for my needs, I couldn't help it by wanting to even more beef my beloved Amiga.
All may know that my most beloved OS is OS3.9 but sadly, all my previous efforts into installing OS3.9 to my 030 A600 wasn't so nice for my taste.
It works, and it works well, but GlowIcons plus 16 colors WB (even in 640x512) isn't as responsive as I would like. That was the reason for sticking with ClassicWB Full in the first place anyway :)
So... I thought about giving one more try to ClassicWB 3.9 but customizing as much as I could to make it more responsive for my taste.
Ok... this is what ClassicWB 3.9 looks like when you install it to an ECS system with 16 colors at a resolution of 640x512 (PAL Hi-Res Laced).
And this is when you change it 8 colors... Yeah I know it sux a bit, but just wait a bit more :)
That's more like it! Changing screenmode to SuperPlus (800x600) with some nice backdrop, changed via ImageStudio to MWB palette.
This is the default GlowIcons iconset before doing anything...
And this is the same, but this time using PeterK's icon.library that supports except from ALL icons even on WB3.0 systems, fast decoding even on PNG icons with it's embedded decoder! (not datatype related!)
It's not such a huge difference, but you can see some shadow differences if you compare it side by side.
Last but not least... AND THIS WAS THE HARDEST PART, was to replace WHOLE iconset of OS3.9 to the one that I made for my previous custom environment based on MagicWB icons!!!
Seems a bit weird at first seeing MWB icons and an 8 colors palette for an OS3.9 system but who cares?
Check also on the following screenshots the replacement of Amidock with the more lightweight and looking AWESOME for small icons ToolManager.
You can see in the following screenshot, some version checks from my custom Kickstart 3.9 that loads via ACA's MapROM feature.
Just to praize a bit of PeterK's work, I thought of doing one more screenshot checking out some DualPNG, and OS4.1 MasonIcons, as well as some older NewIcons and GlowIcons through his AWESOME library.
Don't want to sound too excited, but the system was responsive as a rocket! Boots just fine and rebootless due to custom kickstart, and it blazingly fast, giving the expresion that you might have an 040 underneath (LOL). Icon loading is superb and overall I'm TOO excited about this system which is from now on my ONLY system that I use on this A600.
I'm attaching a really quick teaser video just to understand where all my excitement comes from :)
More updates and info will come in the future as atm I'm still fiddling around with what more stuff to put in this OS :)
Apart from that, despite owning one of the few ACA630@30MHz and 64MB of RAM, I couldn't help wanting to beef a bit more the CPU clockage but not to extreme levels as I know that it would push the memory beyond specc.
So this is my beasty ACA with it's default 60MHz oscillator giving 30MHz speed to my Amiga. It's a small square oscillator but Jens putted both square and rectangle oscillator support to the PCB layout as you can see bellow.
It just needs a bit of careful unsoldering...
And mounting the socket carefully into place :)
And that's about it \o/ On the following example I used for fun despite knowing that it probably won't work... an 80MHz oscillator sent to me by Zetr0.
System booted just fine... and Workbench loaded!!! I was WTF? time to fire up some SysInfo for benchmarking... and Whoa!!!
I was about to cry from joy and when I realized that system crashed a bit after getting back to Workbench :(
I tried a restart but then system refused to boot.
I waited some minutes and system booted just fine again, but after 2 mins it crashed once more... Ok I expected that tbh, so I didn't try it more. It was definitely going beyond specc and I couldn't do anything about it.
Then came Stachu100 to the rescue with a free 66MHz oscillator that he sent me as a gift :)
Once putting the oscillator on... I had a feeling he was a keeper!
System booted just fine, and SysInfo was fired up once more... This time with a bit worse results as normal, but better than the stock 30MHz one.
I left the Amiga playing modules via EaglePlayer for about 1.5 hour without a single glitch!!! Yey!
After that I run my MMU support script and voila some new results (lower than before but this is typical as it was the same in my previous 3.1 ClassicWB setup)
Still awesome though, now that MMU was working I could also fire up WhichAmiga for some leet infos :)
Since MMU is on (on request) I can also run my ShapeShifter setup with Indy support that works just fine but will show on another time on a full video presentation.
