Subject: REVIEW: Microbotics VXL 68030 Card
From: [email-masked] (David Gilbert)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

First thing I'll say is... wow! $429 cdn (Electronics 2001, Toronto).  This
little card is a 68EC030 (optional full 030) at 25Mhz.  It has a socket for
math (although it's PLCC), and attachments for 32bit ram.

THE PACKAGE, AND INSTALLATION OF SAID.
    Well... documentation is sparse... three sheets of 8.5X11 paper... but I
don't think they could have written much more without getting too verbose.
The installation of the card is easy, but they used the type of socket that
consists of little round holes surrounded by little beads of plastic.  I had
trouble getting the 68000 into them as they could be a micron wider... :)...
Actually, my 68000 was not in good enough shape to fit into the card, so I
installed my 68010 instead.  The card didn't seem to mind.  I'll probably pick
up a 68000 at the Commodore show in December... they're usually about $7!

FIRST IMPRESSION.
	Holy boot time batman!  Damn thing booted before the monitor warmed up!
..even floppy access is faster.

CURRENT SYSTEM.
	-Microbotics 68030@25Mhz - no ram - no math
	-GVP series II hd w/ 105meg 19ms drive.
	-4.5meg of ram (1meg chip) on ICD board.
	-original IBM XT power supply ($30!!!)

WHAT IS IT, DAMN IT!?!
	There was some confusion among programs as to what the darn thing was!
Xoper thought it was a 68020/68881!  GVP's little system thing correctly
identified the 68030 with inactive MMU, but it let me look at all the 
non-existent MMU registers anyways!  It also was under the impression that
both caches were always on, but you can check it out correctly using the
cache control register query.  SetCPU, and SetVXL (both included with the
package) identified everything correctly, and performed predictably!

THE FIRST GURU!
	Well, all was not right in Amigaland last night.  I tried turning on the
data cache, and neither my HD or any of my software seemed to have any problem
with it.  So: I put it into my startup sequence!  What a spectacular crash!
AdRAM (included with the ICD RAM thingie) was under the impression that I had
ram all over the place!  It started adding ram that I never knew I had 
(ended up with about 10 meg I figure!)... anyways... it turns out that it's
having the data cache on that confuses this little program... so the fix is
to have SetVXL (or SetCPU) after AdRAM in your startup sequence.  There is,
by the way, no physical conflict between the AdRAM daughter board for the Gary,
and the VXL 30 board.

OVERALL...
	Compile time of TeX went from 30mins to 7mins, but Manx's asm crashed
on the last file (where it didn't before...) with a pointer out of range... 
I'll have to talk to Manx about this.  Professional Page zips along, and
floppies seem to have a perceptible speed increase of icon display.  LHArc was
pleasing, but I just can't wait for LZ now!

LEMMINGS...!
	You probably did a double-take at this last heading... well it just has
to be said that Lemmings works better with an '030!  No, it doesn't run at
speed 78... (that could be fun!)  But it does load faster, and the pauses
between screens are almost instantaneous!  And... when you nuke 'em... they
blow up faster!  Hat's off to Psygnosis for creating a game that works
well on another processor!  (and I'm not talking '286 trash, either!)

Documentation: 		B
Software: 		B+
Hardware: 		A
Cost: 			A+
Overall:  		A+

Dave.
-- 
David C. L. Gilbert                        |   Something witty should here.   |
[email-masked]                        |                                  |
[email-masked]          |-->Only Amiga makes it possible   |
    Environment Canada                     |                                  |