Subject: MINI-REVIEW: Derringer accelerator board for A500
From: [email-masked] (Dean Paul Karpowicz)
Date: 26 Jan 1993 17:55:33 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

PRODUCT NAME

	Derringer accelerator board

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

	This is a 68030 accelerator board for the Amiga 500.  This
mini-review concentrates on the board installation and briefly describes the
performance.

COMPANY INFORMATION

	Name:		Computer Systems Associates (CSA)
	Address:	7564 Trade St.
			San Diego, CA 92121
			USA
	Telephone:	(619) 566-3911
	Tech Hotline:	(619) 566-3923

MINI-REVIEW

	I bought the Derringer 030 in the first week of January 1993, and
installed it.  The installation manual is poorly written.  It's three pages
photocopied double-sided with no photos.

	I installed it on the Amiga 500 Rev. 6a.  The first part of the
installation manual has you opening the case of the A500 and removing the
68000 chip.  After you put the chip into the Derringer 030, the manual has
some faults.  It tells you to seat the board with "moderate" pressure into
the 68000 socket on the motherboard.  However, I needed to use extreme
pressure.  I had to lean on the butt of a screwdriver to push it all the way
down.

	The small plastic pins that they give you to put under the far end
of the board are about half as long as they are supposed to be.  Therefore
the board wants to rock out of the socket from its own weight.  I used the
rubber plugs from the ends of a bicycle handlebar.  After I used those, I
found the right size spacer at work.

	I also used a SMALL drop of superglue at the corners of where the
socket and header come together.  I figured this will keep the board from
coming out of the socket and can be easily broken apart if it needs to be.

	The instructions then say to replace the shielding (ha ha hee hee,
nice try).  The shielding will fit, but it is tight, and the Derringer 030
will short to the shield.  I tried several pieces of electrical tape, but
the pressure of squeezing the shield back on broke through the tape.  I
ended up using a small piece of black plastic sheeting that I taped to the
underside of the shield.  Leaving the shield off will not alleviate this
problem, for the back of the keyboard has metal shielding as well.

	Enough about the installation.  Let's get to the performance.  I
purchased the Derringer 030 with the optional 50Mhz 68882, and it came with
4 MB of 32bit RAM.  There is a software program included to remap the
Kickstart ROM, add the 32-bit RAM to the system, and move the exception
vectors and supervisor stack to 32-bit RAM.  The "-res" part of the command
unfortunately doesn't work with my hard drive.  It's supposed to make the
32-bit RAM available early in a warm boot, speeding things up even more.

	The performance stats from AIBB are very close to an A3000.  Some
tests are faster, but some are slower.  The results are generally 6 to 100
times faster than a stock A500 depending on the tests being run.  I use
Pagestream a lot, and the performance gain there is incredible.  Pages that
took seemingly forever to print now are printing almost immediately.  Using
POVRay to render a scene before took 24-28 hours; the same scene now takes
less than 10 minutes.

	My system is an A500 Rev 6a, GVP A500-HD+ w/ 52meg Quantum and 4 MB
RAM, AmigaDOS 2.1, standard Denise, and 1 MB Agnus (board hacked).  I haven't
seen the problems that have been stated here on netland (video shifted, black
screens, etc.).  So far the system has been rock solid, and I am very excited
about using my new toy.

Dean Paul Karpowicz
[email-masked]

---

   Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews
   Send reviews to:	[email-masked]
   Request information:	[email-masked]
   Moderator mail:	[email-masked]