RAMming the Amiga

hamster

Hi All... I have an idle chatty query about ram... in the ole Amiga...

When I got my Amiga in 1990 I got it with 512K and that xmas I upgraded it to 1Mb. I have a question and I'm pretty sure I know but I wanted to check with ye on this : Is the base 512K all chip ram or slow ram?

I'm thinking that the 512K standard expansion I got was slow ram? I already after forgetting what was so slow about slow ram.

Advancing a few years later... the A1200 had 2Mb and I guess this was all chip ram? I'm googling around for a nice article about ram in general for the Amiga but have ye come across a good detailed one?

It's great to still see Amiga sources for compilation on the net.

silverlining

Yep, the base RAM is chip RAM and the standard expansion is slow RAM. So you got 512KB chip (I almost wrote 512MB there, jesus things have changed) with the A500 and 2MB chip with the AGA series. I remember when we got the 512KB expansion for the A500, it cost £100 Irish at the time!

I'm almost certain that fast RAM is the standard PC RAM that fitted the 680020 (and upwards) accelerator cards for the A500 and the A4000 mainboard

hamster

silverlining wrote:

Yep, the base RAM is chip RAM and the standard expansion is slow RAM. So you got 512KB chip (I almost wrote 512MB there, jesus things have changed) with the A500 and 2MB chip with the AGA series. I remember when we got the 512KB expansion for the A500, it cost £100 Irish at the time!

I'm almost certain that fast RAM is the standard PC RAM that fitted the 680020 (and upwards) accelerator cards for the A500 and the A4000 mainboard

Yeah... I remember paying 90 pound for the 512K add-on for Dungeon Master that xmas (1990). Sigh! What a xmas it was... That time I got Sim City, Elite, Dungeon Master and Operation Stealth.
I got the Amiga going under "The Rainbow Pack" - Rainbow Islands, F29 Retailator, and Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monster (what a crazy title).

silverlining

my older bro got our first amiga, it wasnt in a pack but we got Mercenary, powerplay and Eliminator. Pretty crap games tbh but it didnt matter, we had a shiny big computer that used discs!
I didnt play Elite but I spent a whole year playing Frontier untill my eyes started twitching. I was a fan of the Turrican series and I still play Turrican II on my xbox but there were some other great games like Speedball II, Gravity Wars II (amiga power coverdisc50) and Beneath a Steel sky which I actually finished unlike Operation stealth that had an amazing intro but I couldnt get out of the airport lobby right at the start of the game (damn coin hidden in the newspaper vending machine).
Remember the Commodore 1084S monitor? There's one sitting beside me now that I use most days for playing xbox games which is amazing considering it's about 15 years old.
What were your favourite games? I'm looking to expand my collection

hamster

silverlining wrote:

my older bro got our first amiga, it wasnt in a pack but we got Mercenary, powerplay and Eliminator. Pretty crap games tbh but it didnt matter, we had a shiny big computer that used discs!
I didnt play Elite but I spent a whole year playing Frontier untill my eyes started twitching. I was a fan of the Turrican series and I still play Turrican II on my xbox but there were some other great games like Speedball II, Gravity Wars II (amiga power coverdisc50) and Beneath a Steel sky which I actually finished unlike Operation stealth that had an amazing intro but I couldnt get out of the airport lobby right at the start of the game (damn coin hidden in the newspaper vending machine).
Remember the Commodore 1084S monitor? There's one sitting beside me now that I use most days for playing xbox games which is amazing considering it's about 15 years old.
What were your favourite games? I'm looking to expand my collection

I loved the 3D Construction Kit and Turrican II... and Pinball fantasties. I never got a monitor though

silverlining

hamster wrote:

I loved the 3D Construction Kit and Turrican II... and Pinball fantasties. I never got a monitor though

We wouldnt have dreamed of getting a monitor either but a school was going to throw it out to make way for PCs so we got our hands on it. I was stupid enough to buy a secondhand CD32 though which was the first 32-bit games console but fell way short of the psone and dreamcast's 3d graphics so it died pretty quickly. Also bought a secondhand A1200 with 12MB internal harddrive but just used it for games in the end.
My biggest amiga boast was the A4000T that we got for free. It had a '060 accelerator card and a picasso graphics card and we got it for a small company that was using SCALA for presentations. The tower arrived and then two weeks later another tower arrived but there was no mention of the first tower so we waited a few months and then decided to keep it! (dont worry the only people who got stung were those EMCEE rip-off merchants and I think they deserved it for keeping the cost of computer equipment out of the reach of most Irish people) I sold the accelerator card to somebody in UL after a few years and I think the tower is out on the Aran Islands now. I'd like to see it again and fire up workbench