Amiga500: Lazarustorm/PiStorm vs ACA500plus

The original Amiga 500 is a great machine, but its 7MHz CPU is a bit slow at times and the 512K of base memory quite limited. We take a look at two accelerator cards that increase the CPU speed significantly and also bring a large amount of extra memory to the table. All the while these cards don’t require you to open up your A500, but instead they fit on the expansion slot on the left side of the Amiga, making the process very easy and reversible. Let’s take a look at the PiStorm based Lazarustorm and the Individual Computers’ ACA500plus.
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Music: A Little Wonder by Spino2006
Lazarustorm: github.com/arananet/LAZARUSTORM
PiStorm: github.com/captain-amygdala/p...
ACA500plus: icomp.de/shop-icomp/de/shop/p...
0:00 Introduction & Explanation
15:13 ACA500plus Setup
20:06 ACA500plus Benchmark
24:25 ACA500plus Stealth Mode
26:16 Kickstart 3.1 Issues
31:18 Lazarustorm Benchmark
37:30 Comparison and Closing Words

[@ConradVassallo]

Thanks for sharing the video. I actually have both solutions on hand. Initially, I bought the Lazarus for Pistorm, but I couldn't get it to work with my rev5 A500. The instructions weren't clear to me when I purchased it, and I didn't realize I needed to add the 7Mhz clock signal to the expansion port. All I found was that it wasn't compatible with rev5 boards. Your video clarified things for me, so now I can switch between the two solutions as I like. Thanks again for the helpful tip!

[@root42]

You’re welcome! To be fair, the Lazarustorm is a bit obscure and not very well documented.

[@chainq68k]

Also one more thing about the 8MiB RAM limit you say and you try to combine it with chip RAM... - there's no such thing. The address space of any Amiga that uses the 68000 is 24 bit (16MiB) and in that address space you can have up to 8MiB _continuous_ Fast RAM, in the Zorro II expansion range from $00200000 to $009FFFFF. In addition, there's up to 2MB chip RAM possible, at the start of the address space, from $00000000 to $001FFFFF. There are also smaller "holes" of the address space, where additional RAM is possible, for example the a range from $00C00000, which is reserved for the 512KiB trapdoor expansion (usually), but actually up to 1MiB here can be used. So that's 9MiB of Fast RAM already, and we still did not take Chip RAM into account... There isn't really a hard limit, but there might be diminishing returns trying to use every small block that would be possible, really. On the Amiga 600, the ACA620 can map up to 10.8MiB of Fast RAM into the 24bit address space - plus 2MiB chip RAM is possible, on top of that. I have no experience with the ACA500, but i _think_ what you see, is a bunch of Fast RAM eaten up by disk buffers. Amiga filesystems can be quite obnoxious with RAM requirements, especially when used with large media. I see the installer copying over PFS3, not sure if that was used, but both that and FFS can eat up megabytes of RAM for buffers easily. This can be controlled in HDToolBox though, and reduced (on the expense of losing some performance).

[@o.kiryukhin]

Good, good)😊

[@xantam23]

Maybe you could add an A314-cp to the ACA to get Wi-Fi. Costs around 35€ + a Pi Zero2 W.

[@root42]

Sounds intriguing. But the Zero2 sounds like overkill. A Pico W should be sufficient for networking and is way cheaper.

[@root42]

Just looked it up. That’s way more features than I need. :) I really wonder why there isn’t a Pico W network card for Amigas yet. Wish I knew more about hardware design! :)

[@naib_stilgar]

A plipbox to get the amiga online is both very inexpensive and easy to build. Cheers!

[@root42]

Looking for something WiFi… maybe someone will do a Pico based card next. The MS DOS world now has extremely inexpensive Pi Pico based NE2000 emulation that connects to WiFi. I guess something similar would be possible for the Amiga.

[@chainq68k]

@@root42 I do have a Pico W based WiFi card design for the Amiga parallel port ready for months, that even emulates the PlipBox pinout for easy driver porting, but I was so busy with family and work over the past year, that I just can't seem to find that week of a deep(-ish) focus time I'd probably need to push it over the finish line. But it's really not rocket science indeed. It literally only need a Pico W and two level shifters, plus some firmware stuff ported over from PlipBox. There. The "idea" (quite obvious, really) is out there. Maybe someone will be able to do it, if I can't find that time...

[@root42]

Well, that sounds amazing! Even if you yourself can’t bring it to completion.

[@naib_stilgar]

@@chainq68k I would love to see this happen so I can build one!

[@chainq68k]

Pi 4 is supported, Pi 5 won't ever be (most likely) because its GPIO functionality is behind a PCIe slot, and while PCIe has amazing bandwidth, it has appalling latency, and PiStorm needs low latency to be able to react to the 68k bus in time.

[@root42]

I wonder why they went with PCIe for the Pi5. It’s nice to have for peripherals, but the GPIO was always a way to have low latency IO more or less directly wired to the CPU. Maybe the successor to the Pico will be more powerful and become a valid alternative… perhaps not on the performance level of a Zero2, but good enough for emulating a quite fast 68040…

[@amirpourghoureiyan1637]

Did seem like they crammed too much on the Pi5, sucks that the GPIO isn't direct anymore but their priorities seem to be consolidating the hardware with main chipsets and supporting newer peripherals with PCIe to get them more in line with rivals. Guess the Pi4 is good enough to get nearly everything done on the Amiga but it would've been nice to have the option to explore more with the Pi5.