5 Jul
2001
5 Jul
'01
8:40 a.m.
Similarly, the RAM may be hideously slow, but at least
it uses SIMMs. Getting
hold of ZIPs is a bloody pain in the neck (are there any list members out
there who happen to have any to spare? =).
I remember a review for the DKB Rapidfire SCSI board a number
of years back. It had 72pin SIMM sockets onboard and one of the
points that the reviewer made was that as slow as the A4000's RAM
was, unbeleivably the Rapidfire's RAM was even slower. The Rapidfire
is a 16bit ZII card. I did use one to add cheap SCSI capability to
my A4000 though and you could mount a drive directly to the board
itself if you lacked additional drive space.
The A1200 is common, but it is essentially a closed
architecture. Unless
you're adventurous and put it in a tower with a slot card and all that, but it
still turns out as a mediocre imitation of a real big-box machine. Still,
given a PCI backplane, it turns out a rather cheap solution compared to a
similarly equipped Zorro Amiga.
It amazes me how expensive the later Amiga's still are,
especially the newer A1200's and 4000's. Do people still pay those
kind of prices for the 'new' ones?
run new software, though I'm not familiar with EGA
myself. Didn't it deviate
somewhat from the usual WB look? ISTR screenshots in mags with gadgets which
seemed to come from a Motif system.
Other than looking better on the higher resolution screen, I
don't recall EGS changing the look of the WB at all. Maybe the
screenshots were using varous WB enhancers such as Magic WB and MUI?
I didn't know that the Spectrum was a ZIII board,
and thought it was very
similar to the Picasso II in performance. I run a Retina ZIII myself, and
while it doesn't put up much of a match against newer boards, it is competent
enough. Certainly better than the PII.
Yeah, it's ZIII. It is autosensing with a jumper to force it
to use ZII if needed for compatibility purposes. It only has 2meg of
VRAM though vice the 4meg on other later boards. I've always heard
good things about the Retina boards, but have never used one.
BTW, you do have a CD-ROM, don't you?
Yes, multiple SCSI drives around here. I even have an older
version of AmiCDFS here somewhere.
Jeff
--
Collector of Classic Microcomputers and Video Game Systems:
Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757