chuck@UMBC1.UMBC.EDU ("Chuck Rickard; ", PC) (05/09/89)
I just installed an accelerator board called the "JATO Board" in my ST... I have to say that it isn't as thrilling as one might expect, but the price is hard to beat. For $99.95, you get a 68000-12 microprocessor withg a little board attached to the top with wires going to a switch and an LED indicator light. Installation is simple. All you do is unsolder your old 68000 and solder the included socket in place. Place the new processor in the socket, mount the switch and LED, and then your ready to rock & roll! This upgrade will speed up applications requiring alot of computations, but for some reason doesn't speed up PC_Ditto at all. (I got an SI rating of .3 with and without it) From what I hear, the other board for $400 dollars gets the same benchmark results (The Turbo16 board). Whatever happened to the Turbo ST board? Last I heard, the guy was trying to get the video to work. The previous two boards run at 8mhz external and 16mhz internal, so my guess is that he is trying to get an external 16mhz system to work. This type of mod would truly speed up the ST, but would require a heck of alot of soldering and jumpers! Chuck Rickard UMBC Academic Computing Reply to: <CHUCK@UMBC>
hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) (05/09/89)
I played with the Datafree board for a few minutes while at the MACE Atari Expo this weekend. Timed a few operations in ARC521 running under Gulam. There was only about an 8% speedup using the ARC (T)est command, which decompresses a file but performs no write operations. Unfortunately, these times are a little suspect - the machine they had was a 520ST with 4MB of RAM installed, and slow memory clearing code. There was quite a long delay between issuing a command to Gulam and actually seeing notes from ARC. Perhaps things would have looked better if they had used a Mega... Just as an aside, I picked up TurboST 1.4 as well. Finally got support in there for the small system fonts, so I can use 50 line mode in Gulam with it. (Yeah!) Wayne BuckHoldt (the author) was there showing off some Very Quick graphics demos. Looks like he's going to rewrite all of Line-A by the time the next release comes out. Kind of sad, me with a Mega and hardware blitter, and a bit of software leaves it in the dust... Sigh. -- -=- PrayerMail: Send 100Mbits to holyghost@father.son[127.0.0.1] and You Too can have a Personal Electronic Relationship with God!