richardc@sands1.swbt.com (Richard Cavin) (01/06/91)
With all this talk about the Fat Agnus Chip I decided to check out my A500. I checked inside and have the 8372A Agnus chip in my machine. The machine is an A500 with the commodore 512K add in ram expansion. I purchased the machine in the first half of 1990 new through the educational discount. Since I had the 8372A chip I tried the NTSC-PAL program to boot in PAL mode. I used the BootPal program specifically and did a warm reboot. When the workbench came back up the display was more compressed vertically and the text and icons seemed to be at a higher resolution with a different scan rate on the video (1084S monitor). I then proceeded to go through my collection of Europeon demos I have and lo and behold there was text I have never seen before at the bottom of the screen and at the top on one of the demos. Not only that the graphics were remarkably faster on a couple of the demos. I also booted several NTSC versions of Euro games in the Pal mode and they also shrunk vertically but seemed to be better resolution. On the recommendation of a friend I tried the avail command from the WB and it only showed a max of .5 meg chip ram and .5 meg of fast ram. He told me that if the chip ram was not 1 meg then I did not have the Fat Agnus? I tried the avail command in regular NTSC mode and Pal mode. The results wer identical. So could anybody tell me what I really have? Also, what are the benefits of the Fatter Agnus? If I do have it would it be advisible to get Pal versions of programs since the resolution does look better? Thanks in advance and remember I am NEW to the Amiga world. Richard