 
ACA 630
Accelerator Card for Amiga 600
- CPU 68030 @ 25 MHz
- 32 MB RAM
- MapROM function
- PCMCIA-friendly
- Sophisticated mechanical mounting
The ACA630 is an accelerator card for the Amiga 600
that achieves a surprisingly high performance despite its
relatively low CPU clock. The reason for this is the
extremely fast memory on the card: 32 MB SD-RAM
(64 MB SD-RAM on the 30 MHz version)
with ultra fast CPU connection. The memory access on the
ACA630 is about 24% faster than the memory access of
an Amiga 3000 running at the same CPU clock.
To achieve such outstanding performance, the memory
is clocked at double speed and there's no FPU option.
In real life use cases the gain is much higher than the
potential loss, there are hardly any applications that
make good use of an FPU anyway. The ACA630 was designed
for practical use, i.e. games and Workbench applications
that need good integer performance. And that's where
the ACA630 scores. Big time.
The ACA630 goes new ways in regard to mounting and
cooling. The card is fixed to the A600 mainboard with
two screws. The aluminium heat sink on top of the card
also serves as the mounting space for a mass storage device,
preferrably some Flash-based solution. A "real"
hard disk drive would produce too much heat, but it
wouldn't fit into the A600 due to space constraints
anyway.
The ACA630 gets along nicely with other expansions that
may be installed in your A600: despite the limited space, a
A603 or
A604 Chipmem expansion
and a
Indivision ECS flickerfixer
fit into the case together with the ACA630.
In case you removed the internal floppy disk drive in favour
of the A603/Indivision ECS combination, the ACA630 offers two ways to
shorten the delay at startup. You can either set the "NoDisk"
jumper to disable the FDD completely, or you set the
"BootSel" jumper to make an external FDD act as
"df0:" drive (including the ability to run games and
demos from there).
There are also several nifty optimization options "under the
hood" that you can tweak conveniently with the ACAtune tool:
The MAPROM function allows to copy the contents of the Kickstart ROM
(256k, 512k or 1MB) to FastMem and use it like a normal ROM. This
speeds up most operations significantly since large parts of the
OS are located in the Kickstart ROM. The MAPROM function is similar to the
FASTROM option offered by the Amiga OS CPU command, but the
ACA630 card needs no MMU to achieve this. So in case the MMU is used for
other tasks, there is no conflict.
Re-Kick: Similar to MAPROM, a Kickstart ROM image is
stored in FastMem. The difference is that Re-Kick copies a file
and not the contents of an actual ROM to FastMem. After a reboot
the new Kickstart is available and it even survives a reset.
C0Mem: Simulates an Amiga 500 memory expansion of
1 MByte or 512k. Some games and programs need those exact
configurations to run and would not work with the large amount
of memory available in the system. Thanks to this option your A600
is compatible to games that would not work without the accelerator.
If you have some very, very incompatible software that doesn't
even run with all the compatibility options the ACA630 offers,
the card may also be disabled entirely.
FastChip: This option allows faster access to the ChipMem (video memory)
of the accelerated Amiga. Please note that this is a tuning
option that may not work with every A600 mainboard or every
ChipMem expansion, respectively.
FastZ2: This option speeds up PCMCIA memory access.
Similiar to the FastChip option, there may be certain setups that
can't cope with the acceleration. It is a tuning option that must
be checked in each individual case and that may need to be
turned off in case of doubt.
ChipCache: Typically, data stored in ChipMem is not
available for CPU caching, because it can cause crashes. There
are certain circumstances that may allow cache for ChipMem, but
this should be considered a tuning option for experts and not be
messed with by mere mortals. ;-)
Z2Cache: This option allows the activation of CPU cache for
PCMCIA memory cards.
NoFastMem: Allows to turn fast 32-bit memory on the accelerator
off. This will slow your computer down, so software that doesn't
run well on an accelerated Amiga can be used again.
The last downgrade option is to limit the amount of available
ChipMem: games or applications that crash with larger amounts of
ChipMem can be made to run again reducing the ChipMem size to
1 MB or even 512k.
Detail shots of an ACA 630 mounted in an Amiga 600:
For more details, please have a look at the
User Manual PDF (828.5K).
Please note: The ACA 630 does not work with A300 boards!
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