Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!oliveb!sun!pepper!cmcmanis
From: cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: 512K expansion for A500
Message-ID: <47622@sun.uucp>
Date: 30 Mar 88 22:39:37 GMT
References: <3054@gryphon.CTS.COM>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 42

In article <3054@gryphon.CTS.COM> (Bill Daggett) writes:
|cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) writes:
|>Ahh but when you slip that new agnus chip in and swap that jumper, and 
|>your system boots up and says "980,684 bytes Chip RAM available" you
|>are going to love each and every bit of it. It is at this point that
|>I will consider getting a 500 or 2500 because I will see an improvement
|>over my 1000. 
|
|I still won't upgrade.  Not until I pick up an application software package I
|want and it won't run on the A1000.  Everyone seems to be jumping the gun by
|even thinking their A1000's are obsolete.  And as far as chip upgrades go,
|don't forget that a couple third parties offer Kickstart in ROM and internal
|RAM for the A1000 - CBM wouldn't touch.  My guess is if there is a way to
|keep the A1000 upgraded with the same chips the A500 (at least) has a third
|party WILL make some bucks doing it.

There may indeed be a third party upgrade of sorts. With C/A's propensity 
for laying out motherboards I wonder sometimes if they couldn't just layout
a new motherboard for the 1000 with out the KS tower. But you miss the 
real feature of 1Meg of chip ram. 

It isn't time to upgrade when any one program needs more than 512K chip,
it's when *you* need more than 512K of chip. At one time I had 6 Meg on 
my 1000, and when I did it was great for big ram disks but it was useless
when it came to running 4, 5, or 6 programs that opened their own screen.
I like to have DPaint, Emacs, Workbench CLIs, and the program under 
development open at the same time. Assuming I am designing icons/images
with Dpaint (which I am usually doing) it is running in 640 X 200 X {2,3}
mode. That's 32 - 48K for Dpaint, (another 32- 48K if something is in the
spare screen), 32K for the Emacs 640X400X1 screen, 64K for the Workbench
screen (640X400X2) and 40K for disk buffers, 100K for intuition/exec, etc
it adds up and faster than you might expect. Suddenly with 4Meg of ram
free my AllocMem()'s start failing because I can't get any chip ram.
Not fun at all. 1 Meg of chip Ram will make the system much more usable
for me. My formula is that you can support a 1:5 ration between chip/fast
ram. With 512K of chip that's 2.5Meg of Fast ram, with 1Meg chip thats 5Meg
of fast. 2Meg chip, 10Meg fast. Anything else is wasted (in my opinion)



--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: cmcmanis  ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.