Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!sco!gorn!ucscc!filbo
From: filbo@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us (Bela Lubkin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: speeding up the amiga and hardware hacking
Message-ID: <140.filbo@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us>
Date: 11 Jan 90 02:27:19 GMT
References: <697@tau.sm.luth.se>
Organization: R Pentomino
Lines: 32
X-Claimer: I >am< R Pentomino!

In article <697@tau.sm.luth.se> Karl-Gunnar Hultland writes:
>contact and a switch to XCLK enable and thus get a FASTER amiga.
>If this works it would give faster custom chips too, and I'd like
>that very much.

I've asked about this before (not here) and never gotten a good answer.
I'd like to hear from the real hardware gurus on this.  Obviously many
components of the system will not stand up to being sped significantly;
yet, as with most electronics, you could probably get another 20-30% out
of it.

There is a MAJOR side-effect: you speed up the video timing.  This means
that your video output will not work on anything but a specialized
monitor or a multisync (and then only if it covers the right range of
scan rates).  This also means that the pixels and lines are closer
together -- you might be able to increase the screen size (and keep the
scan rates down), but I suspect there are too many hard limits in the
video chips to do too much along those lines.

It would be very easy to test the idea.  Make an external clock box and
go for it.  I think you can actually get variable-speed crystals if you
want to spend a significant amount of money; you could experiment with a
large continuous range of speeds.

There's enough chance of damaging hardware to say: BE CAREFUL!

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