Review of G-Force 030 Combo  by Eric Fraser  ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| This is primarily a review of the new GVP 68030 based combo board for the Amiga 2000. However I will also be talking about some general information about accelerators. The unit I bought is the 25 Megahertz one with a 68882 FPU installed. It comes with 1 Megabyte of RAM as standard.  What is an accelerator? It's an electronic circuit board which takes over from the normal CPU (processing unit), namely the Motorola 68000. It runs much faster than a standard Amiga (7.5 times faster in my case). Why have one? Because it does things quicker. What sort of things? I'll answer that later. Why get this particular accelerator? For a number of reasons - Firstly, it's not just an accelerator. You also get extra RAM - 32 bit RAM at that (which means it's very fast). With the board I got you can get up to 13 Megabytes of RAM in SIMM32 modules of either 1 or 4 Meg. The G-Force also comes with a SCSI controller and (optionally) a 68882 FPU which is a very useful chip for maths intensive programs. Another reason for getting the GVP model was its name - GVP have a solid reputation for good, fast and reliable gear. OK, so I figured I needed this model because I wanted extra RAM for some large programs, I wanted an accelerator because I'm interested in graphics (especially fractals) and DTP and also I'd be getting a hard disk soon so I needed the SCSI controller. Also, with this card you can buy an optional bracket to hang a hard drive off. This helps if you want to save your expansion slots for other things. The model I finally decided on was the 25 MHz one with a 68882 FPU (that speed is an intermediate one for an accelerator). Well, I sent the cheque off and was very impressed to receive the unit within a couple of days (from Megadisc, in fact - good work Tim). It came in a nice large box well padded with styrofoam. Ripping it open found me the board in an antistatic bag, a manual of some 130 pages and a 3.5" disc with various programs.  The Manual The manual is a ring bound affair with a useful index at the back. It sets out clearly, with plenty of diagrams, how to configure the board for your system. This is needed for those people with more than 9 Meg of RAM (!!!!) and for those with a hard drive who wish to autoboot. You can also change the clock speed of the FPU, if you have an extra crystal to do this, but that's a little technical for me and also probably unnecessary.  Installation The next section tells you how to mount the board and, if you have one, the hard drive. Again plenty of useful diagrams are provided. As I don't yet have a hard drive I won't comment on its installation instructions. The board installation is perhaps a little trickier than they said. Basically the board runs from the front of the A2000 case to the back. The way the manual says it is that you slide the board in a plastic channel at the front, push down and presto you're up and running. Well it wasn't quite that easy as the board seemed a shade long and there was no way it would fit without having a large bend (break?) in it. Luckily there is a long through bolt on the Amiga case which can be slackened off to provide that extra bit of room.  Screwed So the board was in. But to secure it you're supposed to replace the two small screws which you removed from a blanking plate at the back of the Amiga into the board. Guess what? The rotten thread didn't match. There were 2 little screws provided with the board but they didn't match either. Well they didn't match originally but with a bit of brute force they went in. This might only be a small point but it was annoying at the time. The manual then goes onto to talk about the disk provided with the board. This disk contains a number of more or less useful programs, plus some updated general information. One of the things this information noted was that the new Quantum 120 and 240 Meg drives have some problems with SCSI controllers. One of the programs mentioned is GVPCpuCtrl which is used for changing the machine back to a stock 68000 based one. I must say that this part of the manual wasn't altogether clear and it was only when I read the end of the manual that I found that this didn't apply to my board but that I should be using a program called SetCPU (not the one by Nic Wilson but another one written by Dave Haynie). So where was the program? Not on the workbench anywhere I could see. I eventually found it with the help of SID (a directory utility). It then needs to be installed in the startup sequence to do what you want it to: e.g. install ROM in fastRAM, switch caches on or off or whatever. (Caches, from what I can gather, are like memory areas on the accelerator.)  Fixing games Why, I hear you ask, do you need to switch your machine back to normal slow mode? Because, unfortunately, not everything works with an accelerator. For non-game players this isn't a concern as the only things I've had fail so far are some games. Mainly the graphics get severe glitches in them. If you can access the startup sequence of these (mainly with older type games) then you can insert the SetCPU command as the first command, forcing it back to stock 68000 mode. If you can't enter the directory there are a number of ways around the problem. There is a program on the disk which when double-clicked will reboot the machine in normal mode. Also there is a program available in the Public Domain called Degrader which does this and will supposedly survive warm reboots (although I've had varying success with this) [Ed: Find Degrader by Chris Hames on MD25]. There are also 2 programs I've heard about for the A3000 - "bootcache" [Ed: turns caches off to fix up certain games] and "disable" which disable caches and/or Fast Mem. Whether or not these work on an accelerated A2000 I don't know. If anybody does know and can tell me where to find them I would be grateful. [Ed: Get "Degrader" on MD25 - it's better than those mentioned, according to Nic Wilson. But check out DeciGel, Privy-Handler, BootCache-type programs, etc on the Fish disks - just do a search.] Anyway, it may take a bit of fiddling but I haven't yet found any games I couldn't load one way or the other. (Something A3000 owners can't say).  GVPInfo v SysInfo Getting back to the manual, it then talks very briefly about some of the other programs on the disk. One of these is GVPInfo which gives some information about the chips, drives etc in your system. This program is OK but is not a patch on the shareware SysInfo by Nic Wilson. The next 2 pages of the manual have intentionally been left blank! Why I don't know. There are a couple of programs on the disk which are not mentioned in the manual and I suppose in future editions they might go there. The programs are InstallBB for an IBM (don't know what this does), Mem test and FPU test which are both fairly self explanatory. The next major section of the manual and disk is FaaastPrep which is GVP's standard SCSI drive mounting and formatting utility. As soon as I get a hard drive I'll write about this but can't do so yet.  Advantages and Disadvantages In summary, the disadvantages are that 1) the manual leaves a bit to be desired and 2)some games won't load easily. So, what are the advantages of the GForce? 1)Productivity speed is up. This includes word processors, DTP and graphics programs, especially those which require a lot of number crunching. 2)Everything else involving any thinking by the computer speeds up. This includes even something like loading my modified Workbench which includes a virus checker, mouse accelerator and various other utilities. The accelerator knocks 30 seconds off the loading time for this. 3)Extra RAM which is useful for large programs, big demos etc. 4)Some games actually work faster eg RPG's by SSI. 5)SysInfo telling you that you're machine is working 7.5 to 9.5 times faster (depending on caches) than a standard A500!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 ||| 28 |||