WHO'S UPGRADING A 500 ?   
			    =====================


   Ed: Keith Antoine tells us about the history of his A500 techno-freak
  acquisitions.


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   On the 17th of August 1990 I purchased an Amiga A500 and rushed home to
  spread everything across the dining room table and hook it up. Who needed
  dinner at night not me, and why clear the table so as others could eat, why
  should I, good grief couldn't they see dad's busy?? After owning a VIC 20
  and a C64 this was fast and user friendly, and oh, how the world was going
  to feel the impact of my expertise with programming etc. I was interested
  at the time in Astrology and intended writing my own program; little did I
  realise the size of such a project and all in Basic. Well of course the
  first thing was disk swapping, oh, what a pain and then I kept running out
  of memory; how could I, I had more than six times the c64 - who had pinched
  it? So back to the store for an A501 512k upgrade plus an external drive.

   It is easy now looking at back to see how slow the machine was and also
  how restrictive the software available at the time was also. I did not
  finish the astrology program till recently, and with a great deal of
  upgrading done. At the time I was told about Chip RAM and Fast RAM, I
  thought the former was something had with fish and chips and the latter you
  got at 18 and lost at 40.  Hence I had the upgrade done to enhance the chip
  RAM as I was running out of this frequently and home I raced, put picture
  after picture into DPIII and it was terrific, but now the requester popped
  up saying no Fast RAM; OH, no now what was wrong? To cut a long story short
  I sent away to the United States for an ICD A540 memory board populated
  with 4Megs Ram. Why the States? Well at that time the prices in the States
  were a lot lower than the retail houses here were willing to sell at, and
  the delivery only took a fortnight. If you have dealt with some of our
  retailers you will know that some of them are only interested in the
  colour of your money, and service is something they have not heard of.
  Have you been told I'll phone you back? They never do, or it will be in in
  3 days time; it never is, they are worse than politicians and they are bad.

   The next item I bought was an A590 hard drive with 2Megs of RAM on board
  as the programming was getting too big and too many disks to access at one
  time.  I must admit that it was bliss for a time, but the upgrading bug had
  bitten and I did not realise this at the time. It's amazing how fast you
  can fill a 20Meg HD with "important" software and it is also true that it
  is about this time you learn how to compress files on disk to save space.
  One more thing is the bigger the drive the quicker it seems to fill and
  that is after a lot of heartsearching, discarding of files, and then
  compressing. There are some files on the HD you cannot compress, like
  those belonging to the BBS I have and those which will not decompress on
  the run at speed.

   The next addition was a PODSCAT sketch tablet as I am unable to draw but I
  can trace over other drawings and this has drivers which you can use with
  DPIV and other packages. The harddrive has changed again, twice in point
  of fact - firstly I put in a 105Meg Quantum and then because of a conflict
  with the A540 memory, I sold the A590 with memory and 20meg, kept the 105
  and bought a Rochard case with 6Meg 70ns simms and put in the 105 quantum.
  The old memory was 120ns and therefore the information is accessed very
  much faster from the drive.

   I have also purchased and installed an accelerator, VXL-30 with 2Meg of 32
  bit RAM running at 25Mhz, and really it is only when I go up the road to my
  neighbours that I realize how fast mine is. You get so used to the speed
  of the machine and the amount of memory installed (9Megs) that you do not
  think twice about big files or multitasking (I have often got the BBS
  running in the background, working with PC-Task (IBM) and then pull the
  screen down and open another program for a while to do something else. In
  fact it just happened, while I am writing this, someone Yelled at the Sysop
  and my screen went to back. I then had to put the BBS to back and archive
  a file, load it into the BBS for download.  Now back to work. It is obvious
  that I have a modem but it is a Fax Modem and I also have the Answer
  sofware and hardware for answering the phone. One has also to have quality
  software to go with all this hardware, so I also have DCTV and I am selling
  this as I have just purchased OPALVISION 24 bit card.  DCTV is an excellent
  package but as I am grabbing images for DTV and selling scenes in the US I
  have to have the best resolution possible, but I do not have a video slot
  as in the 2000, so I am hoping that a product from the US might help called
  M-Slot or I might have to buy a 2000 motherboard or even, god forbid a
  2000.

   I will in the next few days have one of the fastest 500s around when I
  put in the 50Mhz bit. Now what else! Well I want a floptical drive which
  will be very useful on the IBM side and cheaper than normal disks and I
  will be able to read and write 1.44 and 1.78 high density disks. I will
  also buy myself a Hewlett Packard 500C to replace my 9 pin dot matrix
  colour printer as I am also in a small way into DTP. Then there is the
  Genlock/framegrabber for OpalVision, and change the 32 bit RAM to 8Megs
  (you can only have either 2 or 8, change the chip to 2Meg) and an editor
  for videotaping. I am kept very busy now with my computer and as I am
  considered unemployable (I am unemployed) at my age (59) and therefore have
  to employ myself, and if you can read a book you can teach yourselff
  anything, I am now learning to program in C.


   Keith Antoine 18 Arkana street The Gap Qld 4061. 07 300 2161


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