This view is at odds with reality of 1 in 5 Amiga games already not working at all without third party trapdoor ram expansion. And those were the good games everyone wanted to play. Games would support or even require fast ram if Commodore made adding it easy and cheap like they did with chip ram trapdoor. That means either small SRAM scratchpad or build in fast ram DRAM controller so you are only adding ram on simple PCB instead of being forced into $500 a590 kitchen sink.
On the other hand braindead lack of planning making early Amigas 1MB limited resulted in less than ~10 games ever using more than 1MB. Rare exceptions are for example Wing Commander loading some additional animations with >1MB available. There were also games that hardcoded check for exactly _1MB_ and refused to run with more :)
Yes Amiga was a gaming machine first. Chipset independent scratch SRAM would do wonders for games _IF_ it was introduced together with first A500 like trapdoor ram was.
Running code from 7MHz fast ram bumps amiga from 0,57 to 0,75 Mips, 30% speed bump.
Why bother? The 14MHz mod alone gives a diminutive but _free_ bump from 0,57 to 0,62 Mips, but marrying together 14MHz and running from SRAM fast ram bumps us into 1,51 Mips https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nlG8dGvq-U thats 20% faster than 5 years older Amiga 1200.
Even 8KB of dedicated fast ram would be ideal for small fast loops, and there is plenty of those in games.
Lets not mention Commodore being so incompetent they couldnt find/wouldnt pay for an ASIC designer to update Paula PLL in order to support HD floppies :| Plenty of low hanging fruits nobody at Commodore bothered or knew how to make happen.
That accelerator is amazing, thanks for sharing. It upgrades the A500, released in 1989* to be faster than the A1200, released in 1992. The design is "time period correct" too, it doesn't do anything that couldn't have been done back then.
But... how is that possible? The Amiga 1200 has a 32 bit wide bus and is also 14MHz?! Commodore did the stupid thing again and didn't put any fast-RAM on the machine.
* The Amiga 500 is basically a cost optimized Amiga 1000, released in 1985.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/attribute:268/include_dlc:fal...
On the other hand braindead lack of planning making early Amigas 1MB limited resulted in less than ~10 games ever using more than 1MB. Rare exceptions are for example Wing Commander loading some additional animations with >1MB available. There were also games that hardcoded check for exactly _1MB_ and refused to run with more :)
Yes Amiga was a gaming machine first. Chipset independent scratch SRAM would do wonders for games _IF_ it was introduced together with first A500 like trapdoor ram was.
Running code from 7MHz fast ram bumps amiga from 0,57 to 0,75 Mips, 30% speed bump.
Another Amiga missed opportunity was clocking CPU faster when its not accessing chipset/chip ram. This is possible at the staggering cost of one D flipflop and was figured out in 1989 https://aminet.net/package/docs/hard/14MhzA500 http://amigaga.chez-alice.fr/classic/bidouilles/hack/overclo... Works because 68000 is a horrible CPU with very long cycle count instructions.
Why bother? The 14MHz mod alone gives a diminutive but _free_ bump from 0,57 to 0,62 Mips, but marrying together 14MHz and running from SRAM fast ram bumps us into 1,51 Mips https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nlG8dGvq-U thats 20% faster than 5 years older Amiga 1200.
Even 8KB of dedicated fast ram would be ideal for small fast loops, and there is plenty of those in games.
Lets not mention Commodore being so incompetent they couldnt find/wouldnt pay for an ASIC designer to update Paula PLL in order to support HD floppies :| Plenty of low hanging fruits nobody at Commodore bothered or knew how to make happen.