So last night there was a Perth Amiga Users Group catchup I attended, which was awesome fun.
I, er, may have gone a little insane in all the excitement.
See, I bought something. Something terrifying and powerful and…
No, not the one ring!
It’s called a TerribleFire TF1260 and it’s a VERY fast, VERY powerful upgrade card for the Amiga 1200.
This is running a 50MHz 68LC060.
To give it some context to the PC centric heathens out there in the audience, this is like going from a 286 with 2MB of RAM to a Pentium with 128MB of RAM.
It’s quite some upgrade. The TerribleFire cards are the result of work by an extremely gifted electronic engineer by the name of Stephen Leary. They’re open source and I sourced mine from RetroKit.
I currently have it working but there was some effort to get it there. Have I mentioned my Amiga 1200 is not in a case? I do have plans to make a custom cut case for it.
(Would anyone be interested in an article about that?)
First up, when I initially plugged it in, it was a decellerator, as the Amiga refused to boot. This was fixed by applying some deoxit to the edge connector followed by an ink eraser.
Next up, while the machine would happily boot into a plain workbench disk, it wouldn’t boot from the HDD. It would throw up Guru Meditation errors. After some great advice from Matt and David on the PAUG forums, I installed the MMULib and had it happily booting to an Amiga 3.1 Workbench.
There was a little more mucking around until Matt pointed out I could bypass the warning message on SysInfo to actually run it with an ‘060 in there.
Why SysInfo, you may ask? Because it’s the gold standard for irrelevant benchmarks that prove nothing and are of dubious value. And in that spirit here are the before and after shots.
That’s some upgrade! Hopefully by the time I get around to building the case, I’ll be able to use the onboard IDE port to connect to an IDE CD-ROM I have earmarked for the system. At that point I will truly have the Amiga of my dreams 😀
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