Amiga 1000 - Lucas and Frances

[ddye]

Back in the late 80s/early 90s I used to dabble with Sculpt-Animate 4D. I had a lot of fun rendering scenes but it would take forever running on the stock processor just above 7 MHz. Then along came this article about the Lucas accelerator and I had to have one. This would at least double the processor speed, add floating point and had a hint of a future fast RAM board. My boss at the time was a hardware guy and had some connections for picking up a 16 MHz processor set at a reasonable price. So that was the beginning of my first major build for the A1000. I also remember picking up some different oscillators to try out overclocking but probably ran it mostly at the onboard 14+ MHz from the Amiga oscillator.

The Lucas build which has some blue wire mods from my tinkering.



Later the Frances article came out and I had to build one to add some fast memory. I only half populated my board at the time probably due to my budget back then.



When combined these two boards took up most of the upper deck inside the Amiga. The shield had to be removed in order for this to go into the case. The power supply had to plug into Frances and then the power was looped back to the Amiga motherboard with a short cable. I'll have to say that I enjoyed building these old through hole boards much more than all of the fine pitch boards coming out these days!

[BatteMan]

Wahou, awesome boards and very great story !

Thank you for sharing them with us

[A1-X1000]

I had a Lucas board as well but sold it shortly to finance my very first hard drive for my A1000 then quickly regretted selling it such was life when dreams were big and money was always tight eh

[RizThomas]

I still have a set that is currently installed on one of my A1000. It was passed on to me together with all the software.