- One of the things I really love about the ICD AdSpeed accelerator, in addition to it's noticeable speed benefits, is its incredibly small footprint. It takes up almost no room at all and only adds a tiny bit of extra height to your CPU.
For years now I've had a very mild accelerator in my daily driver Amiga 1000. And for years the AdSpeed I had was only partly functional.
By default, the AdSpeed accelerator has a physical switch that is
supposed to let you set the boot speed to either stock 7Mhz or 14 Mhz. For whatever reason, my AdSpeed would only allow the switch to occur via software. That meant I had to boot workbench at 7Mhz no matter what, activate it if I wanted the 14 Mhz mini-boost or leave everything as-is. The only time this was kind of a bummer was when I needed to boot a game off a disk, which bypassed Workbench altogether. Thus, I could never accelerate those games if I ever wanted to. The speed differences aren't mind blowing, but at times it can be noticeable and quite pleasing.
- Original AdSpeed advertisement from ~1990.
In Workbench it can make quite a difference. When activated, the simple act of opening a drawer will let the machine draw the contents (icons) much faster, which means I can click on things and keep drilling down much quicker. I can even copy disks noticeably faster as it reads and writes data. It's not going to beat my A3000 any time soon, but it's noticeable. Launching programs will often be a bit faster, too. Simple little quality of life things like that. And, some programs simply run a little bit more smoothly. It's that whole "snappiness" thing. And it feels kind of magical, as it all runs off a stock 68000, and it can work in any amiga that has the 68000 slot.
Last year I found another AdSpeed. This now being my third. My previous 2 both worked the same way, much to my disappointment. But with the 3rd? Finally - FINALLY - the jumper on the board actually worked and I can
boot up in 14Mhz mode. I don't need to always boot up in 7, then use a software switch. If I need to drop down to 7Mhz it's not an issue at all. Click a button in my AmiDock and "poof!" Back down to stock.
I've used these devices for years now, as I've said, and not once have I ever come across a single issue, other than the physical switch not working. And now I'm totally in business.
However...
About two weeks ago I decided to install Indiana Jones Last Crusade off original disks to the Amiga.
- Yes, the box cover has a Macintosh sticker on it. The lower box and all of the box contents are 100% Amiga. But my original Amiga cover was completely trashed (graphics ripped off the front and side). And while removing those stickers can be relatively easy, it would reveal either a blank spot or actually a PC / Tandy default, which to me is even worse. So, Mac it is. I'm not going to spend $100 for some box cover...
I have two sets of original disks (because reasons). After the installing to the hard drive following the instructions in the box, I had crazy issues with the game saying it couldn't read from "unit 1" which made no sense to me at first. Unit 1?
- What meanings do ye try to convey, confounding error message?
After a few days of troubleshooting I discovered what was going on.
If I had an external floppy drive attached to the Amiga (which I nearly always do) and I didn't have Disk 2 in the 2nd external drive the moment I booted the game - either via hdd or floppy - the game wouldn't load! While I realized in hindsight that back in the day that an Amiga 1000 with an external disk drive might have been pretty posh, this glaring bug still stunned me.
But, I did get past it. I unplugged the drive and now I could boot the game.
However...
It would always freeze at the Lucasfilm logo. Whether I tried to boot off the original floppies or the hard drive installation it always locked up. Even the animation of the twinkles on the chrome Lucasfilm logo were janky slow.
I made ADFs of my disks and sent them to a friend to test on his Amiga 1000. No problem at all. First I decided to remove my beloved
Parceiro and swap in a
Starboard R2 just to try and eliminate the fast RAM and/or hard drive solutions since both are quite different. Same results.
This inspired me to pull an A600 (that came with OS 2.0) out of storage to try for myself. The internal floppy drive is broken, I discovered, but using an external I was able to load the game up with no problems at all.
- Amiga A600 FTW! I never thought I would say that. ;) For what it's worth, in 2022 the really small footprint of the A600 on my desk is quite refreshing, to be honest. And its little internal original hard drive is still spinning!
My friend Crispy had the idea that maybe my AdSpeed CPU was using an 68010. It is understood today that
the 68010 sometimes has compatibility issues with older games. My CPU wasn't labeled. Or, if it was, the label was beneath an original AdSpeed sticker which I had no intention of ever removing. I thought this was a brilliant theory and I have several extra CPUs.
So, I pulled the CPU and swapped it out with a spare where I could see it wasn't an 68010. To be honest I'm not sure I even have a 68010.
The first CPU I put in there actually was dead! It was a sad moment. But I had several more so I swapped in another. To my immediate disappointment, the machine froze again in the exact same place: the Lucasfilm logo.
Finally, I removed the AdSpeed entirely and put a stock 68K CPU in its place. For the first time in 2 weeks of trying, the game fired right up! (Thank goodness, because I was running out of ideas.)
Something in the AdSpeed's instruction set conflicts with Last Crusade. After all these years I've
finally found a single game that won't work with the (glorious) AdSpeed by ICD.
I wonder what other games / software break? I've thrown quite a lot at it. And I also wonder why, when even dropped to 7 Mhz, it is still incompatible? Crispy suggested that potentially there's a difference in the bus timing. But at this stage it's somewhat of a mystery.
I do wonder if I had a physical hardware switch attached to the jumper if that would fully disable things and allow the stock CPU to run pure. I suppose I can pull the jumper to find out. Might as well - I've gone this far in the QA process, right? I should know one way or the other here in a bit.