The AdSpeed, made in the USA in 1990 by a company called ICD, brings the 1000 up to a stunning 14.32 Mhz. At the time (and even today), this would have been a very exciting and powerful upgrade for the "original Amiga."
For comparison the Amiga 1200 wouldn’t be released until two years later in 1992 and it would launch at the same 14.32 Mhz! For an instant, the thought did cross my mind to put it into my NTSC Amiga 1200 to improve its compatibility options. But it's far more interesting to me to use on the 1000, as 1.3 is my personal Amiga world. But I digress. The AdSpeed also has a very interesting 32KB of SRAM which allows the machine to read and write to fast RAM faster.
Amazingly, incredibly, there is an ICD website that is still lives to this day last copyrighted in 2004. According to the website ICD made several very cool products for both the Amiga and Atari ST line.
From the advertisements about the AdSpped accelerator when ICD was still selling it as late as in 1992:
“AdSpeed will make your Amiga run faster than any 68000 or 68020 accelerator without on-board RAM.”
As you can see in the pictures below, a previous owner soldered a switch onto the AdSpeed’s jumpers. This optional switch allowed him to flip between 7 and 14 Mhz on the fly. However, I had no intention of ever cutting my 1000’s case. Regardless, I installed the board as-is once I got it to see if it worked. The truth is it hadn’t been used in many years so its function was in doubt. After installing the accelerator, I turned on the power. The machine booted up and asked me for my Kickstart disk! That was a very positive sign. After booting Workbench, I loaded SysInfo. It showed I was in the stock 7.16 Mhz mode. It was odd to say the least, as the jumpers made things appear as if I should have been in 14 Mhz mode. According to the manual, I could flip the mechanical switch to enter 14 Mhz mode at any time. I flipped the switch but nothing happened. Yet the stock 7 Mhz kept chugging right along.“AdSpeed has a software selectable true 7.16 Mhz 68000 mode for 100% compatibility - your computer will run as if the stock CPU was installed.”
At that stage, I pinged my source for the board and he recommended I cut off the hardware switch, which had been put on there before he acquired the thing. I snipped it off, but then had to desolder the little pins because the jumper wouldn’t fit on the posts. I re-installed the AdSpeed but, unfortunately, it still was stuck to the original 7 Mhz 68000.
A bit bummed, I kept the AdSpeed installed but put the case back on and buttoned everything back up. So weird.
Over on the Amiga Hardware Database they have two pieces of installation software for the AdSpeed. Since the hardware (or at least part of it) seemed to be working, I decided to download the software, which was in DMS format which is a less-used archival format. There’s an bit of software on Aminet which can extract the files, but Aminet was down over the weekend. I pinged my source and told him how things had gone down. He offered to take the DMS files and convert them to ADFs for me (which was so awesome for him to do). I asked how he did it after the fact:
Paradroyd:
I was literally bowing in his direction after I read that.“To do the conversion I did it the old school way..I used cli-based diskmasher (which I literally obtained over 30 years ago from a BBS) to write the images to physical floppies on the 2000. Then I used cli-based lharc to put them into lha archives, and right after that I used "Adf Blitzer", which is a workbench utility (a much more modern one, I think..I got it maybe about 12-ish years ago). Anyway, I used that to read each of the physical floppies back to adf images.”
I transferred his ADF over to a floppy using my Amiga 2000 over a null-modem cable and Amiga Explorer. Then I turned the Amiga 1000 on and loaded Workbench. Finally I inserted the AdSpeed 2.0 disk and double-clicked its icon.
Suddenly, at the top of my screen, a tiny widget read “14 Mhz”! I literally jumped in my chair when I saw that and quickly fumbled for my SysInfo floppy. After loading and running the program, I saw before me exactly what I’d been looking for this whole time. This 27 year-old little accelerator had pushed my gorgeous Amiga 1000 to 14 Mhz! My 1000 is now running at the same speed as an Amiga 1200! How about that?
The only downside right now is that it’s not working off the hardware jumper. That means if I have a game I want to play off disk, like Starflight, I’ll still be playing at 7 Mhz. But for games that can be played after Workbench has loaded, I can fire up AdSpeed’s software trigger first.
I think Paradroyd may be right:
I’ll try a few more things before I give up on the pure always-on hardware option. But even if this is as far as I can take it, holy smoke guys. Half of the time I’m going to be rocking whenever I want to. This machine now, coupled with 2.5MB of RAM, is one smoking Amiga 1000! It’s nearly complete from my fiddling. I only have two strong desires left: a real time clock option and an external drive. Progress!“[The hardware issue] confirms my theory that it's an electrical contact problem. Either there's a broken contact somewhere, or just as likely there's a stray piece of solder or something like that that's shorting something upstream of the jumper (or possibly right AT the jumper).”