oldbull wrote:Since it's my thread I can go off-topic without apologizing.
Anyway, I'm getting the sense that I should forget about ever plugging an A1200 accelerator onto the ACA500+. What's the point if wait states are just going to mess everything up?
As stated, when I was running my A500 with an ACA500 and an ACA1232 030@40Mhz, I did experience these wait state slowdowns - However I only experienced them in one, possibly two games and a couple of demos, the problem is nowhere as widespread as many are claiming.
Considering the cost of my A500, it cost me $50.00 vs the $500.00 I paid for my A1200 ~3 years ago. When you consider this and when you consider just how well my A500 ran with the enhancements in place it represented fantastic bang for buck. Let me put it this way: If I didn't come across my A1200 on Ebay I would happily still be using my A500 with my ACA500/ACA1232 today running WHDLoad.
Just don't run Sysinfo and claim your A500 is as fast as an A1200/A4000 because Sysinfo says so. It can be in certain scenarios, but in a handful of scenarios it will actually be slower than an unaccelerated Amiga - In which case you simply switch off the accelerator and drop back to floppy.
And the good thing is, if you come across an affordable A1200 you can just swap the accelerator into it along with the CF HDD and you're up in running in no time again.
I find the reaction of many considering WHDLoad surprising, one person on Reddit especially was downright attacking me over it. In the day, floppies were limiting, but we had to put up with them because hard drives were expensive and small - This is something that I found a limitation even on the early Apple Macintosh's. Once I got my Apple Powerbook 170 with an inbuilt HDD I realized just how good an internal HDD was and I always wanted one for my Amiga knowing that AmigaOS crapped all over System 6 or whatever it was I was running at the time. Now that we have the capability to launch games and demos so easily directly off the hard drive, sticking with floppies is like sticking with Windows 3.0 on a Wintel machine IMO, you can do it, but it's still mostly painful and wasteful - you had one disk for one application that took up 25% of the floppies capacity in many cases! there was floppies everywhere!
Retro isn't just about reliving the past, retro is about improving the past and maintaining a knowledge of how these systems worked for future generations and an expanded A500 is a great, affordable way to do just that - I recommend you give WHDLoad a go and learn something new, I love learning new things, especially where operating systems are concerned.