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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Mon Sep 25, 2017 10:53 pm

An online friend of mine in the BBS world as well as on Twitter sent me an awesome piece of tech this week for my Amiga 1000. It’s a little accelerator that was made to work with the 500, 1000 and 2000 models - the aptly named AdSpeed. (That’s how they wrote it BITD (back in the day), with Speed italicized.)

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.
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The ICD AdSpeed accelerator for the Amiga 1000. This may be the smallest Amiga accelerator I've ever seen. How refreshing!

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The ICD AdSpeed, side-view.

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AdSpeed, bottom-view.

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.”
“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.”
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.
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An AdSpeed's optionally installed hardware switch. This allowed users to flip between the stock 7.16 and 14.32 Mhz speeds.

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.
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The AdSpeed installed into my Amiga 1000. I removed my 68000 and replaced it with this kit.

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.

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:
“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 was literally bowing in his direction after I read that.

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!
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The software option for AdSpeed activates it properly. Note the little widget at the very top of the screen stating "14.3 Mhz".

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SysInfo's expanded view. Note also on the right-side of the screen, the 14.3 Mhz proudly shown in all its glory.

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:
“[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).”
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My happy Amiga 1000 running at 14.3 Mhz off an accelerator over 25 years old. This was sold back in the day to breath years of new life into then 5-year old system, flying past many of its sisters.

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!

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SnkBitten
South Carolina

Posted Tue Sep 26, 2017 11:26 am

Nice, I really love the A1000, it was the first computer I purchased (I had split purchase on a C64 a few years earlier with my dad).

I never did much with it other than the Insider board to add 1 MB of ram in addition to the 512 MB I had. I had moved on to the A2000 by the time a lot of the accelerators and such started coming out for it. I did have a Perfect Sound sound sampler with it and a Digiview digitizer w/color wheel.

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Tue Sep 26, 2017 11:47 am

@SnkBitten
I never did much with it other than the Insider board to add 1 MB of ram in addition to the 512 MB I had.
Did you ever try to combine the Insider board with the AdSpeed?

I feel like theoretically they absolutely should be able to work together, and I was going to give that a go soon if it all fit in that tight case (and I believe it will). Did you ever try that?

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SnkBitten
South Carolina

Posted Tue Sep 26, 2017 8:02 pm

Unfortunately no. Just the Insider board before I moved on to an A2000 with an A2620, Video Toaster and a couple of TBCs.

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Paradroyd

Posted Tue Sep 26, 2017 10:50 pm

SnkBitten wrote:Nice, I really love the A1000, it was the first computer I purchased (I had split purchase on a C64 a few years earlier with my dad).

I never did much with it other than the Insider board to add 1 MB of ram in addition to the 512 MB I had. I had moved on to the A2000 by the time a lot of the accelerators and such started coming out for it. I did have a Perfect Sound sound sampler with it and a Digiview digitizer w/color wheel.
I had the Perfectsound & Digiview with the black & white camera and color wheel too.

The interesting thing about Perfectsound was that while it was only an 8 bit digitizer, you could crank the sample rate up to around 100Khz, which is ridiculously high, and it sounded great (and the resulting IFF file would take up half of your hard drive).

I actually used my Perfectsound to sample the bass parts to several Rush songs so that I could loop them and more easily learn them.

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pgovotsos

Posted Thu Oct 26, 2017 8:26 pm

The hardware switch definitely does work if something isn't broken. I haven't really run into any need to drop it down but also don't play a lot of games that would need it. Having the jumper open defaults to 14MHz. If you have removed the switch and it's still defaulting to 7MHz, somewhere you've got something shorting those points. When you had the soldering iron in there could you have dropped a blob of solder that is bridging the pins?

I think the place that an AdSpeed really shines is in a CDTV. It makes everything a lot smoother. That's where all of mine have ended up.

I guess you were making a funny, but you can't install it in a 1200.

The memory that is on the AdSpeed isn't usable as fast RAM, it is just a small cache of (relatively) fast memory. For being only 32K,it can give a surprising boost. It can be disabled also because some code crashes if it is self modifying.

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Thu Oct 26, 2017 10:07 pm

First off - welcome to AmigaLove! Thanks for joining.
pgovotsos wrote:If you have removed the switch and it's still defaulting to 7MHz, somewhere you've got something shorting those points.
Yeah... I'm a hobbyist and tinkerer - not a mechanical or electrical engineer - so whatever is going on seems to be above my pay grade unfortunately. I wish it worked at a hardware level. Very odd.
pgovotsos wrote:When you had the soldering iron in there could you have dropped a blob of solder that is bridging the pins?
I'm not an engineer, but I am an incurable perfectionist (used to be a mechanic on airplanes a million years ago, which trained me to pay attention).
pgovotsos wrote:I think the place that an AdSpeed really shines is in a CDTV. It makes everything a lot smoother. That's where all of mine have ended up.
I've never owned a CDTV but I find your hack of the AdSpeed on it simply fascinating. That's very cool.
pgovotsos wrote:I guess you were making a funny, but you can't install it in a 1200.
No, I know. I was making a crude [and ultimately inaccurate] comparison against the 1200's clock speed, nothing more. :)

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JackTheKnife

Posted Sun Oct 18, 2020 3:51 pm

I have tied to transplant ICD AdSpeed from my A500 to A1000 (ROM 2.04) but it will boot only with it set to 14MHz but from there I can't load WB (via Gotek). It will error out with the message:

RAM Program Failed (error #80000003) Wait for disk activity to finish.

CPU with ICD AdSpeed is installed on the DKB Indsider II board and that one is installed on top of KuikStart II bard, and based what I found it should be compatible with ICD AdSpeed.

Not sure but I think it has something to do with Insider II and/or ROM 2.04 When I have switched ROM to 1.3 I was able to start Amiga with both speeds unfortunately I was able to load Workbench 1.3 only when set to 7MHz.

When I put Insider II back it went to the same problem - only able to boot Amiga when on 14MHz and not table to load WB.

Also looks like doughterboard has PALs wire mode done by previous user.

Image

Any thoughts?

Thanks





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