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Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Sat Aug 18, 2018 8:05 am

Commodore didn't always use the greatest sockets so it may be best not to remove chips frequently. Once in a while is not going to hurt anything though, IMHO. In my own personal experience, for what that is worth, I have never had a socket disintegrate from being brittle. The only time I have replaced sockets was due to corrosion on the metal pins, in my case, the CPU socket and the ROM socket.

That being said, I wouldn't worry too much about swapping it out.

Yeah the MOVE, that is what I remember, which made me recall this little tech note.

Seems it is not a big deal and you shouldn't really have any problems.

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DangerManfred
Hamburg, Germany

Posted Sat Aug 18, 2018 4:13 pm

So I informed myself a little about the functions of the chips in my Amiga, which turns out to be Rev. 6A.
And found a wikipedia page about the Agnus chip.

But my exact model isn't listed there (or maybe I'm just blind, it's 1AM here while I'm typing this.
On my Agnus it says 8372AR, which *should* make it an ECS 1MB RAM compatible Agnus?
So if I understand this right, after plugging in this chip, my Amiga should have 512KB chip RAM like before, but 1,5MB slow RAM instead of none at all, and I can still solder that jumper wire if I desperately want to go for 1MB total chip RAM?

User avatar
Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Sat Aug 18, 2018 8:16 pm

Correct, the 8372A is a 1MB Agnus and supports both PAL and NTSC. Earlier and Later revisions were PAL *or* NTSC, which make it versatile.

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DangerManfred
Hamburg, Germany

Posted Sun Aug 19, 2018 2:59 pm

HA!
I gathered my balls and did the CPU swap.
The board is surprisingly stable, completely different from the delicate modern PC boards I'm used to.
My Amiga Basic code does seem a little faster than before, but I've been learning this for less than a week and it might be my imagination.
Oh well.
It's a shame there are hardly any "zeldalike" Action-RPGs, and no JRPGs whatsoever for my favorite computer.
But for the moment, I'm happy with Pac Mania and Lemmings. Also, Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra. I wonder why Might and Magic IV and V weren't ported to the Amiga? I mean they are literally using the same engine, so it's probably not a hardware issue. Yes, there is a popular talky version of ~40MB on CD that everyone knows, but a floppy disk edition w/o voice exists, too. So it should have been absolutely possible.





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