The AdSpeed has a jumper on the board. If you pull the jumper off, in theory it is supposed to run at 14 Mhz. If you put the jumper on, it runs natively and essentially bypasses the board altogether. But, you can always turn it back on/off in Workbench using the supplied software. You can even modify your startup sequence to run the program automatically when booting Workbench. A very cool idea.
What some people did back in the day was they would attach a mechanical switch to the jumper so they didn't have to keep opening their machine's case. They'd load their favorite game (e.g a flight simulator) then flip the switch to 14 Mhz. Once done, they'd flip it back to 7.
But if you really want to, you should be able to just remove the jumper and be set to 14. The reason why this is important is many older games required being booted off the floppy drive. And when this happens, you bypass Workbench altogether. Hence the need for a mechanical solution and not just software.
After installing the AdSpeed in my stock 1000, I was ready to see if it would work with the new RAM module. I prepared for the following tests.
Test 1
Boot up at 7 Mhz (jumper on) and see if there are any conflicts with the RAM.
Result: No conflicts, boots fine!
Check Sysinfo for Speed and RAM |7 Mhz, 8 MB
Use AdSpeed program. I 14 Mhz activates instantly.
This was extremely good news. At a base level, the AdSpeed could be ignored by default, but activated in Workbench via software. Very cool.
Test 2
Boot up at 14 Mhz (jumper off) and see if there are any conflicts.
Results: produces a solid yellow screen.
I've never memorized what all of the colors mean. I checked my easy-reference. Unfortunately, yellow isn't a ton of help. Yellow can mean there are several problems: custom chips, RAM or Kickstart ROM error. Well, since I'm on an A1000, that led me to believe it was either having issues at that speed with the RAM or the custom chips. Test 3
Remove 8MB RAM. Reinsert AdSpeed and boot up at 14 Mhz. Basically just try to use the AdSpeed by itself with no memory upgrades.
Result: Produces a flashing yellow screen.
Yellow can also mean this:
So at this stage, even just the AdSpeed sitting in there all by itself has an issue with the hardware being fixed at 14 Mhz on bootup. Totally sucks! This means any games that require being booted off the floppy are out of luck! I have to think this issue is specific to the 1000.Yellow (0xFE5) an unexpected processor exception before the appropriate system failure message was prepared. This could mean defective hardware or an attempt to access a RAM address where no RAM exists.
Test 4
I booted up at 7 Mhz, switched to 14 Mhz using the software, then did a soft reboot. Unfortunately, it lets go of the AdSpeed software on soft reboot as I figured it would but it was worth a shot.
So for now I have this crazy little tech sandwich in the stock 1000 with 8MB RAM and 14 Mhz available to Workbench apps and games - whenever I turn it on. By default it stays at 7 Mhz. Kind of bummed I can’t get it to be hardware-bound, but it’s still pretty cool.
My last ditch hope for it to work outside of Workbench would be to create a switch for it. According to the manual, it is possible to activate and deactivate on the fly - outside of the boot sequence. That, I'm afraid, will be for another day. But for now, I leave you with this.