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2010-04-21
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162 lines
PowerUp Mark 2 32mhz Falcon Accelerator
***************************************
By Martin Wilson
****************
While looking through some old ST mags I noticed that 'Atari Workshop'
were selling a Falcon accelerator kit for £60. However when I looked
at the current issue of Atari World (this would have been the August
issue) I noticed it was no longer part of their full page advert.
However because I'd recently got a secondhand Falcon and fancied
making it even faster I'd thought I'd find out if they still did it,
at what price and find out how easy to fit it was. After speaking to
the salesman I found out they still did it, at the same price and that
fitting was of medium difficulty. Anyway I went for it obviously (or I
wouldn't be writing this) and gave them my credit card details. It was
late on a Monday and so the salesman said it would be posted the next
day for me to receive on Wednesday. It arrived on Thursday.
What you get for your money.
****************************
A small rectangalur thing thats sealed with a sort of glue and has a
ribbon cable coming out from it. I couldn't see what components it
contained but I imagine its a timing crystal and possibly an I.C. You
also get a disk, an instruction leaflet, an LED, a resistor and a
little ferrit filter type component. Your meant to get a sticky pad
which I didn't and an optional extra is a switch. My intial reaction
was "£60 for this", but of course I don't actually know what I'm
getting in the rectangular box. I expect not a lot which is why they
sealed it from view.
Installation.
*************
Obviously the first thing to do is find a nice work surface in my case
the dining room table. Set up all the tools you'll need with the
important one being a soldering iron. You'll also need a screwdriver,
some pliers and something to strip of the insulation at the end of the
wires. A solder sucker and a little modelling knive will come in
handy.
One other thing to remember is static. Make sure before you start that
you have touched something thats earthed so any static charge is
removed from your body. Don't settle down to do this project in your
favourite itchey woolley jumper.
The first thing to do is dismantle the Falcon. Everything comes out
until your left with the bare PCB staring up at you. You don't need
to remove it from the bottom of the case.
The best way I think to approach a project is to identify the hardest
bit and do that first. I see little point in doing all the easy stuff
first and then making a cockup of the hardest part. To my mind the
hardest part was removing a surface mounted resistor R222 from the
circuit board. It turned out to be very easy by simply heating the
solder and gradually moving it up and then off the board, but the
point is you must make sure not to damage the tracks below the solder
points. The next thing I did was remove a solder link on the PCB
labelled U46. My solder sucker did this perfectly. I heated the solder
and one suck and it was clear. That went easier than expected. The
last potentially difficult bit was to make two solder connections on a
part of the circuit board that had space for a component that was not
fitted. I added a bit of solder to each of these points. Now I was
ready to split the ribbon cable, remove about 2mm of insulation from
the end of each wire, twist the bare wires and apply a bit of solder
to each. Theres seven connections to make with these wires on the
circuit board but none of these are hard. If you want to make use of
the LED supplied and fit it to your case you'll need to make one other
connection. I didn't do this as I didn't really need to know with an
LED when the accelerator is operating and besides I didn't want to
drill a hole in the case for it to go. The resistor and ferrite
component are used with the fitting of the LED. The optional switch
can be used to simply turn the accelearator on and off. I decided to
go with the software switch as again I wouldn't have to drill a hole
for the switch. The software switch means that a grey wire goes to the
6850 keyboard processor and a small program uses this processor to
turn on the accelerator. I've included the PowerOn program in my auto
folder off my hard drive. The poweroff program is on the top level of
my hard drive if I wish to turn it off. This means I can use the
accelerator for anything except protected games which load using their
own boot sector code from floppy disk. Of course these sort of games
mainly need programs like backwards anyway and running at 32mhz would
cause even more problems compatibility wise. After double-checking my
work I re-assembled the computer except for the top shielding which
covers the PSU, hard drive and floppy. I actually left that out on
purpose because my Falcon gets rather hot near the PSU when using it
for long sessions. I'd already disconnected the internal speaker thats
built into this shielding so the fact that was removed at the same
time was not a problem. Anyway the computer runs a lot cooler now.
Ok so how much faster?
**********************
I used Gembench to perform a few tests. However to my mind Gembench
makes to much of the routines in TOS which are often bypassed or not
used by the majority of games and many applications. I only used the
integer, RAM and ROM tests. For a general assessement of performance
these are all you need. This represents the processor, RAM and ROM. If
Gembench had a direct video write assesement that would probably give
a more accurate idea of speed overall but as far as I know none of its
tests represent that.
I'd also better point out that when I compared my Falcon to the
standard Falcon benchmark my Falcon was already slightly faster
without the accelerator by a few percent. This could be accounted for
by the fact I'm using TOS 4.04 or more likely they were using a VGA
monitor instead of a RGB monitor. The faster refresh rate of a VGA
monitor would mean a slightly heavier load on the processor.
Another point is that I don't believe Gembench uses the built in
caches of the 68030 so the integer test doesn't reflect the true speed
of Atari computers fitted with 68030s (Falcons and TTs). However as
the TT and Falcon have the same processor the test does at least
fairly compare them as they are both put at an equal disadvantage. The
Mega STE I believe also had a cache which operated in 16mhz mode and
so is also unfairly represented to a lesser extent.
I haven't used the FPU test because if the Ataris FPU unit works in
the same way as a PCs FPU unit then software has to be written to take
advantage of it. Therefore the vast majority of software make no use
of it at all.
The speed results for a standard Falcon compared to;
STFM/E 396% (should be well over 400% if caches were taken into a/c)
MEGA STE 196%
TT 71%
TT with FASTRAM 60%
Compared to the accelerated 32mhz Falcon;
STFM/E 643% (should be near or over 700% if caches were taken into
a/c)
NEGA STE 318%
TT 101%
TT with FASTRAM 87%
Another speed test is Frontier which benefits from as much processing
power as possible. The faster the computer the smoother the graphics.
However its a hard program to gauge as the actual game always runs at
the same speed its only the graphics update rate that varies. Running
Frontier on a standard ST is very, very jerky even at low detail
levels. A Falcon is smooth at the same detail level or jerky at the
higher levels. The accelerated Falcon is quite smooth even at high
levels of detail. At very high detail its a bit jerky. In fact I think
the benchmarks above fairly represent it. The accelerated Falcon is
about 7x smoother or faster than the bog standard ST and a normal
Falcon is about 4x smoother or faster than a normal ST. I would
therefore estimate that the accelerator takes the computer up from
just under 4mips to just over 7.5mips but the fact that ROM and RAM
access is only slightly improved by about 30-35% means it works out at
about only 65% faster than a normal Falcon. For comparison a Pentium
P66 is only about 2x as fast a a 486DX-2 66 PC and yet the price
difference can be £300.