The Apollo A6300m

Expandability

Unfortunately then the Amiga 600 has always had its downfalls. Lack of AGA, the inability to add fast RAM, the speed and above all its size, although good for portability, has severe limitations for its expandability. Before anything was developed, then the A600 was limited to a measly 2 Mb of RAM which by the time Workbench loads then you don't really have a lot of memory left to do anything else.

But then those nice people at Apollo came up with the Apollo range of A600 accelerators. First there was the Apollo 620 which is not really the point of this review so I'll say no more. Then came the Apollo 630, equipped with a 68030 processor running at 33 Mhz normally with a 68882 FPU also running at 33 MHz. I say normally because if you wanted to buy one from Power Computing then you only had the option to have an FPU fitted which means more cash to pay out.

First steps

If you have a hard drive then make sure that it is the right physical size before you purchase this accelerator. Although at a tight squeeze, you can fit a 3.5 inch hard drive in the A600, if you do have one, forget this accelerator and buy either an A1200 or a 2.5 inch hard drive.

When you recieve your accelerator and you take your first look at it then it seems a reasonably well made board with a fairly sturdy complexion. Fitting the accelerator is fairly simple but to fit it then you do have to open up your Amiga, so if you are an inexperienced user then you may want to seek out someone who knows what they are doing. Once you have located the CPU then you can slot on your spanking new accelerator with a good solid push down.

Now for the hard drive. You should get a screw with your accelerator and this should screw in one of the holes on the bottom of the hard drive. This screw then keeps the hard drive from pushing down on the accelerator when you come to close the case.

When you first boot up your Amiga you should notice a marked improvement. Icons should come up faster, system operations should be faster and graphics should be faster to name but a few. Suffice to say you should have a faster Amiga and it doesn't mess around with your PCMCIA card slot, even with 32 Mb of RAM!

First impressions

I have had personal experience with this piece of hardware, hence why I am writing this review. All these things going faster soon turn into a shuddering halt. So for me, first impressions definately do not stick. After numerous reboots and crashes, gurus flashing, graphics glitches all over the screen - then you could say that I was having problems!

Upon opening my Amiga again then I saw that with the top casing on then that was putting pressure on my hard drive and in turn pressing down on the accelerator which caused it to make a bad connection with the 68000 CPU. Trying to replace it though, I found out the hard way that the 68030 was running extremely warm. Letting it cool down then I gave it another good push to slot it home. It just popped right back off again. So I tried again and the same thing happened. I then proceeded to put some superglue onto the 68000 chip making sure that none of it came in contact with the pins and pushed home the accelerator once more. It seem to stay there for a time so I remade my Amiga and booted up. After a while I got problems again, glitches, gurus etc so off came my casing again. Nothing appeared wrong at first but it was still quite hot so to give it some ventilation then I ran it with the top casing off.

This seemed to worked for a time until I heard a sound that I noticed as the accelerator coming off again. The superglue that I used was the strongest stuff that I could find yet it had just melted due to the heat. This was getting most annoying. I phoned up the company where I bought it from and they advised me to try an uprated power supply as it could be a power problem. This was not the case and so back on the phone I went. The company then pushed me around from person to person and generally messing me around, so I went to have a look if the acceletrator had any evidence on it that could make it faulty. I found a small scratch on the FPU just large enough to hide the actual speed of it, so it could be a timing problem. I thought this as really peculiar and so it was back on the phone.

After still not getting anywhere with the company then I decided to get my money back and go on from there and this was no walk in the park either, but this is about the Apollo.

Last impressions

Unfortunately, then I have to say that I didn't really think much of the Apollo A630. Part of the problem is with the accelerator because it just refused to work or to stay where it was put, the Amiga for being so awkward to expand and the company for their pitiful after sales service. This wasn't really to do with the problems that I was having but it just made it all the more annoying.

Verdict

Speed: 90%
Accessibility: 52%
Reliability: 8%
Features: 78%
Value: 95% - If it worked!

Overall: 65%

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